“The study demonstrates that this species of crow possess highly flexible abilities that allow them to solve complex problems involving anticipation of the properties of objects they have never seen.”
Month: October 2018
On the environmental politics of anticipation, by C. Groves (2016)
Abstract
“Anticipation may be seen as structured by images and representations, an approach that has informed recent work in science and technology studies on the sociology of expectations. But anticipation, as a capacity or characteristic, is not solely manifested in the form of representations, even where such representations of the ‘not yet’ are performative in nature. It also comprises material capacities, technological, biophysical and affective in nature. The politics of anticipation is shaped by how these symbolic and material capacities, and the forms of agency they make possible, are distributed. As anticipation is an environmentally distributed capacity, it is suggested that the politics of anticipation is also an environmental politics. A conceptual framework for analysing anticipation as comprised of environmental capabilities is introduced, and fleshed out using a case study of energy infrastructure planning from the UK. Key elements of this framework include the concepts of anticipatory assemblages and future horizons or ‘styles’ of anticipation. Working through the case study as an empirical example of a conflict concerning the politics of anticipation and of ‘environments’, it is demonstrated how the relationships between styles of anticipation are materially constitutive of such conflicts.”
Die Aufklärung in the Age of Philosophical Engineering, by B. Stiegler
“The public access to the web is twenty years old. Through it, digital society has developed throughout the entire world. But has this society become mündig, that is, mature, in the sense that Immanuel Kant used this term to define the age of Enlightenment as an exit from minority, from Unmündigkeit ? Certainly not: contemporary society seems on the contrary to have become profoundly regressive. Mental disorders as well as environmental, economic, political and military problems constantly proliferate and increase, while the spread of traceability seems to be used primarily to increase the heteronomy of individuals through behaviour-profiling rather than their autonomy.
If digitalisation clearly holds promise in many ways, and if (and I am convinced of this) socialising digitalisation in a reasoned and resolute way is the first condition for the world to escape from the impasse in which the obsolete consumerist industrial model finds itself, then, this socialisation requires the creation and negotiation of a new legal framework which itself presupposes the formation of new ‘Enlightenments’.
I am thus delighted that Neelie Kroes has called for a new Enlightenment philosophy for the digital age, just as Tim Berners-Lee and Harry Halpin have argued, in dialogue with the position of Vint Cerf, who developed the TCP-IP protocol, that internet access must become a universal right. But here, what exactly does access mean? Or again: what type of access should we claim will bring light or enlightenment, rather than darkness or shadow? Under what conditions will such access be beneficial for individuals and the societies in which they live?”
What Would a World Without You Look Like?
Let’s consider an ant.
The ant is a starting point. A living point. Yet moved first and foremost by our mind as an object of thought.
An ant can be described as a point.
Immediately is supposes other ants.
The ant is an element in a set. It is a multiplicity, a singular plural.
We consider the ant as a generic, a universal. We do not expect the ant to be different from other ants.
This is because we are not specialists: we are not myrmecologists.
An ant for us is a point in a dynamic system. The point is moving in relation to other points on a surface or a sphere.
We see the ant in space, and it is partly a geometrical space. It is both abstract and concrete.
An ant is a symbol for an intelligent emergent system, in which the parts are close to non-existent, but the sum of parts is capable of structural constructions and organized behaviour.
The ant is the member of a group, yet it is seen and considered in isolation. The group is potential, virtual when we consider the ant as ant.
The ant is floating in an abstract place yet to be determined by a narrative and a logos. The ant has, for the moment, no agency.
It may represent the idea of a minimal living point. Or the minimal unit in a biosemiotic text.
The ant has almost no psychological density, yet it is not a pure dot in a set of data. It is more like the point of an exclamation mark. If you take out the point it is no longer an exclamation point, it is an observation without observer.
As an ant that is considered and spoken about, it becomes special, but this is because the other ants have not appeared yet in a non-virtual fashion. The other ants are a probable, possible, background.
For the moment, the ant is a bridge between an abstract point and the realm of life. As such, it is a missing link. The ant is an and. It is a double reality, or triple, since as a geometrical point it also contains the mathematical idea of infinite.
The ant is perhaps both a sign and the negation of an alphabet, because it signifies sameness. But it also suggests difference, the possibility of a difference.
The ant is neither anonymous, neither individuated.
Between the mental representation of an ant and a natural ant, there is a difference in movement and anticipation. But we are searching for another kind of difference, the difference that transforms a monotonous system into a crealectical system. Can we say that a monotonous system is a system of sameness, and a crealectical system a system of differences?
A crealectical system is more than a dialectical system, and more than an analytical system. How?
What would be an analytical system of ants? A system in which sameness is also difference, but a functional difference. Such is the system of science; it studies the ants as a species. Inside this species functional distinctions are operated. A soldier ant is distinguished from a worker ant, and other more sophisticated distinctions that constitute the science of myrmecology.
A dialectical system of ants is a system in which, at a given moment, an ant is not an ant: a dead ant, a larva, or the queen ant are both ants and not ants, for different reasons. The dialectical system is the same as the analytical one, but we look at it from the perspective of becoming, change, growth, and limit states within a given species.
What is then the difference between a crealectical description and a dialectical description? Crealectics looks at the ant in relation to the Creal, that is in relation to possibilities, virtualities, everything that is not the ant and yet that is not another real thing.
Crealectics does not look at the ant in relation to the coleopteran, this is the domain of analytics.
Crealectics does not look at the various aspects and moments of being an ant, including the moments were the ant appears to be like the negation of itself, as a larva or a queen. This is the domain of dialectics.
Crealectics looks for example at the ant in relation to a world in which the ant is but a possibility. The first exercise of a crealectics of the ant is to look at a reality in which ants do exist, and to ask: what would be a world without ants?
The first question of the crealectics of humanity asks: what would be a world without humans, a world in which humans are a virtuality, a potential? We are thinking about them both as what they are not and as a possibility, but not as a hard reality. Such kind of questioning generates hypotheses, narratives, realizations about the place of such and such reality in our network of realities.
What would a world without money look like? To think about it is to engage in the first steps of a crealectics of money.
What would a world without numbers be like? To begin to imagine it and attempt to answer is the beginning of the crealectics of numbers.
Crealectics starts with a form of thought experiment. It is a philosophical practice that considers entities in relationship with the totality of all there is. It encourages us to think holistically. It also encourages us to feel the deeper dimensions of a reality by imagining its absence.
Now a first question towards the crealectics of yourself: what would a world without you be like?
FROM REACTIVE TO ANTICIPATORY COGNITIVE EMBODIED SYSTEMS
Papers from the 2005 AAAI Fall Symposium
Cristiano Castelfranchi, Christian Balkenius, Martin Butz, and Andrew Ortony, Program Cochairs
Technical Report FS-05-05. Published by The AAAI Press, Menlo Park, California
This technical report is also available in book and CD format.
Please Note: Abstracts are linked to individual titles, and will appear in a separate browser window. Full-text versions of the papers are linked to the abstract text. Access to full text may be restricted to AAAI members. PDF file sizes may be large!
Contents
Preface / vii
Cristiano Castelfranchi, Christian Balkenius, Martin V. Butz, Andrew Ortony, Deb Roy, and Luca Tummolini
Anticipation and Representation / 1
Mark H. Bickhard
The Multiple Roles of Anticipation in Developmental Robotics / 8
Douglas S. Blank, Joshua M. Lewis, and James B. Marshall
From the Theory of Mind to the Construction of Social Reality / 15
Guido Boella and Leendert van der Torre
Automatic Synthesis of Multiple Internal Models through Active Exploration / 22
Josh Bongard and Hod Lipson
Mind as an Anticipatory Device: For a Theory of Expectations / 32
Cristiano Castelfranchi
Inference-driven Mechanisms of Attentional Orienting / 43
Paolo Cherubini, Michele Burigo, and Emanuela Bricolo
Towards an Anticipatory Agent to Help Pilots / 51
Frédéric Dehais, Alexandre Goudou, Charles Lesire, and Catherine Tessier
Anticipatory and Improvisational Robot via Recollection and Exploitation of Episodic Memories / 57
Yoichiro Endo
A COSPAL Subsystem: Solving a Shape-Sorter Puzzle / 65
Michael Felsberg, Per-Erik Forssén, Anders Moe, and Gösta Granlund
Discovering a Language for Human Activity / 70
Gutemberg Guerra-Filho, Cornelia Fermuller, and Yiannis Aloimonos
The Role of Internal Models and Prediction in Catching Balls / 78
Mary Hayhoe, Neil Mennie, Brian Sullivan, and Keith Gorgos
Towards an Adaptive Hierarchical Anticipatory Behavioral Control System / 83
Oliver Herbort, Martin V. Butz, and Joachim Hoffmann
Fear: Appraisal of Danger as Anticipation of Harm / 91
Carlos Herrera and Dave C. Moffat
A Habit System for an Interactive Robot / 99
Kai-yuh Hsiao and Deb Roy
Situated Action Generator Post-hoc Reconstruction of Plans / 107
Serin Lee, Takashi Kubota, and Ichiro Nakatani
Modeling Expectations in Cognitive Agents / 114
Emiliano Lorini and Rino Falcone
Understanding Activity: Learning the Language of Action / 121
Randal Nelson and Yiannis Aloimonos
Reinforcement Learning of Hierarchical Skills on the Sony Aibo Robot / 135
Vishal Soni and Satinder Singh
Routine Based Models of Anticipation in Natural Behaviors / 141
Weilie Yi and Dana H. Ballard
