Interaction and Experience in Enactive Intelligence and Humanoid Robotics

We overview how sensorimotor experience can be operationalized for interaction scenarios in which humanoid robots acquire skills and linguistic behaviours via enacting a “form-of-life”’ in interaction games (following Wittgenstein) with humans. The enactive paradigm is introduced which provides a powerful framework for the construction of complex adaptive systems, based on interaction, habit, and experience. Enactive cognitive architectures (following insights of Varela, Thompson and Rosch) that we have developed support social learning and robot ontogeny by harnessing information-theoretic methods and raw uninterpreted sensorimotor experience to scaffold the acquisition of behaviours. The success criterion here is validation by the robot engaging in ongoing human-robot interaction with naive participants who, over the course of iterated interactions, shape the robot’s behavioural and linguistic development. Engagement in such interaction exhibiting aspects of purposeful, habitual recurring structure evidences the developed capability of the humanoid to enact language and interaction games as a successful participant

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

Robot life: simulation and participation in the study of evolution and social behavior.

This paper explores the case of using robots to simulate evolution, in particular the case of Hamilton's Law. The uses of robots raises several questions that this paper seeks to address. The first concerns the role of the robots in biological research: do they simulate something (life, evolution, sociality) or do they participate in something? The second question concerns the physicality of the robots: what difference does embodiment make to the role of the robot in these experiments. Thirdly, how do life, embodiment and social behavior relate in contemporary biology and why is it possible for robots to illuminate this relation? These questions are provoked by a strange similarity that has not been noted before: between the problem of simulation in philosophy of science, and Deleuze's reading of Plato on the relationship of ideas, copies and simulacra

Philosophy of Blockchain Technology - Ontologies

About the necessity and usefulness of developing a philosophy specific to the blockchain technology, emphasizing on the ontological aspects. After an Introduction that highlights the main philosophical directions for this emerging technology, in Blockchain Technology I explain the way the blockchain works, discussing ontological development directions of this technology in Designing and Modeling. The next section is dedicated to the main application of blockchain technology, Bitcoin, with the social implications of this cryptocurrency. There follows a section of Philosophy in which I identify the blockchain technology with the concept of heterotopia developed by Michel Foucault and I interpret it in the light of the notational technology developed by Nelson Goodman as a notational system. In the Ontology section, I present two developmental paths that I consider important: Narrative Ontology, based on the idea of order and structure of history transmitted through Paul Ricoeur's narrative history, and the Enterprise Ontology system based on concepts and models of an enterprise, specific to the semantic web, and which I consider to be the most well developed and which will probably become the formal ontological system, at least in terms of the economic and legal aspects of blockchain technology. In Conclusions I am talking about the future directions of developing the blockchain technology philosophy in general as an explanatory and robust theory from a phenomenologically consistent point of view, which allows testability and ontologies in particular, arguing for the need of a global adoption of an ontological system for develop cross-cutting solutions and to make this technology profitable. CONTENTS: Abstract Introducere Tehnologia blockchain - Proiectare - Modele Bitcoin Filosofia Ontologii - Ontologii narative - Ontologii de intreprindere Concluzii Note Bibliografie DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.24510.3360

Heterogeneous Proxytypes Extended: Integrating Theory-like Representations and Mechanisms with Prototypes and Exemplars

The paper introduces an extension of the proposal according to which conceptual representations in cognitive agents should be intended as heterogeneous proxytypes. The main contribution of this paper is in that it details how to reconcile, under a heterogeneous representational perspective, different theories of typicality about conceptual representation and reasoning. In particular, it provides a novel theoretical hypothesis - as well as a novel categorization algorithm called DELTA - showing how to integrate the representational and reasoning assumptions of the theory-theory of concepts with the those ascribed to the prototype and exemplars-based theories

Interactivist approach to representation in epigenetic agents

Interactivism is a vast and rather ambitious philosophical and theoretical system originally developed by Mark Bickhard, which covers plethora of aspects related to mind and person. Within interactivism, an agent is regarded as an action system: an autonomous, self-organizing, self-maintaining entity, which can exercise actions and sense their effects in the environment it inhabits. In this paper, we will argue that it is especially suited for treatment of the problem of representation in epigenetic agents. More precisely, we will elaborate on process-based ontology for representations, and will sketch a way of discussing about architectures for epigenetic agents in a general manner

Observing Environments

> Context • Society is faced with “wicked” problems of environmental sustainability, which are inherently multiperspectival, and there is a need for explicitly constructivist and perspectivist theories to address them. > Problem • However, different constructivist theories construe the environment in different ways. The aim of this paper is to clarify the conceptions of environment in constructivist approaches, and thereby to assist the sciences of complex systems and complex environmental problems. > Method • We describe the terms used for “the environment” in von Uexküll, Maturana & Varela, and Luhmann, and analyse how their conceptions of environment are connected to differences of perspective and observation. > Results • We show the need to distinguish between inside and outside perspectives on the environment, and identify two very different and complementary logics of observation, the logic of distinction and the logic of representation, in the three constructivist theories. > Implications • Luhmann’s theory of social systems can be a helpful perspective on the wicked environmental problems of society if we consider carefully the theory’s own blind spots: that it confines itself to systems of communication, and that it is based fully on the conception of observation as indication by means of distinction

Designing companions, designing tools : social robots, developers, and the elderly in Japan

Ce mémoire de maîtrise trace la généalogie d’un robot social, de sa conception à ses différentes utilisations et la manière dont les utilisateurs interagissent avec. A partir d’un terrain de six mois dans une start-up et deux maisons de retraite au Japon, j’interroge la création de Pepper, un robot social crée par la compagnie japonais SoftBank. Pepper a été créé de façon à être humanoïde mais pas trop, ainsi que perçu comme adorable et charmant. Par la suite, je décris comment Pepper et d’autres robots sociaux sont utilisés, à la fois par des développeurs, mais aussi par des personnes âgées, et je souligne une tension existante entre leur utilisation comme des compagnons et des outils. En me basant sur l’anthropologie ontologique et la phénoménologie, j’examine la construction du robot comme une entité avec laquelle il est possible d’interagir, notamment à cause de sa conception en tant qu’acteur social, ontologiquement ambigu, et qui peut exprimer de l’affect. En m’intéressant aux interactions multimodales, et en particulier le toucher, je classifie trois fonctions remplies par l’interaction : découverte, contrôle, et l’expression de l’affect. Par la suite, je questionne ces actes d’agir vers et s’ils peuvent être compris comme une interaction, puisqu’ils n’impliquent pas que le robot soit engagé. J’argumente qu’une interaction est un échange de sens entre des agents engagés et incarnés. Il y a effectivement parfois un échange de sens entre le robot et son utilisateur, et le robot est un artefact incarné. Cependant, seule l’impression d’intersubjectivité est nécessaire à l’interaction, plutôt que sa réelle présence.This master’s thesis traces a genealogy of a social robot through its conception to its various uses and the ways users interact with it. Drawing on six months of fieldwork in a start-up and two nursing homes in Japan, I first investigate the genesis of a social robot created by SoftBank, a Japanese multinational telecommunications company. This social robot is quite humanlike, made to be cute and have an adorable personality. While developers constitute one of the user populations, this robot, along with several others, is also used by elderly residents in nursing homes. By analyzing the uses of these populations, I underline the tension between the social robot as a companion and a tool. Drawing on ontological anthropology and phenomenology I look at how the robot is constructed as an entity that can be interacted with, through its conception as an ontologically ambiguous, social actor, that can express affect. Looking at multimodal interaction, and especially touch, I then classify three functions they fulfill: discovery, control, and the expression of affect, before questioning whether this acting towards the robot that does not imply acting from the robot, can be considered a form of interaction. I argue that interaction is the exchange of meaning between embodied, engaged participants. Meaning can be exchanged between robots and humans and the robot can be seen as embodied, but only the appearance of intersubjectivity is enough, rather than its actual presence