Anthropocentric bias and the possibility of artificial cognition

All right, hello and welcome. It's May 30th, 2024, and we're in ActInf Guest Stream 84.1. This will be a presentation and a discussion with Jesse G. So Jesse, thank you for joining and for your participation. Looking forward to a great presentation, and then we'll check the live chat and see where it goes from there. Go for it. All right. Thank you so much for letting me do this showcase. Largely, what I'm going to go over is basically an overview, debut publication of a series of papers that have to do with habits and adaptive learning in regards to agentual systems, and basically looking at agentual systems largely from the point of view of biological organisms, largely trying to understand, better understand, connecting that with human behavior. Largely, the motivation here for this series of publications started with looking at a sort of literature review that was data-focused on looking at the, not necessarily addiction addiction from a more broad point of view, but from a drug dependency point of view. When I reached out to a colleague of mine a number of years ago, well, a little over three years ago now in 2021, when I first started this journey. So this whole series of work has been undergone for about slightly over three years now. So I started this work in 2021. Originally, I was connected indirectly with a group of graduate students associated with a state university, and they were looking at data on addiction, not, not really broadly speaking, but dealing with looking at a more so drug dependency based addiction. And that was a bit, I was quite disappointed with the effort put into the paper. I mean, I understand that the students involved were, were students in data science and informatics. So but at the same time, I was a bit dismayed by the approach in the paper, and I provided a critique of their work. And I thought to myself, well, wow, like, addiction has some root, there's some root to addiction, we need to better understand. And on and what's also, what was also came off quite odd to me for a number of years now is just the narrative, looking at the lens of like, what is the root of addictive behavior? And that kind of goes back fun, you know, thinking about fundamentals. And fundamentally, we think about habits. And when people think about habits, mostly stereotypically, again, people think about habits and sort of a bad point of like, you know, habits are bad, or, you know, people think about habits, you know, point of view, and, you know, point of view, and again, re approaching fundamentals and breaking the stereotypes. I think it's important to understand, okay, well, are habits good or bad? What can we say about them? And how do we adapt to circumstances that we face as humans, you know, as human beings? And so I think it's important to understand, you know, what are the things, more specifically, thinking about sort of this idea of not necessarily coping, but reinforcing our fitness, in the sense of like, how can we better engage with the world around us and with each other, and ourselves, most importantly, over time, over the course of a lifetime. And so that's been the general focus of this series of works is trying to look into, in terms of adaptive learning, what interventionary approaches, like what primary interventionary approaches, which I'll get into a little later, can be leveraged to be reinforcing towards our behavior and complement how we engage with the world around us, each other and ourselves, rather than be counterintuitive. And looking at habits as sort of like, kind of like an ebb and flow of what, where, like how we drive, how we, how we motivate and direct our behaviors. So habits can be good or bad, but more so thinking about habits on a spectrum of being reinforcement based, in a sense that it complements our, our fitness and how we engage with each other in a constructive way in the world around us, of course, as well as ourselves, rather than counterintuitive or…