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In behavior-based agents, underintegration manifests itself on the behavioral
level. These agents generally have a set of black-boxed behaviors. Following
the action-selection paradigm, agents continuously redecide which behavior is
most appropriate. As a consequence, they tend to jump around from behavior
to behavior according to which one is currently the best (a similar observation
is made by (Steels 1994)).
What this means is that the overall character of behavior of the agent
ends up being deficient; generally speaking, its behavior consists of short dal-
liances in individual, shallow high-level behaviors with abrupt changes be-
tween behaviors. It is this overall defective nature of agent behavior, caused by
under-integration of behavioral units, that I term
schizophrenia
and propose to
address here.
Schizophrenia is a loaded term. I use it here to draw attention to important
connections between current approaches to agent-building and the experience
of being schizophrenic in institutional psychiatry. In next two sections, I draw
out those connections, then show how an alternative approach to psychiatric
schizophrenia can motivate changes in AI practice. These changes form the
basis for narrative agent architecture.
Schizophrenia
Schizophrenia's connection to AI is grounded in one of its more baffling symp-
toms - the
sentimente d'automatisme
, or subjective experience of being a ma-
chine (Janet, 1889). This feeling is the flip side of AI's hoped-for machinic
experience of being subjective, and is described by one patient this way: “ 'I
am unable to give an account of what I really do, everything is mechanical
in me and is done unconsciously. I am nothing but a machine' ” (an anony-
mous schizophrenic patient; cited in (Ronell 1989: 118)). R. D. Laing describes
how some schizophrenic patients experience or fear experiencing themselves
as things, as its, instead of as people (Laing 1960). Schizophrenia is, for some,
a frightening feeling of being drained of life, of being reduced to a robot or
automaton.
This feeling of mechanicity is correlated with a fragmentation of the af-
fected patient's being; sometimes, a schizophrenic patient's very subjectivity
seems to be split apart.
In listening to Julie, it was often as though one were doing group psychother-
apy with the one patient. Thus I was confronted with a babble or jumble of
