Directors

Summary

Artificial intelligence increasingly informs decisions about nutrition, weight management, training, and recovery. These practices bring algorithmic recommendations into contact with bodily signals such as hunger, fatigue, and feelings of readiness. When these sources of guidance diverge, how do people decide what to do? This project investigates how judgment is formed and redistributed among conscious deliberation, physiological regulation, and AI systems, returning to a question at the heart of its inquiry: can the brain still make judgments?

The project approaches this question through metabolic mediation: the processes through which metabolic signals, including communication along the gut–brain axis, participate in the regulation of behavior and internal states. It explores whether, and in what sense, these adaptive processes can be understood as embodied judgment. This concept provides a basis for examining how AI interacts with bodily regulation, and for distinguishing physiological adjustment from conscious choice and ethical responsibility.

The collaboration brings together philosophy, metabolic physiology, and sport and health psychology at East China Normal University and Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1. The research combines analysis of established physiological findings and existing datasets with exploratory investigations of situations in which algorithmic advice meets bodily feedback. Particular attention is given to how individuals interpret recommendations, adjust their behavior, and negotiate conflicts between external guidance and their own experience. Joint seminars, research visits, and doctoral training will support the development of a shared conceptual and methodological framework.

The ethical inquiry concerns the conditions under which AI can legitimately support or substitute for particular forms of judgment. It examines how technological intervention affects opportunities for bodily feedback and adaptation, as well as personal agency and the attribution of responsibility. As an exploratory JORISS project, it aims to clarify these boundaries and develop questions and methods for subsequent empirical research. Planned outputs include joint publications and interdisciplinary workshops, with the longer-term aim of sustaining Sino–French research on AI, bodily regulation, and health practices.