Emerging archetypes in massive artificial societies for literary purposes using genetic algorithms

The creation of fictional stories is a very complex task that usually implies a creative process where the author has to combine characters, conflicts and plots to create an engaging narrative. This work presents a simulated environment with hundreds of characters that allows the study of coherent and interesting literary archetypes (or behaviours), plots and sub-plots. We will use this environment to perform a study about the number of profiles (parameters that define the personality of a character) needed to create two emergent scenes of archetypes: "natality control" and "revenge". A Genetic Algorithm (GA) will be used to find the fittest number of profiles and parameter configuration that enables the existence of the desired archetypes (played by the characters without their explicit knowledge). The results show that parametrizing this complex system is possible and that these kind of archetypes can emerge in the given environment.This work has been supported in part by FPU research grant AP2009-2942 and projects EvOrq (TIC-3903), CANUBE (CEI2013-P-14) and ANYSELF (TIN2011-28627-C04-02)

Life Formed: Evolutionary Design and the Futures of a Political Biology

Ph.D.Ph.D. Thesis. University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa 201

Interference patterns: Literary study, scientific knowledge, and disciplinary autonomy after the two cultures

This project interrogates the claims made for the possibility of collapsing all the various disciplines into one discipline, probably physics, and surely a science, in the name of making clearer the relations between our various fields of knowledge. This is the aim of the radical reductionist, and I take E. O. Wilson's Consilience as exemplary of such attempts. Central to Wilson's method of achieving unity is the new science of evolutionary psychology - itself a re-working of the sociobiology with which Wilson first achieved notoriety. In the on-going project of explaining culture under a Darwinian description, the evolutionary psychologists have begun to suggest explanations for the popularity and content of narrative fiction. Because they are consonant with the rest of science, these biologistic accounts of fiction might be preferable to the accounts traditionally offered by Literary Studies. Consequently, there is a risk that the traditional practices of Literary Studies will be made redundant within the academy and gradually atrophy. The demand is that Literary Studies either makes itself rigorous like the sciences (as with such projects as Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism), or else forfeit its claims to produce knowledge. Aware of this threat, some literary critics embrace forms of relativism in an attempt to deny the unity or effectiveness of scientific knowledge and so neuter the threatened takeover. Among these forms of relativism, Richard Rorty's account seeks to collapse the hierarchy of disciplines and seemingly offers Literary Studies a means of retaining its distinctive approach without denying the effectiveness of scientific knowledge. I aim to show that Literary Studies need not become a science, and that such sciences as evolutionary psychology are neither as threatening as some had feared, nor as useful to literary study as some have hoped

“Why not pitch the whole enterprise at the highest level possible?”: Speculative Radicalism and the Planetary Topics

This dissertation problematizes the hegemony of “critique” within the humanities in general and communication studies in particular. I argue that critique in the current mode, a reading and engagement practice that valorizes suspicion and purports to unmask allegedly concealed ideologies, does not equip scholars or students with the imaginative capacity necessary to confront the problems of the Anthropocene. Drawing upon the resources of speculative realism and speculative fiction, I propose speculative radicalism as an alternative practice. Speculative radicalism is an affirmative mode of reading, engagement, and theorizing that encourages the imagining of alternative future ways of living and modes of production, proceeding stepwise from a posited point of difference, or “novum.” Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy is offered as a model of invention in the speculative radicalist mode. With the goal of elaborating how speculative radicalism operates in this context, I repurpose the rhetorical topics of invention, or topoi. I argue that to fully appreciate the Mars Trilogy, one must understand that its applicable topics are, in fact, the planetary features of Mars itself: its gravity, landforms, and more. I develop and analyze this list of the planetary topics in the context of the Trilogy. In addition, I use the planetary topics to reevaluate established critical readings of the strategy video game series Sid Meier’s Civilization, as well as Robert Zubrin’s nonfiction space advocacy monograph The Case for Mars. I conclude that a reading of these artifacts informed by the planetary topics can yield more nuanced judgements than those produced by the prevailing style of academic critique; furthermore, this conclusion points the way toward the development of a speculative radicalist mode of engagement and imagination that is capable of meeting the challenges of the Anthropocene

A Thousand Futures: A Search for Scenario Space

Although both science fiction and professional foresight work both are engaged with what the future might look like, they operate mostly independently from one another. A literature search reveals the characteristics of written science fiction and foresight, seeking ways these practices could be successfully combined. Concepts are explored through the example of agriculture and agricultural technology as well as technologies for constructing narrative semantics. Approaches are outlined for generating foresight scenarios and for creating a semantic tagging system for generating a semantic space for scenarios using intellectual technologies from science fiction

An Approach for the Development of Complex Systems Archetypes

The purpose of this research is to explore the principles and concepts of systems theory in pursuit of a collection of complex systems archetypes that can be used for system exploration and diagnostics. The study begins with an examination of the archetypes and classification systems that already exist in the domain of systems theory. This review includes a critique of their purpose, structure, and general applicability. The research then develops and employs a new approach to grounded theory, using a visual coding model to explore the origins, relationships, and meanings of the principles of systems theory. The goal of the visual grounded theory approach is to identity underlying, recurrent imagery in the systems literature that will form the basis for the archetypes. Using coding models derived from the literature, the study then examines the interrelationships between system principles. These relationships are used to clearly define the environment where the archetypes are found in terms of energy, entropy and time. A collection of complex system archetypes is then derived which are firmly rooted in the literature, as well as being demonstrably manifested in the real world. The definitions of the emerging complex systems archetypes are consistent with the environmental definition and are governed by the system’s behavior related to energy collection, entropy displacement, and the pursuit of viability. Once the archetypes have been identified, this study examines the similarities and differences that distinguish them. The individual system principles that either define or differentiate each of the archetypes are described, and real-world manifestations of the archetypes are discussed. The collection of archetypes is then examined as a continuum, where they are related to one another in terms of energy use, entropy accumulation, self-modification and external-modification. To illustrate the applicability of these archetypes, a case study is undertaken which examines a medium-sized organization with multiple departments in an industrial setting. The individual departments are discussed in detail, and their archetypical forms are identified and described. Finally, the study examines future applications for the archetypes and other research that might enhance their utility for complex systems governance

The emergence of language as a function of brain-hemispheric feedback

This text posits the emergence of language as a function of brain-hemispheric feedback, where “emergence” refers to the generation of complex patterns from relatively simple interactions, “language” refers to an abstraction-based and representational-recombinatorial-recursive mapping-signaling system, “function” refers to an input-output relationship described by fractal algorithms, “brain-hemispheric” refers to complementary (approach-abstraction / avoidance-gestalt) cognitive modules, and “feedback” refers to self-regulation driven by neural inhibition and recruitment. The origin of language marks the dawn of human self-awareness and culture, and is thus a matter of fundamental and cross-disciplinary interest. This text is a synthesized research essay that constructs its argument by drawing diverse scholarly voices into a critical, cross-disciplinary intertextual narrative. While it does not report any original empirical findings, it harnesses those made by others to offer a tentative, partial solution—one that can later be altered and expanded—to a problem that has occupied thinkers for centuries. The research contained within this text is preceded by an introductory Section 1 that contextualizes the problem of the origin of language. Section 2 details the potential of evolutionary theory for addressing the problem, and the reasons for the century-long failure of linguistics to take advantage of that potential. Section 3 reviews the history of the discovery of brain lateralization, as well as its behavioral and structural characteristics. Section 4 discusses evolutionary evidence and mechanisms in terms of increasing adaptive complexity and intelligence, in general, and tool use, in particular. Section 5 combines chaos theory, brain science, and semiotics to propose that, after the neotenic acquisition of contingency-based abstraction, language emerged as a feedback interaction between the left-hemisphere abstract word and the right-hemisphere gestalt image. I conclude that the model proposed here might be a valuable tool for understanding, organizing, and relating data and ideas concerning human evolution, language, culture, and psychology. I recommend, of course, that I present this text to the scholarly community for criticism, and that I continue to gather and collate relevant data and ideas, in order to prepare its next iteration

The major and the minor on political aesthetics in the control society

This thesis examines the crucial diagnostic and productive roles that the concepts of minor and major practice, two interrelated modes of cultural production set out by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in Kafka: toward a Minor Literature (1975), have to play in the present era of ubiquitous digital technology and informatics that Deleuze himself has influentially described as the control society. In first establishing the conditions of majority and majority, Deleuze and Guattari’s historical focus in Kafka is the early twentieth century period of Franz Kafka’s writing, a period which, for Deleuze, marks the start of a transition between two types of society – the disciplinary society described by Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish and the control society that is set apart by its distribution, indifferent technical processes and the replacement of the individual with the dividual in social and political thought. Because of their unique conceptual location, at the transition between societies, the concepts of majority and minority present an essential framework for understanding the impact of ubiquitous digital technology and informatics on cultural production in the twentieth century and beyond. In order to determine the conditions of contemporary major and minor practice across the transition from disciplinary to control societies, the thesis is comprised of two interconnecting threads corresponding to majority and minority respectively. Drawing on the theoretical work of Deleuze and Guattari, Friedrich Kittler and Fredric Jameson alongside pioneering figures in the historical development of computation and informatics (Alan Turing, Claude Shannon and others), material observation on the technical function of digital machines, and the close examination of emblematic cultural forms, I determine the specific conditions of majority that emerge through the development of the contemporary control era. Alongside this delineation of the conditions of majority I examine the prospective tactics, corresponding to the characteristics of minority set out by Deleuze and Guattari in Kafka, which emerge as a contemporary counter-practice within the control-era. This is carried out through the close observation of key examples of cultural production in the fields of literature, film, video, television and the videogame that manifest prospective tactics for a control-era minor practice within the overarching technical characteristics of the control-era major. Through an examination of these interrelated threads the thesis presents a framework for both addressing the significant political and cultural changes that ubiquitous computation effects in constituting the contemporary control society and determining the ways in which these changes can be addressed and countered through cultural production

Machine-assisted mixed methods: augmenting humanities and social sciences with artificial intelligence

The increasing capacities of large language models (LLMs) present an unprecedented opportunity to scale up data analytics in the humanities and social sciences, augmenting and automating qualitative analytic tasks previously typically allocated to human labor. This contribution proposes a systematic mixed methods framework to harness qualitative analytic expertise, machine scalability, and rigorous quantification, with attention to transparency and replicability. 16 machine-assisted case studies are showcased as proof of concept. Tasks include linguistic and discourse analysis, lexical semantic change detection, interview analysis, historical event cause inference and text mining, detection of political stance, text and idea reuse, genre composition in literature and film; social network inference, automated lexicography, missing metadata augmentation, and multimodal visual cultural analytics. In contrast to the focus on English in the emerging LLM applicability literature, many examples here deal with scenarios involving smaller languages and historical texts prone to digitization distortions. In all but the most difficult tasks requiring expert knowledge, generative LLMs can demonstrably serve as viable research instruments. LLM (and human) annotations may contain errors and variation, but the agreement rate can and should be accounted for in subsequent statistical modeling; a bootstrapping approach is discussed. The replications among the case studies illustrate how tasks previously requiring potentially months of team effort and complex computational pipelines, can now be accomplished by an LLM-assisted scholar in a fraction of the time. Importantly, this approach is not intended to replace, but to augment researcher knowledge and skills. With these opportunities in sight, qualitative expertise and the ability to pose insightful questions have arguably never been more critical

Non-determinism in the narrative structure of video games

PhD ThesisAt the present time, computer games represent a finite interactive system. Even in their more experimental forms, the number of possible interactions between player and NPCs (non-player characters) and among NPCs and the game world has a finite number and is led by a deterministic system in which events can therefore be predicted. This implies that the story itself, seen as the series of events that will unfold during gameplay, is a closed system that can be predicted a priori. This study looks beyond this limitation, and identifies the elements needed for the emergence of a non-finite, emergent narrative structure. Two major contributions are offered through this research. The first contribution comes in the form of a clear categorization of the narrative structures embracing all video game production since the inception of the medium. In order to look for ways to generate a non-deterministic narrative in games, it is necessary to first gain a clear understanding of the current narrative structures implemented and how their impact on users’ experiencing of the story. While many studies have observed the storytelling aspect, no attempt has been made to systematically distinguish among the different ways designers decide how stories are told in games. The second contribution is guided by the following research question: Is it possible to incorporate non-determinism into the narrative structure of computer games? The hypothesis offered is that non-determinism can be incorporated by means of nonlinear dynamical systems in general and Cellular Automata in particular