800 research outputs found
Autonomy: a review and a reappraisal
In the field of artificial life there is no agreement on what defines ‘autonomy’. 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
On the Concept of Creal: The Politico-Ethical Horizon of a Creative Absolute
Process philosophies tend to emphasise the value of continuous creation as the
core of their discourse. For Bergson, Whitehead, Deleuze, and others the real is
ultimately a creative becoming. Critics have argued that there is an irreducible
element of (almost religious) belief in this re-evaluation of immanent creation.
While I don’t think belief is necessarily a sign of philosophical and existential
weakness, in this paper I will examine the possibility for the concept of universal
creation to be a political and ethical axiom, the result of a global social
contract rather than of a new spirituality. I argue here that a coherent way to
fight against potentially totalitarian absolutes is to replace them with a virtual
absolute that cannot territorialise without deterritorialising at the same time:
the Creal principle
Philosophical foundations of the Death and Anti-Death discussion
Perhaps there has been no greater opportunity than in this “VOLUME FIFTEEN of our Death And Anti-Death set of anthologies” to write about how might think about life and how to avoid death. There are two reasons to discuss “life”, the first being enhancing our understanding of who we are and why we may be here in the Universe. The second is more practical: how humans meet the physical challenges brought about by the way they have interacted with their environment.
Many persons discussing “life” beg the question about what “life” is. Surely, when one discusses how to overcome its opposite, death, they are not referring to another “living” thing such as a plant. There seems to be a commonality, though, and it is this commonality is one needing elaboration. It ostensibly seems to be the boundary condition separating what is completely passive (inert) from what attempts to maintain its integrity, as well as fulfilling other conditions we think “life” has. In our present discussion, there will be a reminder that it by no means has been unequivocally established what life really is by placing quotes around the word, namely, “life”. Consider it a tag representing a bundle of philosophical ideas that will be unpacked in this paper
The Capitalist Socius and Videogame Production: Autopoietic Subjectivation Monsters
Diverse representations of bodies in videogames have become a point of contention among developers and consumers alike, which has led scholars to question why videogame production is breaking with trends of recognizable, anthropocentric characters in favor of “diverse” bodies. This paper contends that the overarching reason for this is that the capitalist socius (Deluze and Guattari, 1986) has become more readily equipped to be able to monetize and streamline diversity. Instead of diversity and inclusivity in videogames being an act of subversion that was often only done outside of formal videogame production, the capitalist socius and videogame production have adapted the necessary material discursive apparatuses to turn diversity into a form of capital-general. The mechanisms by which videogame production recruits and retains workers via their passion also offers insight into how these material-discursive apparatuses are forming. In examining how the capitalist socius overlays onto the videogame production process, a few things become apparent. Because videogame production operates within the capitalist socius, its goals are similar: to become autopoietic (able to reach a point of homeostasis in which the entity is able to reproduce and maintain its structural integrity), and to turn any and all resources into sources of capital generation. The expectation of bodies working in these regimes is to be as non-threatening and as pliable to new modes of subjectivation and capital generation as possible, but that means that bodies must undergo certain political transformations to adhere to these needs of the capitalist socius and videogame production processes
From Simple to Complex and Ultra-complex Systems:\ud A Paradigm Shift Towards Non-Abelian Systems Dynamics
Atoms, molecules, organisms distinguish layers of reality because of the causal links that govern their behavior, both horizontally (atom-atom, molecule-molecule, organism-organism) and vertically (atom-molecule-organism). This is the first intuition of the theory of levels. Even if the further development of the theory will require imposing a number of qualifications to this initial intuition, the idea of a series of entities organized on different levels of complexity will prove correct. Living systems as well as social systems and the human mind present features remarkably different from those characterizing non-living, simple physical and chemical systems. We propose that super-complexity requires at least four different categorical frameworks, provided by the theories of levels of reality, chronotopoids, (generalized) interactions, and anticipation
Explorative Synthetic Biology in AI: Criteria of Relevance and a Taxonomy for Synthetic Models of Living and Cognitive Processes
This article tackles the topic of the special issue “Biology
in AI: New Frontiers in Hardware, Software and Wetware Modeling
of Cognition” in two ways. It addresses the problem of the relevance
of hardware, software, and wetware models for the scientific
understanding of biological cognition, and it clarifies the
contributions that synthetic biology, construed as the synthetic
exploration of cognition, can offer to artificial intelligence (AI). The
research work proposed in this article is based on the idea that the
relevance of hardware, software, and wetware models of biological
and cognitive processes—that is, the concrete contribution that
these models can make to the scientific understanding of life and
cognition—is still unclear, mainly because of the lack of explicit
criteria to assess in what ways synthetic models can support the
experimental exploration of biological and cognitive phenomena.
Our article draws on elements from cybernetic and autopoietic
epistemology to define a framework of reference, for the synthetic
study of life and cognition, capable of generating a set of assessment
criteria and a classification of forms of relevance, for synthetic
models, able to overcome the sterile, traditional polarization of their
evaluation between mere imitation and full reproduction of the target
processes. On the basis of these tools, we tentatively map the forms
of relevance characterizing wetware models of living and cognitive
processes that synthetic biology can produce and outline a
programmatic direction for the development of “organizationally
relevant approaches” applying synthetic biology techniques to the
investigative field of (embodied) AI
From Simple to Complex and Ultra-complex Systems:\ud A Paradigm Shift Towards Non-Abelian Systems Dynamics
Atoms, molecules, organisms distinguish layers of reality because of the causal links that govern their behavior, both horizontally (atom-atom, molecule-molecule, organism-organism) and vertically (atom-molecule-organism). This is the first intuition of the theory of levels. Even if the further development of the theory will require imposing a number of qualifications to this initial intuition, the idea of a series of entities organized on different levels of complexity will prove correct. Living systems as well as social systems and the human mind present features remarkably different from those characterizing non-living, simple physical and chemical systems. We propose that super-complexity requires at least four different categorical frameworks, provided by the theories of levels of reality, chronotopoids, (generalized) interactions, and anticipation
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