Abstract
Studying disorientation is studying how, through our bodies, culture and technology, we humans are connected to our environment, and what happens when this connection is weakened or severed. What happens, of course, depends again on our environment, bodies, culture and technology: the world around us becomes at times uncanny, unfamiliar or dangerous when we get disoriented. Disorientation can be exciting and refreshing—an invitation to explore, to leave behind nagging desires for control and certainty, and to embrace instead a more spontaneous relationship with our surroundings. Getting lost shapes our consciousness, not only by transforming our perception of the world around us, but by transforming our sense of who we are in that world, and what possibilities are open to us within it.
In this chapter, we analyse the phenomenology of disorientation to elucidate the role that emotions play in distributed cognitive processes that involve multiple agents and cognitive artefacts. The feeling of disorientation destabilises our horizon of experience and turns the world around us unfamiliar or alien. This feeling embodies our disconnection to the agents (e.g. walking companions), the cognitive artefacts (e.g. maps), and the environment around us. A proper analysis of the phenomenology of both orientation and disorientation uncovers the role feelings play in distributed cognitive processes: emotions serve as a form of evaluative regulation that contributes to, on the one hand, the syncing of the different elements of a distributed cognitive process, and on the other, to the eventual disengagement of the agent from an unreliable distributed cognitive process.
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Notes
- 1.
In this paper, we are using the term “affective” as a reference to emotions. This is the use of the term in, for instance, “affective neuroscience” to mean the study of the neural mechanisms of emotion or to mean the “affective turn”. Here, by the expression “affective state” we mean an emotional state, and by “affective experience” we mean an emotional experience.
- 2.
The situated approach to emotions stays neutral about the stronger ontological claim that emotions extend onto the environment. The situated approach to emotions does not necessarily imply that the environment is a constituent part of an emotion; the claim is simply that the environment has a casual contribution to emotion. What the approach offers is a methodological alternative to traditional emotion accounts, just like distributed cognition offers an alternative to traditional accounts of cognition without making ontological claims about the extension of the mind.
- 3.
For a detailed computational account of how such regulatory and evaluative role might be implemented see Joffily and Coricelli (2013).
- 4.
Another variation of disengagement is the initiation of contingency measures, such as the co-pilot starting to double-check the route on their own phone once they feel that the driver has lost the way.
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Fernández Velasco, P., Casati, R. (2021). Making and Breaking Our Shared World: A Phenomenological Analysis of Disorientation as a Way of Understanding Collective Emotions in Distributed Cognition. In: Falcato, A., Graça da Silva, S. (eds) The Politics of Emotional Shockwaves . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56021-8_10
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