Abstract
It is clear that people can interact with programs and robots in ways that appear to be, and can seem to participants to be, social. Asking the question of whether or not such interactions could be genuinely social requires examining the nature of sociality and further examining what requirements are involved for the participants in such interactions to co-constitutively engage in genuine social realities – to constitute genuine social agents. I will attempt to address both issues. A further question is “Why ask the question?” Isn’t “sociality” like a program in that simulating the running of a program is the running of a program – so sufficiently simulated sociality is genuine sociality? What more could be relevant and why? As I will explain, there are at least two sorts of answers to the question of why the difference between genuine performance and simulation matters: (1) to better understand the ontology of sociality and thereby its potentialities and ways in which “merely” simulated sociality might fall short, especially of the developmental and historistic potentialities of sociality, and (2) to better understand the issues of ethics surrounding interactions among and between humans and robots.
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Notes
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If it is argued that it is not correct, then the burden is on whoever offers such a claim to make good on what Hume’s argument could possibly have been (Schurz, 1997). The abbreviatory definition interpretation fits what Hume knew about definition, and does support his “argument” as valid.
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Note that, insofar as such models were to succeed in modeling normative function, they would violate Hume’s argument. I have argued that Hume’s argument is unsound, but the point that either something is wrong with Hume’s argument or else these models cannot be correct is generally overlooked or ignored.
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For discussion of these resources in more detail, including resources for representations of abstractions such as the number three, see, e.g., Bickhard (2009b).
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It should be noted that this model of representation is a model of functional emergence, not of consciousness or conscious representation. Neither the bacterium nor the frog, for example, have reflective consciousness. The overall model, however, does have some strong implications regarding consciousness, and entails: (1) that consciousness is not the unitary phenomenon that is commonly assumed, (2) that some properties of consciousness are in fact emergent in fairly simple organisms, and (3) that much of the mystery of how to naturalize consciousness evaporates when it is realized that mystery is a product of underlying false assumptions being made in the literature (Bickhard, 2005).
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Processes of selecting among trajectories of indicated interaction possibilities constitute the domain of motivation.
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These anticipatory webs have some similarities with Gibson’s notion of affordance, though Gibson’s affordances cannot have the kind of structure and organization mentioned above. For discussion of Gibson, see Bickhard & Richie (1983).
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This is one of multiple places in which Fodor acknowledges that there are serious problems with his model. See, for another example, Fodor (1990).
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That this problem is equivalent to the classic radical skeptical argument provides some sense of its difficulty. The radical skeptical argument points out that, in order to check my representation, I would have to somehow step outside of myself and gain independent epistemic access to what I am trying to represent – become my own external observer – to be able to compare my representation with what is being represented. I cannot step outside of myself, so I cannot check my own representations. One common intuition is that I can check consequences of my representations: walk up closer to the “cow” and discover that it is in fact a horse. I think there is a germ of a correct approach here (anticipation), but, as stated, it simply checks one representation with another, and gives no reason to accept that either one is true or false. Such considerations can lead to pure coherence models. For further discussion, see Bickhard (in preparation).
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Social realities range from momentary common understandings among participants to a conversation, to two oncoming pedestrians passing each other on the right, to a check out clerk relationship to a customer, to institutions of government, to language, to friendships, and so on. There are many kinds of such realities, and, generally, many instances of such kinds.
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Another criticism of Lewis’s model is that it depends on a rather rigid model of rationality, and of unrealistic assumptions about how rational thought works (Gilbert, 1989). I will not present the interactive model of rationality here, but suffice it to say that, whether or not those criticisms are valid against Lewis, this model does not involve such models of rationality (see Bickhard, 2002, 2008).
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This kind of possibility for the establishment of convention is of central importance for Lewis (1969), who wants to characterize language as conventional: if the only way to establish a convention is via negotiation, then what is the language in which the conventions that constitute language are negotiated?
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Information semantics is the currently dominant framework within psychology, cognitive science, and philosophy. It constitutes a fundamental equivocation between technical information – a condition of being correlated with – and semantic, or representational, information. If X is correlated with Y, then knowing X can permit inferring something about Y – but only if X and Y and the correlation are already known and represented. If all of these are known, then X can be used as an encoding of (properties of) Y, but, as usual, encodings require that all of the relevant representations be already available. Correlational information cannot, in itself, constitute representation. This point is relatively well known, though often ignored, but what else is required has no resolution. The problem of organism-detectable error, discussed above, is one of several reasons why it cannot be resolved. See Bickhard (1980, 1993, 2009b, 2014) for further discussion.
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With no stake in their existence in the world, they cannot have a stake in their existence in the world as social agents.
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For further discussion of this issue regarding artificial agents, see Bickhard (2009a).
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Acknowledgements
This is an expanded version of Bickhard, M. H. (2014). Robot Sociality: Genuine or Simulation? In J. Seibt, R. Hakli, M. Nørskov (Eds.) Sociable Robots and the Future of Social Relations. Series: Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications. (81–86). Amsterdam: IOS Press.
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Bickhard, M.H. (2017). Robot Sociality: Genuine or Simulation?. In: Hakli, R., Seibt, J. (eds) Sociality and Normativity for Robots. Studies in the Philosophy of Sociality. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-53133-5_3
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