Abstract
Within the philosophy of biology, recently promising steps have been made towards a biologically grounded concept of agency. Agency is described as bio-agency: the intrinsically normative adaptive behaviour of human and non-human organisms, arising from their biological autonomy. My paper assesses the bio-agency approach by examining criticism recently directed by its proponents against the project of embodied robotics. Defenders of the bio-agency approach have claimed that embodied robots do not, and for fundamental reasons cannot, qualify as artificial agents because they do not fully realise biological autonomy. More particularly, it has been claimed that embodied robots fail to be agents because agency essentially requires metabolism. I shall argue that this criticism, while being valuable in bringing to the fore important differences between bio-agents and existing embodied robots, nevertheless is too strong. It relies on inferences from agency-as-we-know-it to agency-as-it-could-be which are justified neither empirically nor conceptually.
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Notes
- 1.
Barandiaran and Moreno (2008) and Moreno and Mossio (2015) distinguish between adaptive agency (manifest in the generic ability of organisms to adjust interactive processes to changes in the environment) and behavioural agency (adaptive agency involving motility). As a form of minimal (behavioural) agency they discuss the chemotaxis of bacteria, such as E. coli. What exact distinctions within the spectrum are drawn depends on the criteria deployed, which is a subject of debate and varies among authors. See also the following discussion in this chapter.
- 2.
It also offers a new and attractive stance on the problem of free will, by demystifying free will as a means of the survival and well-being of organisms (Skewes and Hooker 2009; Brembs 2011; Dupré 2013; Meincke in preparation b).
- 3.
Even though it is widely assumed that today’s philosophy of mind has moved beyond classical Cartesian dualism, when it comes to agency, the debate tends to follow the old tracks by either treating human agency as a unique exception to an otherwise presumably completely mechanistic universe or rather explaining it in mechanistic terms and thereby effectively eliminating it, see Meincke (in preparation b) and Spann (2014).
- 4.
See Shapiro (2010) for a recent comprehensive discussion of the field of embodied cognition.
- 5.
“I believe that mobility, acute vision and the ability to carry out survivalrelated tasks in a dynamic environment provide a necessary basis for the development of true intelligence” (Brooks 1991a, 141).
- 6.
“This part of intelligence” – “the ability to move around in a dynamic environment, sensing the surroundings to a degree sufficient to achieve the necessary maintenance of life and reproduction” – “is where evolution has concentrated its time – and it is much harder” (Brooks 1991a, 141). Compare also Varela’s twofold motto of the “disenchantment of the abstract” and the “re-enchantment of the concrete” (Varela 1995).
- 7.
‘Autopoietic enactivism’ was the historically first version of ‘enactivism’ but nowadays competes with ‘sensorimotor enactivism’ and ‘radical enactivism’; see de Jesus (2016) for a recent critical discussion.
- 8.
The criticism of embodied robotics’ failure to artificially realise agency is part of a more general criticism according to which embodied robotics fails to artificially realise cognition (Barandiaran and Moreno 2006; Ziemke 2016). In this paper I shall focus on the agency-part of the systems biological criticism of embodied robotics. A careful and instructive discussion of both aspects of this criticism is offered by Froese and Ziemke (2009).
- 9.
Compare Chris Langton’s well-known distinction between “life-as-we-know-it” and “life-as-it- could-be”, the latter of which he claimed to be the object of study of artificial life (so-called ALife) (Langton 1989, 1).
- 10.
Similarly di Paolo argues that the robot does not “care[] about what it is doing” (di Paolo 2003, 10; italics in the original) and, hence, fails to be an “intentional agent” (di Paolo 2003, 11). Its behaviour, despite being “embedded in a sensorimotor loop of situated interaction[,] […] can be fully described simply as movement as opposed to action” (di Paolo 2003, 9).
- 11.
The embodied robot’s dependence for functioning on energy supply is no valid objection to this, given that functioning and existing in the case of the embodied robot, unlike in the case of the organism, do not coincide and given, furthermore, that dependence on energy supply does not qualify as adaptive interaction in the (active) sense of behaviour.
- 12.
I shall come back to some problematic aspects of this assumption in the conclusions of this chapter.
- 13.
This actually resonates with the continuing popularity of mechanist approaches to biology, including the common understanding of organisms as (very complicated) machines (on the latter, see Nicholson 2013).
- 14.
‘Wet ALife’ is different from both software-based ‘soft ALife’ and hardware-based ‘hard ALife’ (robotics).
- 15.
“[T[he phenomena they [autopoietic unities] generate in functioning as autopoietic unities depend on their organization and the way this organization comes about, and not on the physical nature of their components” (Maturana and Varela 1987, 51). “Life is the manifestation of a certain kind of (relational) model. A particular material system is living if it realizes this model” (Rosen 1991, 254; italics in the original).
- 16.
Barandiaran and Moreno acknowledge this via more recent paper by stressing that “interactive dynamics are constitutive of the [autonomous] system and not something to be added, a posteriori, in the form of structural coupling” as which it appears, according to the authors, in Varela’s concept of autopoiesis (Barandiaran and Moreno 2008, 327(f.)). See also Moreno and Mossio (2015, 5), footnote 7. For a discussion of the concept of (organisational) closure with respect to the role of interactive dynamics and to its ontological implications, see Meincke (in preparation a).
- 17.
‘Soft robotics’ explicitly names biology as the key source of inspiration (Trivedi et al. 2008; Kim et al. 2013). It is therefore also called ‘organic robotics’, see https://orl.mae.cornell.edu/index.html
- 18.
In fact the only chemical substances that actually are regarded as ‘inert’ are noble gases, also called ‘inert gases’.
- 19.
See this section on page 20.
- 20.
This is evident, for instance, from recent insights in the formation of cell membranes. Lipid bi-layers build up only in an aqueous environment, which has led chemists “to regard the ‘active volume’ of molecules such as proteins as extending beyond their formal boundary (the van der Waals surface, say), by virtue of the way they shape and manipulate the shell of water that surrounds them. Moreover, the structure and dynamics of this hydration shell seem to feed back onto those aspects of the proteins themselves so that biological function depends on a delicate interplay between what we have previously regarded as distinct entities: the molecule and its environment” (Ball 2008, 75). Bagatolli et al. (2010, 381) likewise stress that “[c]ooperative phenomena are the reason in the first place for the formation of an aqueous supra-molecular aggregate like a bimolecular lipid-bilayer membrane.” I am grateful to my colleague Stephan Güttinger for bringing this literature and the related questions to my attention.
- 21.
This is meant to be a critique of a purely functionalist or formalist approach to life: “If it were the case that the relations among components arise from their material properties, the complex organisation of living systems could not be fully understood except by recourse to the properties of living matter” (Moreno et al. 1994, 407). “If we suppose that some of the essential relations of the logic of the living are necessarily implicit, then only those material components that can bear such relations can constitute life” (Moreno et al. 1994, 408f.).
- 22.
For an affirmative adoption of the idea of ‘molecular vitalism’ see Kirschner et al. (2000).
- 23.
This is clearly stated in an earlier paper co-authored by Moreno and Kepa Ruiz-Mirazo: basic autonomy is defined as “the capacity of a system to manage the flow of matter and energy through it so that it can, at the same time, regulate, modify, and control (i) internal self-constructive processes and (ii) processes of exchange with the environment”, and the “interdependence […] between the constructive and interactive aspects of the phenomenon is precisely the cornerstone for the constitution of any real metabolic organization” (Ruiz-Mirazo and Moreno 2004, 240; italics in the original).
- 24.
The passage reads in full: “So far, the research program in robotics and artificial intelligence has focused on autonomy at the sensorimotor level, without basic autonomy. Instead of trying to reconstruct the conditions for triggering a process of spontaneous organization starting from chemical components, computers and other complex technical tools are the building blocks” (Moreno and Etxeberria 2005, 173). In the aforementioned co-authored paper we are similarly warned not to “forget[] about the material mechanisms that are crucial to trigger off a biological type of phenomenon/behavior”, followed by the demand that “research should be directed to implement those – or very similar – interactive processes with molecular components and tools that are alternative to (and, perhaps, less complex than) the biochemical machinery present in known living beings” (Ruiz-Mirazo and Moreno 2004, 238).
- 25.
Boden goes so far as to deny that so-called ‘embodied’ robots are in fact embodied: “[B]eing embedded does not necessitate being (truly) embodied. […] a body is not a mere lump of matter, but the physical aspect of a living system, created and maintained as a functional unity by an autonomous metabolism. If this is right, then these robots do not have bodies” (Boden 1999, 239). The very same claim “that artificially created adaptive agents are not fully embodied” we find in Barandiaran and Moreno (2008, 339), based on the diagnosis that embodied robotics focuses on ‘sensorimotor embodiment’ only at the expense of ‘biological embodiment’ (Barandiaran and Moreno 2008, 338ff.; see also Ziemke 2016) or ‘organismic embodiment’, including ‘emotional embodiment’ (Barandiaran and Moreno 2006, 180).
- 26.
On the second half see the next section of this chapter.
- 27.
I thus agree with Langton’s claim on which he founded the research agenda of Artificial Life, that life is “a property of the organization of matter, rather than a property of the matter which is so organized” (Langton 1989, 2).
- 28.
- 29.
I am grateful to the anonymous reviewer of this chapter for drawing my attention to another example of intrinsically normative agency that is not grounded in metabolism, namely that of collective and institutional agents like companies and nations or states. However, apart from the fact that it is contentious whether there really are such collective and institutional agents in a non-metaphorical sense, there is also room for the speculation that those agents’ actions actually serve the purpose of self-maintenance, i.e., are ontologically grounded in some sort of precariousness. I therefore take the concept of divine agency to be the more instructive one for my argument.
- 30.
The guy’s generic wish to please his mum allows for attributing his observable behavior to him as his actions, but it does not suffice to explain why he performs specific actions at specific times in specific situations; instead, these specific actions are fully explained only by taking into account the specific wishes of the guy’s mum. The imagined case, hence, is not a case of intrinsic normativity, despite the fact that, insofar as the guy in question qualifies as an agent (and, i.e., insofar as his body movements qualify as intentional (see the following considerations)), his mum’s goals could be seen as the guy’s ‘own’ goals in a derivative sense.
- 31.
Exactly this is contentious in the case of embodied robots because it is contentious whether embodied (or any other robots) actually possess intentionality, alongside with other mental states. The following considerations, rather than presupposing that embodied robots are subjects of knowledge and wishes, have to be understood as thought experiments, designed to bring out a deficiency in the concept of intrinsic normativity as tied by Moreno and Etxeberria to the concept of agency.
- 32.
‘Hypothetical’, as it an open question whether there are brainwashed robots; to claim that there are would be to concede that these robots are agents. This in contrast to an objection against the idea that robots are autonomous as imagined by Haselager: “[A] philosopher might argue that robots are in a situation comparable to that of people who are brainwashed and that therefore robots are not even close to being candidates for any serious degree of autonomy. Robots are not autonomous because they themselves don’t choose their own goals and they do not even know that it is us that set their goals for them” (Haselager 2005, 520). Haselager subsequently rightly points out that the issue of choosing one’s own goals has to be distinguished from the “issue of intrinsic ownership” (2005, 522; italics in the original); however, like Moreno, Etxeberria and colleagues he thinks that intrinsic ownership is strictly tied to the maintenance of homoeostasis: “Fundamentally, what makes my goals mine, is that I myself am at stake in relation to my success or failure in achieving them” (2005, 523).
- 33.
See also Moreno and Mossio (2015, 92) for an explicit exclusion of “rational and conscious intentionality” from their definition of agency.
- 34.
See Schlosser (2015) for a summary of the state-of-the-art of the philosophical debate on the matters of representationalism and intentionality with respect to agency.
- 35.
See also Barandiaran and Moreno (2008, 330): “We use the term ‘agents’ for those systems that interact with their environments, so that the changes produced between the system and its environment contribute to its self-maintenance.”
- 36.
- 37.
It is not even clear that it enters into the concept of bio-agency as such, given that the bio-agency on earth possibly could also have developed differently and that there might be extraterrestrial forms of bio-agency with entirely different evolutionary histories.
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Acknowledgments
This paper was funded by the European Research Council, grant agreement number 324186 (“A Process Ontology for Contemporary Biology”). Previous versions of this paper were presented in September 2015 at the Internal “Physics and Philosophy” workshop of the Research Project “Agency and (Quantum) Mechanics” (funded by the Templeton World Charity Foundation) in Reichenau at Lake Constance in Germany, in March 2016 at the 2016 Conference of the German Society of the Philosophy of Science (GWP) in Düsseldorf in Germany and in June 2016 at the 2016 meeting of Philosophy of Biology in the UK (PBUK) in Bristol in the United Kingdom. I am grateful to the organisers and audiences, especially Hans F. Briegel, Thomas Müller and Josef Quitterer, for helpful discussions and suggestions. I am also grateful to John Dupré and an anonymous referee for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.
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Meincke, A.S. (2018). Bio-Agency and the Possibility of Artificial Agents. In: Christian, A., Hommen, D., Retzlaff, N., Schurz, G. (eds) Philosophy of Science. European Studies in Philosophy of Science, vol 9. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72577-2_5
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