An Evolutionary Model of Bounded Rationality and Intelligence

Background: Most economic theories are based on the premise that individuals maximize their own self-interest and correctly incorporate the structure of their environment into all decisions, thanks to human intelligence. The influence of this paradigm goes far beyond academia–it underlies current macroeconomic and monetary policies, and is also an integral part of existing financial regulations. However, there is mounting empirical and experimental evidence, including the recent financial crisis, suggesting that humans do not always behave rationally, but often make seemingly random and suboptimal decisions. Methods and Findings: Here we propose to reconcile these contradictory perspectives by developing a simple binary-choice model that takes evolutionary consequences of decisions into account as well as the role of intelligence, which we define as any ability of an individual to increase its genetic success. If no intelligence is present, our model produces results consistent with prior literature and shows that risks that are independent across individuals in a generation generally lead to risk-neutral behaviors, but that risks that are correlated across a generation can lead to behaviors such as risk aversion, loss aversion, probability matching, and randomization. When intelligence is present the nature of risk also matters, and we show that even when risks are independent, either risk-neutral behavior or probability matching will occur depending upon the cost of intelligence in terms of reproductive success. In the case of correlated risks, we derive an implicit formula that shows how intelligence can emerge via selection, why it may be bounded, and how such bounds typically imply the coexistence of multiple levels and types of intelligence as a reflection of varying environmental conditions. Conclusions: Rational economic behavior in which individuals maximize their own self interest is only one of many possible types of behavior that arise from natural selection. The key to understanding which types of behavior are more likely to survive is how behavior affects reproductive success in a given population’s environment. From this perspective, intelligence is naturally defined as behavior that increases the probability of reproductive success, and bounds on rationality are determined by physiological and environmental constraints.Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Laboratory for Financial Engineerin

Acknowledging Ralph Pred

At the time of his death in May of 2012, Ralph Pred was working on a critical social theory inspired by process philosophy. In the book manuscript he left unfinished, Syntax and Solidarity, he develops a “radically empirical” sociology that enables him to identify and critically evaluate the different forms that social solidarity has taken in the history of civilization. The purpose of this paper is to draw attention to the importance of his unfinished project. The executors of Pred’s literary estate would be happy to see his project, with due acknowledgment, publicized and continued. Keywords: Active Voice Bias, Concrescence, Middle Voice, Sociogeny, Solidarity, Substanc

The Heart Wants What It Wants: Effects of Desirability and Body Part Salience on Distance Perceptions (Campbell)

Previous research has shown that desirability influences perceived distance to an object, such that desirable objects are perceived as closer to the viewer than undesirable objects (Balcetis & Dunning, 2010). Research regarding conceptual metaphors has suggested that making the head or heart salient by placing the index finger there produces characteristics commonly associated with these body parts (i.e., emotionality for the heart and rationality for the head) (Fetterman & Robinson, 2013). The current studies examined the effects of desirability and head or heart salience on distance perception. Participants had their attention drawn to their head or their heart by touching it with their index finger while throwing a beanbag towards a desirable or a neutral object. In Experiment 2, a verbal estimate of distance was also measured. We predicted that, due to the popular association of the heart with desire, there would be a significant interaction between desirability of an object and hand placement. Specifically, there would be no effect of hand placement when the object was neutral, but heart-pointers would perceive the desirable object as closer than head-pointers. Results from both studies failed to support the predictions, as neither hand placement nor object desirability affected distance perceptions. Limitations and suggestions for further research are discussed

An Adversarial Interpretation of Information-Theoretic Bounded Rationality

Recently, there has been a growing interest in modeling planning with information constraints. Accordingly, an agent maximizes a regularized expected utility known as the free energy, where the regularizer is given by the information divergence from a prior to a posterior policy. While this approach can be justified in various ways, including from statistical mechanics and information theory, it is still unclear how it relates to decision-making against adversarial environments. This connection has previously been suggested in work relating the free energy to risk-sensitive control and to extensive form games. Here, we show that a single-agent free energy optimization is equivalent to a game between the agent and an imaginary adversary. The adversary can, by paying an exponential penalty, generate costs that diminish the decision maker's payoffs. It turns out that the optimal strategy of the adversary consists in choosing costs so as to render the decision maker indifferent among its choices, which is a definining property of a Nash equilibrium, thus tightening the connection between free energy optimization and game theory.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figures. Proceedings of AAAI-1

The SGIA and the Common Growing Language

Human or virtual agents are presented in our lives daily. They serve our purposes and represent us in different many situations. Nowadays the number of virtual agents is increasing daily because they are cheaper, faster and more accurate than human agents. Our aim in this article is to define a new type of intelligent agent called SGIA – Self Growing Intelligent Agent and a new defining language for it. The SGIA agent is an intelligent agent with all the common agents’ characteristics and with other special one: that to learn and grow by itself in knowledge and size.Software Agent, Knowledge Management, Education Process, Language Development

The Heart Wants What It Wants: Effects of Desirability and Body Part Salience on Distance Perceptions (Heath)

Previous research has shown that the desirability of an object influences perceived distance from the object, such that desirable objects are perceived as closer than objects that are not desirable (Balcetis & Dunning, 2010). It has also been suggested that metaphors reflect how our knowledge is represented; so, for example, making the head or heart more salient produces characteristics commonly associated with those body parts (i.e., emotionality for the heart, rationality for the head) (Fetterman & Robinson, 2013). The current study examined the effects of head or heart salience and object desirability on distance perception. We hypothesized that, since common idioms relate the heart to desirability, salience of the heart would cause desirable objects to be perceived as closer than would salience of the head, but there would be no difference between the head and heart conditions when the object was neutral. To test this hypothesis, we conducted two experiments in which participants had their attention drawn to their head or their heart by placing their hand there while making an action-based (haptic) measure of distance to an object. After finding no significant results in Experiment 1, in Experiment 2 a verbal measure of distance perception was added and participants completed a two-minute filler task while touching the assigned body part to strengthen the body part salience effect before estimating distance. Besides replicating Proffitt’s 2006 finding that haptic estimates of environmental features are more accurate than verbal estimates, we found no significant results in Experiment 2

An information-theoretic on-line update principle for perception-action coupling

Inspired by findings of sensorimotor coupling in humans and animals, there has recently been a growing interest in the interaction between action and perception in robotic systems [Bogh et al., 2016]. Here we consider perception and action as two serial information channels with limited information-processing capacity. We follow [Genewein et al., 2015] and formulate a constrained optimization problem that maximizes utility under limited information-processing capacity in the two channels. As a solution we obtain an optimal perceptual channel and an optimal action channel that are coupled such that perceptual information is optimized with respect to downstream processing in the action module. The main novelty of this study is that we propose an online optimization procedure to find bounded-optimal perception and action channels in parameterized serial perception-action systems. In particular, we implement the perceptual channel as a multi-layer neural network and the action channel as a multinomial distribution. We illustrate our method in a NAO robot simulator with a simplified cup lifting task.Comment: 8 pages, 2017 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS

The Heart Wants What It Wants: Effects of Desirability and Body Part Salience on Distance Perceptions (DeWitt)

Previous research has shown that the desirability of an object influences perceived distance from the object, such that desirable objects are perceived as closer than objects that are not desirable (Balcetis & Dunning, 2010). It has also been suggested that metaphors reflect how our knowledge is represented; so, for example, making the head or heart more salient produces characteristics commonly associated with those body parts (i.e., emotionality for the heart and rationality for the head) (Fetterman & Robinson, 2013). The current study examined the effects of head or heart salience and desirability on distance perception. We hypothesized that since common idioms relate the heart to desirability, salience of the heart would cause desirable objects to be perceived as closer than would salience of the head, but there would be no such difference between the head and heart conditions when the object was neutral. To test this hypothesis, participants had their attention drawn to either their head or their heart by placing their index finger there while throwing a beanbag towards a desirable or a neutral object. In Experiment 2, a verbal distance estimate was also included. We predicted that there would be a significant interaction between desirability of object and hand placement. Specifically, we expected that there would be no effect of hand placement when the object was neutral but that heart-pointers would perceive a desirable object as closer than the head-pointers. Results from both experiments failed to support our hypothesis

The Four-Color Theorem Solved, Again: Extending the Extended Mind to the Philosophy of Mathematics

In 1977 when Appel, Haken and Koch used a computer to mathematically solve the century old four-color-problem philosopher Thomas Tymoczko thought that the epistemic justification in mathematics had been changed. Essentially, Tymoczko, and others, argue we can now have mathematical epistemic justification through a posteriori means. This has obvious implication in philosophy of mathematics and epistemology because this would be the first case where mathematics isn’t justified through a priori means of investigation. However, I ultimately disagree with Tymoczko. I argue that computer-aided-proofs still warrant an a priori means of justification. In order to show this, I refer to advances in philosophy of mind, mainly, the extended mind thesis. ). I will argue that our mind has evolved to enter into symbiotic relationships with non-organic entities in order to offload certain internal capacities. I believe that this is what constitutes humans amazing gift of rationality and intelligence. Thus, when we use a computer-aided-proof to solve unsurveyable proofs, we are really extending our minds into these cognitive tools and extending our method of proof checking to be more efficient and quicker. Thus, the a priori is saved because the computer is just a part of the causal cognitive loop that constitutes our mind