[FRIAM] What is an agent [was: Philosophy and Science}
Frank Wimberly
wimberly3 at gmail.com
Sat Jul 15 15:44:59 EDT 2023
Eric,
I hadn't seen your mail until David quoted it.
What you say reminds me of a project I worked on for a couple of years in
the Robotics Institute at Carnegie. Under the global title of Factory of
the Future I coordinated a project to automate and optimize a fluorescent
lamp factory. There were a sequence of processes that a lamp (bulb) went
through from sand to melted glass to cutting into five foot tubes. Then
white "paint" flowed through the tube after which it was baked. To make a
long story short, electrodes were added to the ends, the tube was cured and
tested by running a current through it. Our approach was to saturate the
sequence of machines with sensors including visual, chemical, viscosity,
electrical, etc. One goal was to reduce "shrinkage" or rejection of
bulbs. The existing rate was about 10% as I recall. It was known that
there were interactions of the elements of the sequence of processes.
Therefore we had hopes that we could have the processors, actuators, and
sensors take advantage of an understanding of those interactions.
The Dutch firm Phillips bought all of Westinghouse's lamp manufacturing
operations and they cancelled our work during the very early design stage.
Disclaimers: my memory is less than perfect about events from the early
eighties.
Frank
---
Frank C. Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
Santa Fe, NM 87505
505 670-9918
Santa Fe, NM
On Sat, Jul 15, 2023, 12:52 PM Prof David West <profwest at fastmail.fm> wrote:
> If you have not read it — I highly recommend The Tree of Knowledge by
> Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela. Self organization from simple to
> complex via a single mechanism.
>
> On Fri, Jul 14, 2023, at 7:30 PM, David Eric Smith wrote:
>
> I have had a version of this problem for several years, because I want to
> start with small-molecule chemistry on early planets, and eventually talk
> about biospheres full of evolving actors. I have wanted to have a rough
> category system for how many qualitative kinds of transitions I should need
> to account for, and to explain within ordinary materials by the action of
> random processes. Just because I am not a(n analytical) philosopher, I
> have no ambition to shoehorn the universe into a system or suppose that my
> categories subsume all questions even I might someday care about, or that
> they are sure to have unambiguous boundaries. I just want a kind of sketch
> that seems like it will carry some weight. For now.
>
> Autonomy: One early division to me would be between matter that responds
> “passively” to its environment moment-by-moment, and as a result takes on
> an internal state that is an effectively given function of the surroundings
> at the time, versus one that has some protection for some internal
> variables from the constant outside harassment, and a source of autonomous
> dynamics for those internal variables. One could bring in words like
> “energy”, but I would rather not for a variety of reasons. Often, though,
> when others do, I will understand why and be willing to go along with the
> choice.
>
> Control: The category of things with autonomous internal degrees of
> freedom that have some immunity from the slings and arrows of the immediate
> surroundings is extremely broad. Within it there could be very many
> different kinds of organizations that, if we lack a better word, we might
> call “architectures”. One family of architectures that I recognize is that
> of control systems. Major components include whatever is controlled (in
> chem-eng used to be called “the plant”), a “model” in the sense of Conant
> and Ashby, “sensors” to respond to the plant and signal the model, and
> “effectors” to get an output from the model and somehow influence the
> plant. One could ask when the organization of some material system is well
> described by this control-loop architecture. I think the control-loop
> architecture entails some degree of autonomy, else the whole system is
> adequately described by passive response to the environment. But probably
> a sophist could find counterexamples.
>
> One could ask whether having the control-loop architecture counts as
> having agency. By discriminating among states of the world according to
> their relation to states indexed in the model, and then acting on the world
> (even by so little as acting on one’s own position in the world), one could
> be said to express some sort of “goal”, and in that sense to have “had”
> such a goal.
>
> Is that enough for agency? Maybe. Or maybe not.
>
> Reflection: The controller’s model could, in the previous level, be
> anything. So again very broad. Presumably a subset of control systems
> have models that incorporate some notion of a a “self”, so they could not
> only specifically model the conditions of the world, but also the condition
> of the self and of the self relative to the world, and then all of these
> variables become eligible targets for control actions.
>
> Conterfactuals and simulation: autonomy need not be limited to the
> receiving of signals and responding to them with control commands. It
> could include producing values for counterfactual states within the
> controller’s model, of playing out representations of the consequences of
> control signals (another level of reflection, this time on the dynamics of
> the command loop), and then choosing according to a meta-criterion. Here I
> have in mind something like the simulation that goes on in the tactical
> look-ahead in combinatorial games. We now have a couple levels of
> representation between wherever the criteria are hard-coded and wherever
> the control signal (the “choice”) acts. They are all still control loops,
> but it seems likely that control loops can have different enough major
> categories of design that there is a place for names for such intermediate
> layers of abstraction to distinguish some kinds as having them, from others
> that don’t.
>
> How much internal reflective representation does one want to require to
> satisfy one or another concept of agency? None of them, in particular? A
> particular subset?
>
> For different purposes I can see arguing for different answers, and I am
> not sure how many categories it will be broadly useful to recognize.
>
> Eric
>
>
> On Jul 15, 2023, at 8:28 AM, Russ Abbott <russ.abbott at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I'm not sure what "closure to efficient cause" means. I considered using
> as an example an outdoor light that charges itself (and stays off) during
> the day and goes on at night. In what important way is that different from
> a flashlight? They both have energy storage systems (batteries). Does it
> really matter that the garden light "recharges itself" rather than relying
> on a more direct outside force to change its batteries? And they both have
> on-off switches. The flashlight's is more conventional whereas the garden
> light's is a light sensor. Does that really matter? They are both tripped
> by outside forces.
>
> BTW, congratulations on your phrase *epistemological trespassing*!
>
> -- Russ
>
> On Fri, Jul 14, 2023 at 1:47 PM glen <gepropella at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I'm still attracted to Rosen's closure to efficient cause. Your flashlight
> example is classified as non-agent (or non-living ... tomayto tomahto)
> because the efficient cause is open. Now, attach sensor and effector to the
> flashlight so that it can flick it*self* on when it gets dark and off when
> it gets bright, then that (partially) closes it. Maybe we merely kicked the
> can down the road a bit. But then we can talk about decoupling and
> hierarchies of scale. From the armchair, there is no such thing as a (pure)
> agent just like there is no such thing as free will. But for practical
> purposes, you can draw the boundary somewhere and call it a day.
>
> On 7/14/23 12:01, Russ Abbott wrote:
> > I was recently wondering about the informal distinction we make between
> things that are agents and things that aren't.
> >
> > For example, I would consider most living things to be agents. I would
> also consider many computer programs when in operation as agents. The most
> obvious examples (for me) are programs that play games like chess.
> >
> > I would not consider a rock an agent -- mainly because it doesn't do
> anything, especially on its own. But a boulder crashnng down a hill and
> destroying something at the bottom is reasonably called "an agent of
> destruction." Perhaps this is just playing with words: "agent" can have
> multiple meanings. A writer's agent represents the writer in
> negotiations with publishers. Perhaps that's just another meaning.
> >
> > My tentative definition is that an agent must have access to energy, and
> it must use that energy to interact with the world. It must also have some
> internal logic that determines how it interacts with the world. This final
> condition rules out boulders rolling down a hill.
> >
> > But I doubt that I would call a flashlight (with an on-off switch) an
> agent even though it satisfies my definition. Does this suggest that an
> agent must manifest a certain minimal level of complexity in its
> interactions? If so, I don't have a suggestion about what that minimal
> level of complexity might be.
> >
> > I'm writing all this because in my search for a characterization of
> agents I looked at the article on Agency <
> https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2019/entries/agency/> in the
> /Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy./ I found that article almost a parody
> of the "armchair philosopher." Here are the first few sentences from the
> article overview.
> >
> > In very general terms, an agent is a being with the capacity to act,
> and ‘agency’ denotes the exercise or manifestation of this capacity. The
> philosophy of action provides us with a standard conception and a standard
> theory of action. The former construes action in terms of intentionality,
> the latter explains the intentionality of action in terms of causation by
> the agent’s mental states and events.
> >
> > _
> > _
> > That seems to me to raise more questions than it answers. At the same
> time, it seems to limit the notion of /agent/ to things that can have
> intentions and mental models. (To be fair, the article does consider the
> possibility that there can be agents without these properties. But those
> discussions seem relatively tangential.)
> >
> > Apologies for going on so long. Thanks, Frank, for opening this can of
> worms. And thanks to the others who replied so far.
> >
> > __-- Russ Abbott
> > Professor Emeritus, Computer Science
> > California State University, Los Angeles
> >
> >
> >
> > On Fri, Jul 14, 2023 at 8:33 AM Frank Wimberly <wimberly3 at gmail.com
> <mailto:wimberly3 at gmail.com>> wrote:
> >
> > Joe Ramsey, who took over my job.in
> <https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=http%3a%2f%2fjob.in&c=E,1,ZIav2qEBYSxLGqvQX4FG0oAWBKSkcEB9rSfJj-XKpOD9tHOyXksq2ZtBESmsULaSupUC7vk04BazrglG4D-b7AP92McmfQb5aRH7KAKg&typo=1>
> <http://job.in
> <https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=http%3a%2f%2fjob.in&c=E,1,w5L6ESqFsG_k1WjqiiZd-LW-FNq3wwseGECZMZpifzAWAZM_vc-u9gIIo8UiMeTxSEok1oAHiNRRSoxGNvuXGZ1IeBm5Vevc1u6F8lxy4zQ,&typo=1>>
> the Philosophy Department at Carnegie Mellon, posted the following on
> Facebook:
> >
> > I like Neil DeGrasse Tyson a lot, but I saw him give a spirited
> defense of science in which he oddly gave no credit to philosophers at all.
> His straw man philosopher is a dedicated *armchair* philosopher who spins
> theories without paying attention to scientific practice and contributes
> nothing to scientific understanding. He misses that scientists themselves
> are constantly raising obviously philosophical questions and are often
> ill-equipped to think about them clearly. What is the correct
> interpretation of quantum mechanics? What is the right way to think about
> reductionism? Is reductionism the right way to think about science? What is
> the nature of consciousness? Can you explain consciousness in terms of
> neuroscience? Are biological kinds real? What does it even mean to be real?
> Or is realism a red herring; should we be pragmatists instead? Scientists
> raise all kinds of philosophical questions and have ill-informed opinions
> about them. But *philosophers* try to answer
> > them, and scientists do pay attention to the controversies. At least
> the smart ones do.
> >
>
> --
> ꙮ Mɥǝu ǝlǝdɥɐuʇs ɟᴉƃɥʇ' ʇɥǝ ƃɹɐss snɟɟǝɹs˙ ꙮ
>
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