Seminar #54: Shallow and deep embodiment: Reasons for embracing enactivism

Here are details of an Alergic / Life and Mind talk by Ezequiel Di Paolo (CCNR/Informatics, University of Sussex), which will be held next week.

Location: ARUN-401
Date: Wednesday 21st Oct
Time: 4:30pm.

Shallow and deep embodiment: Reasons for embracing enactivism

Ezequiel Di Paolo

Research in cognitive science today (as in most areas of psychology, neuroscience and AI) is done within a functionalist framework. This generally takes the form of a computational/representational view of cognition as something performed in the head, informed by the world and for actions in the world, but in itself, decoupled from the world.

Over the last two decades the computational, skull-bound view of the mind has been challenged from various different angles (from autonomous robotics to sensorimotor theories of perception to cognitive linguistics). These challenges are often described as embodied because they show the non-trivial (constitutive and not merely informative) role played by bodily structures and their situatedness in the world.

In so far as such challenges concentrate on providing alternative working mechanisms for cognition, they remain susceptible to being re-interpreted in functionalist terms and so they are bound to inherit the blind-spots of functionalism, among others: a lack of a definition or grounding for terms like identity, autonomy, agency, value, meaning, cognition, and even sociality.

20th Oct – talk by J. Scott Jordan at Sussex

I think this forthcoming COGS talk by J. Scott Jordan should be of interest to Life and Minders:

http://www.sussex.ac.uk/cogs/1-4-4.html#w3

Scott is an experimental psychologist who explores enactive approaches to cognition experimentally. In his talk he will be discussing ways in which dynamical systems can give rise to meaning.

Mike

Adaptive Behavior Special Issue: Agency in Natural and Artificial Systems

Takashi Ikegami and I (Marieke Rohde) have edited a special issue on Agency in Natural and Artificial Systems which is now available on the journal homepage

The special issue had been the outcome of a 2008 Kyoto Workshop with the same topic and features contributions by both workshop participants and outside contributors. All contributions are potentially relevant to the followers of this blog. I hope the one line summaries below adequately summarise the papers

• Xabier E. Barandiaran, Ezequiel Di Paolo, and Marieke Rohde Defining Agency: Individuality, Normativity, Asymmetry, and Spatio-temporality in Action:  A conceptual paper that proposes a definition of agency that is based on Barandiaran & Di Paolo’s earlier work, with tight links to autopoietic theory.
• Matthew D. Egbert and Ezequiel Di Paolo Integrating Autopoiesis and Behavior: An Exploration in Computational Chemo-ethology: A simulation model (artificial chemistry) of a proto cell to combine autopoiesis and functional sensorimotor behaviour, investigating the transition from just autopoiesis to minimal agency.
• Jean-Julien Aucouturier and Takashi Ikegami The Illusion of Agency: Two Engineering Approaches to Compromise Autonomy and Reactivity in an Artificial System: An analysis of the authors’ previous work on chaotic neural networks for dancing behaviour in a robot. Proposing a “dynamical Turing test”, the authors assess in how far internal controller complexity can lead to fluctuations in “information circulation” in sensorimotor couplings, which brings about behaviour that appears life-like and autonomous.
• Jun Tani Autonomy of Self at Criticality: The Perspective from Synthetic Neuro-Robotics: Reviewing a series of his earlier work in Neuro-Robotics, Tani proposes that self-organising criticality in complex neural robot controllers is a possible mechanism to bring about spontaneous switching in behaviour as we observe it in higher living organisms. The work is inspired by and related to Heidegger’s phenomenology of selfhood.
• Hanne De Jaegher and Tom Froese On the Role of Social Interaction in Individual Agency: The authors assess in a conceptual contribution to what extent processes of dynamical self-organizing between individuals (i.e., in interaction) can be relevant for the study and generation of agency. Giving examples/guidelines, they propose that higher forms of agency can only be reached if interaction dynamics are taken into consideration.

Enjoy!

Seminar #53: Sociality and the life-mind continuity thesis

This Wednesday I will give a Life and Mind seminar at 4:30pm in Arun-401. Title and abstract below:

Sociality and the life-mind continuity thesis: An exploration in evolutionary robotics

Tom Froese

Time: 4:30-6:00pm
Date: Wed. 2nd, September 2009
Location: Arun-401

In this seminar I will provide a brief summary of my PhD. The main idea is the following:

The life-mind continuity thesis, which is the theoretical foundation for recent embodied, enactive and dynamical approaches to cognitive science, holds that mind is prefigured in life and that mind belongs to life. Its biggest challenge is the problem of scalability: how can the same explanatory framework that accounts for basic phenomena of life and mind be extended to incorporate the highest reaches of human cognition? So far there has been little systematic response to this apparent ‘cognitive gap’.

The aim of my PhD is to show that the scalability problem appears insurmountable because of the prevalent focus on the individual agent alone, and that the problem can be resolved by an appreciation of the constitutive role of sociality. In the seminar I will present a series of evolutionary robotics models that support this argument.

All welcome!

Including Constitution in Models of Behaviour

Thank you to everyone that showed up for my presentation yesterday. I appreciated the comments, questions and criticisms that were raised at the end of the talk. I thought I would try to summarise some of these comments and my responses to them here.

Also, here is the paper which the talk was based upon.

Egbert, M., Di Paolo, E. A. and Barandiaran, X. (2009) Chemo-ethology of an Adaptive Protocell: Sensorless sensitivity to implicit viability conditions in Proceedings of the Ninth European Conference on Artificial Life, ECAL09, Budapest, September 13-16, 2009, Springer Verlag. (forthcoming)

Comment #1: “How are you distinguishing between behaviour and constitutional processes? Why don’t you consider processes of self-constitution to be behavioural processes?”

This question likely comes from early in my talk where I speak about how models tend to either concentrate on `behavioural’ or`constitutional’ processes. I don’t think we need a formal definition of `behaviour’ or self-constitution to see that different types of phenomena are being modelled in, for instance, Anil Seth’s model of action selection and Varela, Maturana and Uribe’s model of an autopoietic system.

The former is inspired by one type of biological phenomena (I called it behaviour) and the latter is inspired by a different phenomena (autopoiesis, or self-maintenance). It is also clearly the case that in these two models (and many others) the two types of phenomena are not included in the same model. Typically in models, if type-a phenomena (what I called behavior) is in the model, then the type-b phenomena (what I called constitutional processes) is absent and vice versa.