Refactoring Agency

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Why Vitalism Won’t Die; or Refactoring Agency Mike Travers [email protected] http:// omniorthogonal.blogspot.c om Refactor Camp 201

description

Prepared for but not delivered at Ribbinfarm Refactor Camp 2012 -- dredged up some old ideas from dissertation that refuse to die.

Transcript of Refactoring Agency

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Why Vitalism Won’t Die; orRefactoring Agency

Mike [email protected]

http://omniorthogonal.blogspot.com

Refactor Camp 2012

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Trained in the mechanist/reductionist tradition

• The world consists of physical objects and forces

• This is theoretically enough to explain everything

• Success story: molecular biology• Not-so-successful story: AI

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Vitalism / Animism

• Mechanism violates people’s commonsense intuitions (eg free will)

• Not going to get into this tired debate

• Old, more or less discredited theories of “life force”

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My nagging itch

• Despite its unscientificness,• There’s something in vitalist and

similar theories that we need to pay attention to.

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How to be a vitalist at MIT

• I cheated -- with the epistemological / metaphorical turn

• How do people understand the world, and computers, and systems?

• Through a wide variety of metaphors including – Animate Metaphors– Agents– Programming by creating networks of

agents

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Distributed Agency

• Minsky’s Society of Mind• EO Wilson’s Ant Colonies• Hewitt’s Actor Model of Computation• Agre & Chapman’s Situated Action

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Vivarium Project(Apple and MIT)

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Other neo-vitalists

• Christopher Alexanderfrom Pattern Language to a radical metaphysics of the living

• Bruno Latour and followersA democracy of objects

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Refactoring Agency

‘In the case of ... potato chips, it seems appropriate to regard the hand’s actions as only quasi- or semi-intentional, for the chips themselves seem to call forth, or provoke and stoke, the manual labor…To eat chips is to enter into an assemblage in which the I is not necessarily the most decisive operator” -- Bennett, Vibrant Matter

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Refactoring the grammar of agency

I ate the potato chips.

The potato chips ??? me.eta

Agent

Patient

I ate the potato chips.

The potato chips were eaten by me.

The potato chips compelled me to eat them.

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So what?

• We are increasingly embedded in complex networks of sociotechnology

• How do we make sense of it?• We need to be able to analyze systems

through simultaneous application of a variety of cognitive systems:– Mechanical– Tool– Agency

• Software has goals of its own, whether we acknowledge it or not

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