A situated and embodied model of ant route navigation

This abstract summarises a model of route navigation inspired by the behaviour of ants presented fully in Baddeley et al. (2012). The ant's embodiment coupled with an innate scanning behaviour means that robust route navigation can be achieved by a parsimonious biologically plausible algorithm

Communication, Machines & Human Augmentics

This essay reformulates the question of human augmentation as a problem of advanced human-machine communication, theorizing that such communication implies robust artificial intelligence and necessitates understanding the relational role new technologies play in human-machine communication. We focus on the questions, “When do electronic tools cease to be ‘simply’ tools, and become meaningfully part of ourselves,” and, “When might we think of these tools as augmenting our selves, rather than simply amplifying our capabilities?” These questions, already important to the medical and rehabilitative fields, loom larger with increasing commodification of pervasive augmentation technologies, and indicate the verge on which human-machine communication now finds itself. Through analyses of human and machine agency, mediated through a theory of close human-machine communication, we argue that the critical element in discussions of human-machine communication is an increase in sense of agency, extending the traditional human-computer interface dictum to provide an internal locus of control

Material Engagement Theory and Extensive Enactivism Within the 4E Cognitive Debate: A Phenomenological Approach to Material Agency and Application to Current Technology

4E Cognition is a fairly new field of study within cognitive science, cognitive psychology, and cognitive philosophy. The various approaches to cognition namely embodied, embedded, extended and enacted cognition; provide multi-faceted approaches to cognition. A common claim of these approaches is that cognition may have various contributing factors such as the role of the brain, body and its environments. Thus challenges the traditional idea that cognition exists purely mentally within the confines of the brain and skull. However, even within the 4E Cognition family, some nuanced arguments are hotly debated, particularly among the proponents of Embedded Theories (EmT) and Extended Theories (ExT). The main area of dispute centres on the idea of what process(es) can be classified as ‘cognitive’. Both enterprises try to answer the pertinent question regarding what makes a cognitive state the process of a particularly cognitive kind. In other words, both theories try to answer what and where the mark of the cognitive is. EmT argues that a particular context, situation, or an environment where the body is located shapes one’s cognition. The environment, context, or situation constitutes the mark of the cognitive. However, although the body is deeply embedded with the surrounding environment, the processes that can be considered ‘cognitive’ remain within the domain of the neural system. ExT on the other hand, through the coupling principle, argues that if external resources have the same functionality with internal processes located inside the brain, then these external processes can be considered ‘cognitive’ processes. For ExT, cognition extends to external resources if and only if, extracranial resources have the same functionality as internal or neural processes inside the brain and the skull. Although, ExT and EmT vary to some degree on what constitutes the mark of cognition, they agree on where cognition predominantly resides – both agree that it is very much a “heady” affair! Still, both ExT and EmT are susceptible to the assumption that the only processes that can be classified as ‘cognitive’ processes are the internal or neural processes. However, this does not tell us how ‘cognition’ comes to be, nor does it answer the question of what makes a cognitive state the process of a particularly cognitive kind. My main aim in this thesis is to provide a possible theory, an alternative theory that can tease out the mark of the cognitive we need to settle the dispute between EmT and ExT. The first commitment we require from this theory is that it needs to renounce any knowledge claim assumption that ‘cognition’ has an a priori location inside the head. Therefore, this thesis will propose a theory that will not assume ‘cognition’ as mainly a “heady” affair, it will instead, start from the assumption that 5 | P a g e ‘cognition’ has no a priori location. Drawing from Lambros Malafouris’ framework of Material Engagement Theory (MET) seen through the lens of Extensive Enactivism (EE), I will argue that this is the theory required to tease out the mark of cognition. In addition, by giving special attention to the phenomenological perception of material things, which is that things matter and should be taken seriously since the default mode of our place in the world is ours always, and already involved in habitual engagement with things or technologies in the world. In that sense, our cognitive engagement with external things do not just scaffold or extend cognition, but rather, it is radically embodied and dynamically conflated – incorporating our brains, bodies, things, technologies, and environments. These conglomeration of contributing factors to our cognitive processes, I believe, form the mark of cognition

Chalking as disruption and dialogue: a practical exploration of a rhetorical ecology at a southern, rural college

In this thesis, I explore how an informal form of discourse like sidewalk chalking functions as and within a rhetorical ecology, how ideas and texts circulate within such a complex system, and how this sometimes disruptive medium affects the potential for productive dialogue. By applying Margaret Syverson's four principles of rhetorical ecologies (distribution, embodiment, emergence, and enaction), we learn that chalking is an interconnected but informal system of sidewalk-based communication that uses playground chalk for writing or drawing messages, from art to insults, event notices to poetry, protests to love notes. It is a complex, dynamic system that includes other writers, other ideas, other texts, and other overlapping, entangled ecologies of the physical, social, historical, and cultural worlds we live in. Chalking is both social and material, and by mapping the interactions of and relationships between its human and nonhuman actors, we can explore the blurred boundaries of its rhetorical ecology and examine the disruptive potential within that ecology. Furthermore, we can uncover its practical uses: chalking can serve as visual rhetoric that can be studied in the composition classroom, connect students with the "real" world outside the classroom, and encourage them to engage in productive discourse. More broadly, informal discourse, however mundane it may seem, can guide or influence public rhetorics in often surprising, meaningful ways

Autonomous Visual Navigation A Biologically Inspired Approach

Inspired by the navigational behavior observed in the animal kingdom and especially the navigational behavior of the ants, we attempt to simulate it in an artificial environment by implementing different kinds of biomimetic algorithms.Comment: 57 pages, 39 figures, Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Dissertation, University of Susse