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.

Defining Agency

Xabier Barandiaran, Ezequiel Di Paolo and Marieke Rohde have recently submitted the final version of a paper of interested to this blog: “Defining Agency. Individuality, Normativity, Asymmetry and Spatio-temporality in Action“, to be published soon on a special issue on Agency edited by Marieke Rohde and Takashi Ikegami on Adaptive Behavior Journal. The paper provides a explicit definition of minimal agency, hoping to be applicable to modellers and to provide a step forward to clarify and deepen into essential aspects of agency with a very special focus on the background of this blog: biological grounding of cognition, autopoiesis, enactive cognitive science, dynamicis approaches, etc.

ABSTRACT: The concept of agency is of crucial importance in cognitive science and artificial intelligence, and it is often used as an intuitive and rather uncontroversial term, in contrast to more abstract and theoretically heavy-weighted terms like “intentionality”, “rationality” or “mind”. However, most of the available definitions of agency are either too loose or unspecific to allow for a progressive scientific program. They implicitly and unproblematically assume the features that characterize agents, thus obscuring the full potential and challenge of modeling agency. We identify three conditions that a system must meet in order to be considered as a genuine agent: a) a system must define its own individuality, b) it must be the active source of activity in its environment (interactional asymmetry) and c) it must regulate this activity in relation to certain norms (normativity). We find that even minimal forms of proto-cellular systems can already provide a paradigmatic example of genuine agency. By abstracting away some specific details of minimal models of living agency we define the kind of organization that is capable to meet the required conditions for agency (which is not restricted to living organisms). On this basis, we define agency as an autonomous organization that adaptively regulates its coupling with its environment and contributes to sustaining itself as a consequence. We find that spatiality and temporality are the two fundamental domains in which agency spans at different scales. We conclude by giving an outlook to the road that lies ahead in the pursuit to understand, model and synthesize agents.
KEYWORDS: Agency, individuality, interactional asymmetry, normativity, spatiality, temporality.

<p style="text-align:center;"><a href="http://xabierbarandiaran.files.wordpress.com/2009/07/barandiaran_dipaolo_rohde_-_defining_agency_v_1_0_-_jab_20091.pdf"><img class="aligncenter size-thumbnail wp-image-138" title="defining_agency_screenshot" src="http://xabierbarandiaran.files.wordpress.com/2009/07/defining_agency_screenshot.png?w=150" alt="defining_agency_screenshot" width="150" /></a></p>

PSR…

Funny video showing an example of the corridor situation (De Jaegher & Di Paolo, 2007) from the film The Science of Sleep.

So, where’s the brain, people?

Ezequiel
(thanks to Eduardo!)

Seminar #52: Enacting motor goals

We will have Massimiliano Cappuccio visit us next Wednesday to give a Life and Mind talk at 4:30pm in Arun-401. Title and abstract below:

Enacting motor goals: mirror neurons, motor intentionality and the frame problem

Massimiliano Cappuccio

Time: 4:30-6:00pm
Date: Wed. 20th, May 2009
Location: Arun-401

Experiments carried out by Rizzolatti’s group in Parma suggest that the premotor cortex may codify not only simple movements, but also intentions related to motor goals. Mirror neuron circuits and canonical neuron circuits, for instance, are functionally defined by the pragmatic-transformative meaning of typologies of actions embedded in their intentional context, and not by their syntactical-kinematic structure. The existence of such structures suggests that proprioception, kinaesthesia and somatosensory information are not the only required elements (and not the most fundamental ones) in order to execute/recognize goal-oriented intentional actions, because an embodied familiarity toward the holistic practical meaning of a motor goal is required of intentional agents in order to perform purposeful actions as intelligent projects of intervention into the world. This familiarity is realistically acquired through a dynamic coupling of the agent’s body with a wide set of environmental and behavioural factors and is strictly consequent from the agent’s social history.

New paper on enactive intersubjectivity

A new paper on enactive intersubjecitivity has just appeared in Consciousness and Cognition.

De Jaegher, H. (2009). “Social understanding through direct perception? Yes, by interacting.” Consciousness and Cognition 18(2): 535-542.

Abstract:”This paper comments on Gallagher’s recently published direct perception proposal about social cognition [Gallagher, S. (2008a). Direct perception in the intersubjective context. Consciousness and Cognition, 17(2), 535–543]. I show that direct perception is in danger of being appropriated by the very cognitivist accounts criticised by Gallagher (theory theory and simulation theory). Then I argue that the experiential directness of perception in social situations can be understood only in the context of the role of the interaction process in social cognition. I elaborate on the role of social interaction with a discussion of participatory sense-making to show that direct perception, rather than being a perception enriched by mainly individual capacities, can be best understood as an interactional phenomenon.”

With commentaries:

Hutto, D. D. (2009). “Interacting? Yes, but of what kind and on what basis?” Consciousness and Cognition 18(2): 543-546.

Gallagher, S. (2009). “Deep and dynamic interaction: Response to Hanne De Jaegher.” Consciousness and Cognition 18(2): 547-548.

And a reply:

De Jaegher, H. (2009). “What made me want the cheese? A reply to Shaun Gallagher and Dan Hutto.” Consciousness and Cognition 18(2): 549-550.