6,271 research outputs found
Autonomy: a review and a reappraisal
In the field of artificial life there is no agreement on what defines âautonomyâ. This makes it difficult to measure progress made towards understanding as well as engineering autonomous systems. Here, we review the diversity of approaches and categorize them by introducing a conceptual distinction between behavioral and constitutive autonomy. Differences in the autonomy of artificial and biological agents tend to be marginalized for the former and treated as absolute for the latter. We argue that with this distinction the apparent opposition can be resolved
Maturanaâs Autopoietic Hermeneutics Versus Turingâs Causal Methodology for Explaining Cognition (Reply to A. Kravchenko (2007) Whence the autonomy? A comment on Harnad and Dror (2006)
Kravchenko (2007) suggests replacing Turingâs suggested method for explaining cognizersâ cognitive capacity through autonomous robotic modelling by âautopoeisis, Maturanaâs extremely vague metaphor for the relations and interactions among organisms and their environments. I suggest that this would be an exercise in hermeneutics rather than causal explanation
Enacting Productive Dialogue: Addressing the Challenge that Non-Human Cognition Poses to Collaborations Between Enactivism and Heideggerian Phenomenology
This chapter uses one particular proposal for interdisciplinary collaboration â in this case, between early Heideggerian phenomenology and enactivist cognitive science â as an example of how such partnerships may confront and negotiate tensions between the perspectives they bring together. The discussion begins by summarising some of the intersections that render Heideggerian and enactivist thought promising interlocutors for each other. It then moves on to explore how Heideggerian enactivism could respond to the challenge of reconciling the significant differences in the ways that each discourse seeks to apply the structures it claims to uncover
Enaction-Based Artificial Intelligence: Toward Coevolution with Humans in the Loop
This article deals with the links between the enaction paradigm and
artificial intelligence. Enaction is considered a metaphor for artificial
intelligence, as a number of the notions which it deals with are deemed
incompatible with the phenomenal field of the virtual. After explaining this
stance, we shall review previous works regarding this issue in terms of
artifical life and robotics. We shall focus on the lack of recognition of
co-evolution at the heart of these approaches. We propose to explicitly
integrate the evolution of the environment into our approach in order to refine
the ontogenesis of the artificial system, and to compare it with the enaction
paradigm. The growing complexity of the ontogenetic mechanisms to be activated
can therefore be compensated by an interactive guidance system emanating from
the environment. This proposition does not however resolve that of the
relevance of the meaning created by the machine (sense-making). Such
reflections lead us to integrate human interaction into this environment in
order to construct relevant meaning in terms of participative artificial
intelligence. This raises a number of questions with regards to setting up an
enactive interaction. The article concludes by exploring a number of issues,
thereby enabling us to associate current approaches with the principles of
morphogenesis, guidance, the phenomenology of interactions and the use of
minimal enactive interfaces in setting up experiments which will deal with the
problem of artificial intelligence in a variety of enaction-based ways
Afterword
Francisco J. Varela was a student and collaborator of Humberto R. Maturana. Their pioneering collaboration on Autopoiesis and Cognition reestablished âprocesses of livingâ as the principle topic of biological explorations. This topic had dropped out of the discourse of biology after the work of Jacob von UexkĂŒll. Autopoiesis brought a new framework to biology. I say framework because it was not a theory that predicted observable phenomena but a scaffold to pose and answer new kinds questions. In their The Tree of Knowledge, which connected the notion of autopoiesis to a variety of biological, evolutionary, cognitive, and, in a rudimentary way, linguistic and social phenomena, Francisco started to identify his contributions
Afterword
Francisco J. Varela was a student and collaborator of Humberto R. Maturana. Their pioneering collaboration on Autopoiesis and Cognition reestablished âprocesses of livingâ as the principle topic of biological explorations. This topic had dropped out of the discourse of biology after the work of Jacob von UexkĂŒll. Autopoiesis brought a new framework to biology. I say framework because it was not a theory that predicted observable phenomena but a scaffold to pose and answer new kinds questions. In their The Tree of Knowledge, which connected the notion of autopoiesis to a variety of biological, evolutionary, cognitive, and, in a rudimentary way, linguistic and social phenomena, Francisco started to identify his contributions
Hermeneutic resonance in animats and art
One major criticism of direct or active perception (and other forms of embodied action) from the perspective of cognitive psycology is that, according to common sense, there are some actions that require strictly symbolic information - for example, to stop a car in response to a red traffic light - which fall outside the realm of a perception-action cycle. Although such cognitive responses are not necessarily a goal of artificial life, they must necessarily be included within the embodied paradigm if it is to encompass the cognisant individual, the self-aware individual, or, potentially, the conscious individual. This paper will address the question, 'can an animat appreciate art?' Although this may seem very different to the example of a prosaic response to a traffic light, it will be argued that a common framework for establishing the meaning of an object is needed. It will also be argued that clarification to previous philosophical models of artistic engagement is required: in particular that the process of understanding is not a dialogue between an autopoietic artwork and animat, but that there is either a unity of object (artwork-animat) which becomes self-maintaining, or a more classical Gibsonian interpretation as a fixed set of affordances offered by an object to the subject, both of which lead to the conclusion that the process of understanding becomes a resonance in the unity or animat
Towards Autopoietic Computing
A key challenge in modern computing is to develop systems that address
complex, dynamic problems in a scalable and efficient way, because the
increasing complexity of software makes designing and maintaining efficient and
flexible systems increasingly difficult. Biological systems are thought to
possess robust, scalable processing paradigms that can automatically manage
complex, dynamic problem spaces, possessing several properties that may be
useful in computer systems. The biological properties of self-organisation,
self-replication, self-management, and scalability are addressed in an
interesting way by autopoiesis, a descriptive theory of the cell founded on the
concept of a system's circular organisation to define its boundary with its
environment. In this paper, therefore, we review the main concepts of
autopoiesis and then discuss how they could be related to fundamental concepts
and theories of computation. The paper is conceptual in nature and the emphasis
is on the review of other people's work in this area as part of a longer-term
strategy to develop a formal theory of autopoietic computing.Comment: 10 Pages, 3 figure
Chemical communication between synthetic and natural cells: a possible experimental design
The bottom-up construction of synthetic cells is one of the most intriguing
and interesting research arenas in synthetic biology. Synthetic cells are built
by encapsulating biomolecules inside lipid vesicles (liposomes), allowing the
synthesis of one or more functional proteins. Thanks to the in situ synthesized
proteins, synthetic cells become able to perform several biomolecular
functions, which can be exploited for a large variety of applications. This
paves the way to several advanced uses of synthetic cells in basic science and
biotechnology, thanks to their versatility, modularity, biocompatibility, and
programmability. In the previous WIVACE (2012) we presented the
state-of-the-art of semi-synthetic minimal cell (SSMC) technology and
introduced, for the first time, the idea of chemical communication between
synthetic cells and natural cells. The development of a proper synthetic
communication protocol should be seen as a tool for the nascent field of
bio/chemical-based Information and Communication Technologies (bio-chem-ICTs)
and ultimately aimed at building soft-wet-micro-robots. In this contribution
(WIVACE, 2013) we present a blueprint for realizing this project, and show some
preliminary experimental results. We firstly discuss how our research goal
(based on the natural capabilities of biological systems to manipulate chemical
signals) finds a proper place in the current scientific and technological
contexts. Then, we shortly comment on the experimental approaches from the
viewpoints of (i) synthetic cell construction, and (ii) bioengineering of
microorganisms, providing up-to-date results from our laboratory. Finally, we
shortly discuss how autopoiesis can be used as a theoretical framework for
defining synthetic minimal life, minimal cognition, and as bridge between
synthetic biology and artificial intelligence.Comment: In Proceedings Wivace 2013, arXiv:1309.712
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