DREAM Architecture: a Developmental Approach to Open-Ended Learning in Robotics

Robots are still limited to controlled conditions, that the robot designer knows with enough details to endow the robot with the appropriate models or behaviors. Learning algorithms add some flexibility with the ability to discover the appropriate behavior given either some demonstrations or a reward to guide its exploration with a reinforcement learning algorithm. Reinforcement learning algorithms rely on the definition of state and action spaces that define reachable behaviors. Their adaptation capability critically depends on the representations of these spaces: small and discrete spaces result in fast learning while large and continuous spaces are challenging and either require a long training period or prevent the robot from converging to an appropriate behavior. Beside the operational cycle of policy execution and the learning cycle, which works at a slower time scale to acquire new policies, we introduce the redescription cycle, a third cycle working at an even slower time scale to generate or adapt the required representations to the robot, its environment and the task. We introduce the challenges raised by this cycle and we present DREAM (Deferred Restructuring of Experience in Autonomous Machines), a developmental cognitive architecture to bootstrap this redescription process stage by stage, build new state representations with appropriate motivations, and transfer the acquired knowledge across domains or tasks or even across robots. We describe results obtained so far with this approach and end up with a discussion of the questions it raises in Neuroscience

The literary dream in German Central Europe, 1900-1925: A selective study of the writings of Kafka, Kubin, Meyrink, Musil and Schnitzler.

This thesis examines the literary dream in selected works by Kafka, Kubin, Meyrink, Musil and Schnitzler, with a particular focus on the redefinition of subjectivity through dreamlife. The introductory chapter contextualises these case studies in the broader field of oneirocriticism, emphasising the dream's ancient role as fixtional template and its specific significance in the destabilised environment of German Central Europe during the early twentieth century. Alfred Kubin's Die andere Seite (1909), which uses the 'other side' as metaphor for both oneiric and artistic experience, reveals the inherent dualism of the literary dream and its close relationship with creativity. In Robert Musil's Die Verwirrungen des Zdglings Tdrlefi (1906), the protagonist serves as the model for a new type of self-determining subject who draws on the knowledge of dreams and irrationality. Franz Kafka's texts reveal techniques for integrating the dream into fictional worlds that are already dreamlike through the prevalence of (literalised) metaphor and free association. Gustav Meyrink, in Der Golem (1915), shares Kafka's interest in concretised metaphor, but also explores the dream's associations with occult practices, used as a defence against the threatening claims of science. Finally, Arthur Schnitzler's literary dreams offer a direct confrontation with psychoanalysis and a dismantling of nineteenth-century ideals of gender and bourgeois love. Overall, it is argued that the literary dreams by these authors hold varied responses to fragmentation of the Ich in the face of psychological 'vivisection', theories of relativity, and the collapse of old social orders. The dream, as a nightly 'psychosis', crystallised the pervasive fears of self-loss during this period; however, in its perennial role as micro-narrative, it also provided a site for re-construction of the subject. The incorporation of dreams in fictional lives served as a metonymical guide for the integration of un- and subconscious experience overall

Frontiers in psychodynamic neuroscience

he term psychodynamics was introduced in 1874 by Ernst von Brücke, the renowned German physiologist and Freud’s research supervisor at the University of Vienna. Together with Helmholtz and others, Brücke proposed that all living organisms are energy systems, regulated by the same thermodynamic laws. Since Freud was a student of Brücke and a deep admirer of Helmholtz, he adopted this view, thus laying the foundations for his metapsychology. The discovery of the Default Network and the birth of Neuropsychoanalysis, twenty years ago, facilitated a deep return to this classical conception of the brain as an energy system, and therefore a return to Freud's early ambition to establish psychology as natural science. Our current investigations of neural networks and applications of the Free Energy Principle are equally ‘psychodynamic’ in Brücke’s original sense of the term. Some branches of contemporary neuroscience still eschew subjective data and therefore exclude the brain’s most remarkable property – its selfhood – from the field, and many neuroscientists remain skeptical about psychoanalytic methods, theories, and concepts. Likewise, some psychoanalysts continue to reject any consideration of the structure and functions of the brain from their conceptualization of the mind in health and disease. Both cases seem to perpetuate a Cartesian attitude in which the mind is linked to the brain in some equivocal relationship and an attitude that detaches the brain from the body -- rather than considering it an integral part of the complex and dynamic living organism as a whole. Evidence from psychodynamic neuroscience suggests that Freudian constructs can now be realized neurobiologically. For example, Freud’s notion of primary and secondary processes is consistent with the hierarchical organization of self-organized cortical and subcortical systems, and his description of the ego is consistent with the functions of the Default Network and its reciprocal exchanges with subordinate brain systems. Moreover, thanks to new methods of measuring brain entropy, we can now operationalize the primary and secondary processes and therefore test predictions arising from these Freudian constructs. All of this makes it possible to deepen the dialogue between neuroscience and psychoanalysis, in ways and to a degree that was unimaginable in Freud's time, and even compared to twenty years ago. Many psychoanalytical hypotheses are now well integrated with contemporary neuroscience. Other Freudian and post-Freudian hypotheses about the structure and function of the mind seem ripe for the detailed and sophisticated development that modern psychodynamic neuroscience can offer. This Research Topic aims to provide comprehensive coverage of the latest advances in psychodynamic neuroscience and neuropsychoanalysis. Potential authors are invited to submit papers (original research, case reports, review articles, commentaries) that deploy, review, compare or develop the methods and theories of psychodynamic neuroscience and neuropsychoanalysis. Potential authors include researchers, psychoanalysts, and neuroscientists

Design and the Politics of Knowledge in America, 1937-1967: Walter Gropius, Gyorgy Kepes

Using the American careers of Walter Gropius and Gyorgy Kepes as case studies, this dissertation addresses the intersection of art and architecture with the reciprocal politics of knowledge production and state formation in the mid-twentieth century United States. Inasmuch as the careers of Gropius and Kepes--wartime émigrés from Germany and Hungary, respectively--retrace the narrative of importation and assimilation linking interwar European modernism and its post-World War Two American legacies, this project also implicates that larger narrative and its constructions. Avant-garde practices in the Weimar Republic orbit advanced a model of design as a practice of knowledge, ideation or "expertise," which found fertile ground in the new political conditions of postwar America. The intersection of design practices with practices of knowledge production reconfigured design from material craftsmanship or artistic invention to a fluid set of competences and techniques oriented towards establishing new cultural, political, and economic agency for the designer. The constitution of this agency and its limits is the central historical and conceptual problem of this dissertation. From their strategic positions on architectural faculties at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and in their multiple roles as administrators, educators, writers, and designers, Gropius and Kepes both responded to and shaped several emergent discourses on knowledge that traversed the academy, the federal government, the design professions, and the wider political and intellectual life of the nation: the discourse of economic "stimulus" that posited the intersection of knowledge and legislative practices and their combined agency in the social body; the discourse of planning that charted the intervention of the "managed economy" regime across the nation's urban fabric; the discourse of the creative mind that posited knowledge as a key economic and political resource; and finally, the discourse of instrumentality that defined the political agency of knowledge-production within the postwar research university. Among the events leading Gropius and Kepes to confront those discourses, as chronicled in this dissertation, were the wartime administrative reorganization of the Harvard Graduate School of Design, the establishment of the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard and the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT, and postwar curricular reform at MIT at large. In each of those instances, art and architecture emulated the disciplinary practices of knowledge production: research, education, methodology, collaboration. But more importantly, the disciplines of design adopted and elaborated in their own terms the ends of those organized knowledge practices in the promotion of unpredictability and innovation, necessitating in turn the curbing of controls and the circumscription of agency. The pursuit of this mode of practice, characterized by internal delimitation, situated design within an emergent political regime dedicated to the maintenance of socio-economic freedoms, articulated in the United States within a newly consolidated and organized federal government institution, and accompanied by new legislative and ideological articulations of national identity

The Subject Reimagined: Language, Event, and the Event of Language

In event phenomenology, the problem of subjectivity and its relation – or non-relation – to event remains a legitimate problem. A legitimate problem because, on the one hand, events are the definitional neuter, or nihil, that erupt into the something of being and subsequently reconfigure this being; while on the other, our experience of ourselves, what constitutes the bedrock of subjectivity, appears as cogent, unified. The purpose of this thesis is to propose a new sort of phenomenological language, carried through in a thoroughly ontological anthropology, that provides a way to connect discontinuity with continuity, the unfamiliar and alien with the familiar, inside subjectivity. Doing so requires abandoning the transcendental residue in Heidegger’s work, relying instead, and primarily, on Francoise Dastur’s ontogenetic analysis of language (and its event) to forge a path forward to an eventful subjectivity

The ground of radical fantasy: Imagining a critical theory of fantastic literature

To what extent can fantasy offer a radical critique of society? What does it take to imagine genuine alternate possibilities in modernity, while we remain under the hegemony of technocratic rationalization? This is not simply a question of what we think; it is a question of how we think, and in that context, fantasy may offer surprising insights. Ideas for a critical theory of fantasy should be concerned with how we imagine and how we can re-imagine ourselves in the world, constituting an approach toward possibility and potentiality. This thesis argues that radical fantasy is a way of looking to the past, to the margins of society, and to the human imaginative capacity to conceive of that which is not possible under the horizon of late capitalism

Paths from the Philosophy of Art to Everyday Aesthetics

During the past few decades, everyday aesthetics has established itself as a new branch of philosophical aesthetics alongside the more traditional philosophy of art. The Paths from Philosophy of Art to Everyday Aesthetics explores the intimate relations between these two branches of contemporary aesthetics. The essays collected in this volume discuss a wide range of topics from aesthetic intimacy to the nature of modernity and the essence of everydayness, which play important roles both in the philosophy of art and everyday aesthetics. With these essays, the writers and editors of this volume wish to commemorate professor Arto Haapala on his 60th birthday. This collection of articles is intended for scholars and students working in the fields of aesthetics, philosophy, and art studies

Walter Benjamin’s Parisian passages: correspondences in European thought

This thesis investigates the impact of France and its literary and philosophical heritage on Walter Benjamin’s writings. It argues that this influence is not merely circumstantial, but dates back to Benjamin’s early fascination with the nation’s history and culture and was crucial to the development of his methods as well as the reception of his ideas beyond German borders. Benjamin’s unfinished study on the passages of nineteenth-century Paris — the Passagenarbeit [The Arcades Project] — acts as the connecting thread throughout the chapters of the thesis which chronicle his activity as a reader, writer and translator before and during his exile in the French capital. In addition to being considered for their status as the database of Benjamin’s French interests, the arcades materials function as a case study to illustrate his methodology as a Franco-German comparatist. In turn, the thesis also reverses the question of French influence by challenging the significance of Benjamin’s writings for post-war French thought and theory. Central to my analyses is the notion of ‘correspondence’— understood in an epistolary sense but equally as a type of intellectual and literary dialogue between texts and figures — which I propose as a means of conceptualizing the effects of particular French works on Benjamin’s practice as a critic and thinker. The fusion of Benjamin’s investment in francophone literatures with his grounding in the German intellectual tradition means his works emerge as interdisciplinary, transnational and translingual fields, where French and German sources are in constant ‘correspondence’ with one another. By analysing the depth of Benjamin’s ties with French literary and aesthetic culture and their influence on his work, the thesis highlights his role and legacy as a European intermediary within the history of Franco-German cultural and intellectual relations, and the ways in which philosophies from both nations were exchanged, inherited and developed

Because I am Not Here, Selected Second Life-Based Art Case Studies. Subjectivity, Autoempathy and Virtual World Aesthetics

Second Life is a virtual world accessible through the Internet in which users create objects and spaces, and interact socially through 3D avatars. Certain artists use the platform as a medium for art creation, using the aesthetic, spatial, temporal and technological features of SL as raw material. Code and scripts applied to animate and manipulate objects, avatars and spaces are important in this sense. These artists, their avatars and artwork in SL are at the centre of my research questions: what does virtual existence mean and what is its purpose when stemming from aesthetic exchange in SL? Through a qualitative research method mixing distribute aesthetics, digital art and media theories, the goal is to examine aesthetic exchange in the virtual: subjectivity and identity and their possible shifting patterns as reflected in avatar-artists. A theoretical and methodological emphasis from a media studies perspective is applied to digital media and networks, contributing to the reshaping of our epistemologies of these media, in contrast to the traditional emphasis on communicational aspects. Four case studies, discourse and text analysis, as well as interviews in-world and via email, plus observation while immersed in SL, are used in the collection of data, experiences, objects and narratives from avatars Eva and Franco Mattes, Gazira Babeli, Bryn Oh and China Tracy. The findings confirm the role that aesthetic exchange in virtual worlds has in the rearrangement of ideas and epistemologies on the virtual and networked self. This is reflected by the fact that the artists examined—whether in SL or AL—create and embody avatars from a liminal (ambiguous) modality of identity, subjectivity and interaction. Mythopoeia (narrative creation) and experiencing oneself as ‘another’ through multiplied identity and subjectivity are the outcomes of code performance and machinima (films created in-world). They constitute a modus operandi (syntax) in which episteme, techne and embodiment work in symbiosis with those of the machine, affected by the synthetic nature of code and liminality in SL. The combined perspective from media studies and distribute aesthetics proves to be an effective method for studying these subjects, contributing to the discussion of contemporary virtual worlds and art theories