The Strategy of the Genes

A study of Kant’s Critique of Judgment (1790). Our topics will include Kant’s motivations for a critique of judgment; principles of ‘reflective’ and ‘determining’ judgment; theory of aesthetic judgment, including epistemology and metaphysics of the beautiful and sublime; theory of genius; teleology in the critical philosophy—including harmony of the cognitive faculties, organisms, scope and limits of mechanical explanation, physicoand ethico-theology; the relation of ethics, aesthetics and teleology. A basic familiarity with Kant’s theoretical philosophy is presupposed.

Critique of Judgment

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International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics

We present a project to design interactive devices (smart displays, robots, etc.) capable of self-motivated learning through non-goal-directed interactive behaviors (e.g., curious, emotional, playful behaviors). We use and improve algorithms inspired by constructivist epistemology that we have designed previously. These algorithms incrementally learn sequential hierarchies of control loops in a bottom-up and open-ended fashion, and continuously reuse the learned higher-level control loops to generate increasingly complex behaviors that exhibit self-motivation. This project contributes to research in self-supervised learning because the learning is driven by low-level preferences that under-determine the device’s future behaviors, leaving room for individuation, which, in turn, opens the way to autonomy in learning.

Generating Natural Behaviors using Constructivist Algorithms.

This presentation discusses a notion encountered across disciplines, and in different facets of human activity: autonomous activity. We engage it in an interdisciplinary way. We start by considering the reactions and behaviors of biological entities to biotechnological intervention. An attempt is made to characterize the degree of freedom of embryos & clones, which show openness to different outcomes when the epigenetic developmental landscape is factored in. We then consider the claim made in programming and artificial intelligence that automata could show self-directed behavior as to the determination of their step-wise decisions on courses of action. This question remains largely open and calls for some important qualifications. We try to make sense of the presence of claims of freedom in agency, first in common sense, then by ascribing developmental plasticity in biology and biotechnology, and in the mapping of programmed systems in the presence of environmental cues and self-referenced circuits as well as environmental coupling. This is the occasion to recall attempts at working out a logical and methodological approach to the openness of concepts that are still to be found, and assess whether they can operate the structuring intelligibility of a yet undeveloped or underdeveloped field of study, where a “bisociation" and a unification of knowledge might be possible.

Béatrice de Montera

Papers

Acquisition of Autonomy in Biotechnology and Artificial Intelligence