Holarchic HCI and Augmented Psychology (“AugPsy”)

Consciousness enables experience, and each can be placed on a spectrum [1, 14]. Experience is more robust and multidirectional, though the possibility exists for it to be bidirectional (particularly for the geometrician working along a line, but also generally when considering between two given options). Consciousness is synonymous informally with awareness. When one is conscious, they are aware, and vice versa. Awareness can be quantified in terms of being “greater” or “lesser”. For example, one may be more aware of certain aspects of experience than others given selective attention.

Experience is the basic unit of analysis for phenomenology. While experience may be operationalized as qualia to address “what things are like” [20], the former may also be treated as a formal primitive. Phenomena are events as they appear to or present themselves for conscious perceivers. In ordinary use, experiences are assumed to be significant events or happenings.

Phenomenal experience is qualitative. It is characterized as such by description through adjectives (e.g., “good” or “bad”). Experiences can be categorized into types, e.g. into the learning kind (as in the “learning experience”). If an experience is rich, then it has richness that may be qualified—described further in terms of what makes it so—or quantified. Growth may result from the victorious experience. This is so in battle-based role playing games (RPGs), where successfully defeating one’s opponent earns experience points that contribute to the possible level-up of one or more of the player’s team members (as in Pokémon and Fire Emblem, two of the most popular Japanese action-adventure RPG series).

It is posited that the self, after being immersed in something greater than it, has potential to emerge greater than it was prior [2, 3]. Positive psychology recognizes such an immersed state as being one of flow or engagement. Subjective immersion [6] can be reported on to certain extents of meaningfulness and accuracy. Immersion can be qualified, e.g. via description of an activity’s meaning to the human actor, or perhaps quantified. Perhaps the optimal flow experience is only quantifiable as being infinitely enjoyable, enriching, engaging, and/or meaningful, among other possible measures.

1. 1.

   Though the popular Yu-Gi-Oh! trading card game (TCG) does not have a corresponding game element of experience, it is relevant to HCI in ways distinct from the two other franchises mentioned. Specifically, Yu-Gi-Oh! emphasizes technology heavily in its anime: this is exemplified in the character Seto Kaiba and his invention of “duel technology” in the form of the “duel disk”. Using the duel disk allows players to play the card game while summoning realistic holograms of magic, “trap cards”, and fantasy monsters that do battle. Yu-Gi-Oh! is meta-technological in that, while interacting with one’s computer (to watch the anime or play the franchise’s video games), one also confronts technological possibilities not presently existent in the actual world.

2. 2.

   Immersion in musical listening—along with the accompanying change in one’s affective state to reflect the music’s intended mood—can be viewed as an instantaneous flow state.

3. 3.

   “Unconscious reality” was encountered in the name and lyrics of a song by the former pop-rock band Artist Vs. Poet. It is forwarded that psychological insight can be reached, and cognition thus augmented, via analysis of lyrics by such artists (including hard-rock band A Day to Remember, among many others).

4. 4.

   The human person has typically been discussed in theological, ethical, and philosophical contexts [36, 37].

5. 5.

   This chapter’s notion of existential humanness is intended to be fully compatible with Yalom’s existential givens, including freedom, death, isolation, and meaning [44].

6. 6.

   An interesting question for affective HCI and positive computing, as well as for positive psychology, is whether the process of attaining eudaimonic fulfillment feels similarly to flow. Since cognition theoretically disappears during flow (as Seligman once claimed), does the same happen when one is maximally engaged in a flow activity that does not necessarily involve thought? If so, eudaimonia may be equated to Aristotelian flow. In any case, the question of where pleasure ends and fulfillment begins is a more general and worthy quantitative question to answer. Additionally, when non-cognitive, flow cannot be a form of augmented cognition (by definition), but may still be one of augmented psychology.

7. 7.

   Overmier and Lawry defined M instead as “mediator” in the incentive motivation formula.

8. 8.

   A useful contribution to continental philosophy relevant to the present discussion of person would be the introduction of the concept “person-in-themself” (or “person-in-himself” and “person-in-herself”). This may exist as a counterpart to Immanuel Kant’s “thing-in-itself”, an object which appears to us but that we only can assume exists independent of our relation (e.g., observatory) to it. While person may be subsumed as a kind of noun along with thing, the former refers to an ontologically subjective rather than objective noun. Of course, based on the sub-discussion of self and other here, additional concepts may be introduced: “thing-in-itother” and “person-in-itother”; acceptance of the term “itother” (following from itself) would need to precede this.

9. 9.

   Concepts following from (3)–(4) include: personal situation; situational person; personal self; personal other; situational self (i.e., who one is in a given context or setting); and situational other.

10. 10.

    Procedural memory consists in the storage of and retrieval from embodied knowledge. An interesting consideration is its connection with expert intuition, which does not yet seem to have been rendered explicit. Procedural memory and expert intuition draw from one’s stored set of embodied “know-how” and “know-that”, respectively.

11. 11.

    Related to the formal representation of knowledge is the question of how to quantify knowledge. One may answer this by counting all propositional statements that an agent knows to be true.

12. 12.

    The unconscious sub-mind can be formally defined as the set of all holons that exist outside of awareness.

13. 13.

    [50] describes eight kinds of consciousness, including organism, control, intentional, state/event, reportable, introspective, subjective, and self-consciousnesses. Introspective consciousness is speculated to be a “special case” of intentional consciousness and is proposed to explain state/event consciousness (p. 4).

14. 14.

    References to constructs of the five-factor model of personality (a.k.a. the “Big Five”) are derived from [38].

15. 15.

    Further, speaking of the “head” and “heart” in metaphorical terms could lead to the quantification of just how “ahead” (i.e., mature) cognition or affect might be in relation to the other (assuming the metaphor holds literally).

16. 16.

    A Platonic theory of love can also be added. In such a model, love can be conceptualized as being affective (consisting of emotions like joy), cognitive (containing fond thoughts of the object of love), or conative (demanding action on the part of the lover to better the state of the loved object).

17. 17.

    Related to the topic of long-term romantic partnership is the more general role of affect in interpersonal relations. One relevant question is: Can we behave to determine—rather than merely influence—a given being’s affective trate? If so, the door is opened to affective governance in everyday contexts. Such social engineering in the form of institutionalism would seek to negate the neoliberal view of the autonomous subject, where individuals are solely self-responsible [56].

18. 18.

    In [63], it is noted that affection, cognition, and conation correspond respectively with pathos, logos, and ethos. It may be considered whether the respective groupings, when included equally by a given mind or persuasion and transcended, yield a super-mind or super-persuasion.

19. 19.

    In the spirit of (4) and its description in this chapter, it is encouraged that future studies consider an “other-referential” counterpart to the concept of recursion. In an other-referential formal system, functions or other mathematical objects would be definable as other terms occurring within a given universe of discourse. In terms of mathematical equations, such reverse-recursion (“cursion”) could simply refer to one value on a side of an equation equaling values on the other.

20. 20.

    The neologism of psychological portmanteaus like foremory and memsight can be traced historically to [59] with the coinage of “idiothetic”. As a portmanteau of idiographic and nomothetic, the idiothetic approach to personality seeks a middle ground between qualitative case study and quantitative population analysis.

21. 21.

    Also of relevance to relationships vis-à-vis augmented cognition is the former’s increasing technological mediation. Such mediation takes the forms of text, voice, and video chats, messaging, and meetings. A typology may be sketched out where long-distance relationships are assumed to be the most technologically mediated, necessarily relying on the aforementioned communication channels.

22. 22.

    See [41] for a discussion of intuitive cognition.

23. 23.

    Related to dual-process cogfective decision-making is the growing belief that System 1 affect is best understood in terms of “embodied, embedded” mental science [44]. Augmented psychology must test whether decision-making is augmented overall by the respective enactments of distinct types of embodiment (i.e., human vs. computer).

24. 24.

    In the case of blending memory and foresight, my study was confined to Western (Euro-American) psychology. No competing constructs to memory nor such concepts to foresight were found, though my study did not consider whether a term for momeiohr exists in any non-English language.

25. 25.

    Related is the common notion of intention as one’s aim to carry out a task for X purpose. Intentions of this kind are usually framed as conscious, but they can be unconscious or subconscious (and possibly superconscious) as well.

26. 26.

    In [11], intuition was defined as a term that is referred to in its psychological literature as affect and cognition in different places. It seems both more faithful and parsimonious to treat intuition less as cogfective (which was a compromise attempted in [11] given the divergence of how to conceive of intuition), and more as simply affective. If this is done, no concrete phenomenon will have yet been identified as being definitionally cogfective.

Authors and Affiliations

1. The Sirius Project, Carrollton, USA

   Suraj Sood

Editors and Affiliations

1. Soar Technology Inc., Orlando, FL, USA

   Dylan D. Schmorrow

2. Design Interactive, Inc., Orlando, FL, USA

   Cali M. Fidopiastis

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