The Metaphysics of Information: the Power and the Glory of Machinehood

Res-Publica : Revista Lusófona de Ciência Política e Relações InternacionaisNão há disciplina em qualquer ramo da ciência, seja esta natural, social, humana, descritiva, experimental ou teórica, qualitativa ou quantitativa, que não tenha sido afectada a vários níveis da instrumentalidade, conceptualização, construção de modelos, escolha de metáforas heurísticas ou ontológicas, e sentidO da investigação, em alguns casos muito profunda e decisivamente, pela influência crescente da constelação informacional computacional. A investigação baseada em simulações por computador é uma “terceira espécie de ciência”, que se soma aos tipos teórico e físico-experimental de trabalho científico. A ciber-ciência é um lugar natural para simular ciência, ou meta-ciberciência, mas todo o conhecimento científico cai no domínio da meta-ciberciência ou da filosofia da ciência computacional. A meta-ciência simula a ciência(o estudo computacional da produção do conhecimento científico); a ciber-ciência é por definição simulatória; a ciber-ciência simula a Natureza; a Natureza, segundo alguns físicos, é ela mesma uma simulação. Receber a categoria da informação nas ciências da vida e nas ciências humanas e sociais, da maneira específica como tem vindo a ocorrer, traz um considerável lastro metafísico: os humanos como máquinas, ultrapassáveis por máquinas inteligentes ou “espirituais”. A informação emerge como a alavanca de Arquimedes para as nossas intervenções n o domínio da vida e do espírito, de máquinas informacionais naturais, com evidentes implicações para a ciência política.There is no discipline in any branch of science, natural science, social science, human science, descriptive, experimental or theoretical, qualitative or quantitative, that has not been affected at various levels of instrumentality, conceptualization, model-building, in the choice of heuristic or ontological metaphors, and the direction of research, in some cases quite profoundly and decisively, by the ascent of the informational computational constellation. Computer simulation research is a “third kind of science”, in addition to theoretical and physical-experimental types of scientific work . Cyber-science is a natural topic for simulating science, or meta-cyberscience, but all scientific knowledge falls within the domain of meta-cyberscience or the computational philosophy of science. Metascience simulates science (the computational study of scientific knowledge production); cyber-science is by definition simulational; cyberscience simulates nature; nature, according to some physicists, is itself a simulation. To receive the category of information in the life-sciences, the human and social sciences, in the specific way that has been taking place, carries quite a metaphysical baggage: humans as machines, surpassable by intelligent or “spiritual” machines. Information emerges as the Archimedean lever for our interventions in the realm of life and mind, of natural information machines, with evident implications for political science

또 다른 인간의 동반자: 동물의 권리를 로봇에게도?

학위논문 (석사) -- 서울대학교 대학원 : 국제대학원 국제학과(국제협력전공), 2020. 8. Jiyeoun Song.This paper considers the academic debate on and different responses to the emergence of lifelike social robots as others from humans in society. The philosophical issues surrounding legal rights that are raised by this regulatory issue will be analyzed by deploying a 2x2 matrix based on two modalities: can and should social robots have rights? On these two questions, this thesis examines how the legal treatment of animals, the original others, has evolved historically, and how the animal-robot analogy, which encourages an understanding of social robots as analogues of animals, has risen to prominence as a line of argument to push for the extension of legal rights to protect social robots akin to animals. Using the same modalities, other positions on robot rights will be examined to suggest that the debate on robot rights shows parallels to the debate on animal rights and can be modeled along similar lines. In doing so, this thesis provides an overview of the current rights debate and suggests that the robot rights debate may follow a similar trajectory to the animal rights debate in the future.I. INTRODUCTION 1 II. LITERATURE REVIEW 8 II.1. ANALYSIS 9 II.1.1. On Social Robots 9 II.1.2. On Anthropomorphism 12 II.1.3. On the Comparison between Animal and Robot Rights 14 II.2. LIMITATIONS 16 III. METHODOLOGY 18 IV. DEFINING SOCIAL ROBOTS: WHY DO WE TALK ABOUT THEM? 22 IV.1. BACKGROUND 22 IV.2. EXAMPLES OF SOCIAL ROBOTS 25 IV.3. ANTHROPOMORPHISM AS INTENTIONAL DESIGN CHOICE 27 V. THE ANIMAL RIGHTS DEBATE 34 V.1. BACKGROUND 34 V.2. DEBATE ANALYSIS: FROM INDIFFERENCE TO ADVOCACY 35 V.3. CONTEMPORARY PERSPECTIVE 44 VI. THE ROBOT RIGHTS DEBATE 49 VI.1. BACKGROUND 49 VI.2. DEBATE ANALYSIS: FROM TOOLS TO SOCIAL ENTITIES 51 VI.2.1. Q1: Since social robots cannot have rights, they should not have rights. 52 VI.2.2. Q2: Even though social robots cannot have rights, they should have rights. 55 VI.2.3. Q3: Even though social robots can have rights, they should not have rights. 59 VI.2.4. Q4: Since social robots can have rights, they should have rights. 62 VI.2.5. The Dynamics of The Discourse 64 VI.3. THE ANIMAL-ROBOT ANALOGY 73 VI.4. CONTEMPORARY PERSPECTIVE 86 VII. CONCLUSION 89 VIII. REFERENCES 92Maste

Apperceptive patterning: Artefaction, extensional beliefs and cognitive scaffolding

In “Psychopower and Ordinary Madness” my ambition, as it relates to Bernard Stiegler’s recent literature, was twofold: 1) critiquing Stiegler’s work on exosomatization and artefactual posthumanism—or, more specifically, nonhumanism—to problematize approaches to media archaeology that rely upon technical exteriorization; 2) challenging how Stiegler engages with Giuseppe Longo and Francis Bailly’s conception of negative entropy. These efforts were directed by a prevalent techno-cultural qualifier: the rise of Synthetic Intelligence (including neural nets, deep learning, predictive processing and Bayesian models of cognition). This paper continues this project but first directs a critical analytic lens at the Derridean practice of the ontologization of grammatization from which Stiegler emerges while also distinguishing how metalanguages operate in relation to object-oriented environmental interaction by way of inferentialism. Stalking continental (Kapp, Simondon, Leroi-Gourhan, etc.) and analytic traditions (e.g., Carnap, Chalmers, Clark, Sutton, Novaes, etc.), we move from artefacts to AI and Predictive Processing so as to link theories related to technicity with philosophy of mind. Simultaneously drawing forth Robert Brandom’s conceptualization of the roles that commitments play in retrospectively reconstructing the social experiences that lead to our endorsement(s) of norms, we compliment this account with Reza Negarestani’s deprivatized account of intelligence while analyzing the equipollent role between language and media (both digital and analog)

FOR WORKSHOP: THE INCOMPUTABLE,

of virtual machinery with “physically indefinable ” functions What’s Meta-Morphogenesis? A partial answer: Evolution, individual development, learning, and cultural change producing new mechanisms of evolution, individual development, learning, and cultural chang

From Biological to Synthetic Neurorobotics Approaches to Understanding the Structure Essential to Consciousness (Part 2)

We have been left with a big challenge, to articulate consciousness and also to prove it in an artificial agent against a biological standard. After introducing Boltuc’s h-consciousness in the last paper, we briefly reviewed some salient neurology in order to sketch less of a standard than a series of targets for artificial consciousness, “most-consciousness” and “myth-consciousness.” With these targets on the horizon, we began reviewing the research program pursued by Jun Tani and colleagues in the isolation of the formal dynamics essential to either. In this paper, we describe in detail Tani’s research program, in order to make the clearest case for artificial consciousness in these systems. In the next paper, the third in the series, we will return to Boltuc’s naturalistic non-reductionism in light of the neurorobotics models introduced (alongside some others), and evaluate them more completely

A COGNITIVE APPROACH TO BENACERRAF’S DILEMMA

One of the important challenges in the philosophy of mathematics is to account for the se­ mantics of sentences that express mathematical propositions while simultaneously explaining our access to their contents. This is Benacerraf’s Dilemma. In this dissertation, I argue that cognitive science furnishes new tools by means of which we can make progress on this problem. The foundation of the solution, I argue, must be an ontologically realist, albeit non-platonist, conception of mathematical reality. The semantic portion of the problem can be addressed by accepting a Chomskyan conception of natural languages and a matching internalist, mentalist and nativist view of semantics. A helpful perspective on the epistemic aspect of the puzzle can be gained by translating Kurt Godel’s neo-Kantian conception of the nature of mathematics and its objects into modern, cognitive term

Categorical Ontology of Complex Systems, Meta-Systems and Theory of Levels: The Emergence of Life, Human Consciousness and Society

Single cell interactomics in simpler organisms, as well as somatic cell interactomics in multicellular organisms, involve biomolecular interactions in complex signalling pathways that were recently represented in modular terms by quantum automata with ‘reversible behavior’ representing normal cell cycling and division. Other implications of such quantum automata, modular modeling of signaling pathways and cell differentiation during development are in the fields of neural plasticity and brain development leading to quantum-weave dynamic patterns and specific molecular processes underlying extensive memory, learning, anticipation mechanisms and the emergence of human consciousness during the early brain development in children. Cell interactomics is here represented for the first time as a mixture of ‘classical’ states that determine molecular dynamics subject to Boltzmann statistics and ‘steady-state’, metabolic (multi-stable) manifolds, together with ‘configuration’ spaces of metastable quantum states emerging from complex quantum dynamics of interacting networks of biomolecules, such as proteins and nucleic acids that are now collectively defined as quantum interactomics. On the other hand, the time dependent evolution over several generations of cancer cells --that are generally known to undergo frequent and extensive genetic mutations and, indeed, suffer genomic transformations at the chromosome level (such as extensive chromosomal aberrations found in many colon cancers)-- cannot be correctly represented in the ‘standard’ terms of quantum automaton modules, as the normal somatic cells can. This significant difference at the cancer cell genomic level is therefore reflected in major changes in cancer cell interactomics often from one cancer cell ‘cycle’ to the next, and thus it requires substantial changes in the modeling strategies, mathematical tools and experimental designs aimed at understanding cancer mechanisms. Novel solutions to this important problem in carcinogenesis are proposed and experimental validation procedures are suggested. From a medical research and clinical standpoint, this approach has important consequences for addressing and preventing the development of cancer resistance to medical therapy in ongoing clinical trials involving stage III cancer patients, as well as improving the designs of future clinical trials for cancer treatments.\ud \ud \ud KEYWORDS: Emergence of Life and Human Consciousness;\ud Proteomics; Artificial Intelligence; Complex Systems Dynamics; Quantum Automata models and Quantum Interactomics; quantum-weave dynamic patterns underlying human consciousness; specific molecular processes underlying extensive memory, learning, anticipation mechanisms and human consciousness; emergence of human consciousness during the early brain development in children; Cancer cell ‘cycling’; interacting networks of proteins and nucleic acids; genetic mutations and chromosomal aberrations in cancers, such as colon cancer; development of cancer resistance to therapy; ongoing clinical trials involving stage III cancer patients’ possible improvements of the designs for future clinical trials and cancer treatments. \ud \u