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coordination of movements, is the decisive factor in how quickly the individuals
achieve their goal of passing each other. Rather than adopting a plan with a fi xed
and concrete goal to control locomotion, an enactive analysis would posit that indi-
viduals remain fl exible throughout the situated action by dynamically accommodat-
ing the choice of the other agent.
7.3.3
Goals and Directives
In the traditional view of information processing, in order to accomplish goals, an
agent would follow certain steps according to a preset plan for solving the particular
problems defi ned by concrete goals. From an enactive perspective, intelligence and
creativity involve knowing how to change the fl ow of sensory information in order
to explore possibilities for action, i.e., leaning in closer to get a better look at some-
thing. It is often simply easier to act on the environment and experiment with how
different interactions affect the system than representing it in its entirety and per-
forming symbolic processing on those representations like the information process-
ing perspective proposes (Noë 2004 ). Even at the level of social interaction with an
intelligent agent, an enactive approach tries to avoid postulating high-level cogni-
tive mechanisms at the core of our intersubjective skills. The coevolution of a com-
municative/creative process is seen here as a gradual unfolding in real time of a
dynamic system spanning a human subject, the environment, and agents within it.
In this view, intentions emerge but are also transformed in and through the interac-
tion with other agents and the environment.
Thus, instead of describing creative behavior as goal-based planning and infor-
mation processing, we have adopted the enactive terminology of directives (Engel
2010 ). A “directive” is a loose intention that directly infl uences what things appear
interesting or salient in the environment and how specifi c types of interactions
might provide more information about emerging hypotheses. A directive is similar
to a goal in that it can be refl ected on, elaborated, and specifi ed in more detail, but
it is critically different from the current notion of “goal” in planning-based AI
because it does not constitute action in any way. A directive constrains and suggests
potential actions that could yield productive changes in an emergent process of
sensemaking. See Fig. 7.3 for an illustration of goals compared to directives.
To illustrate the distinction between directives and goals, let us consider an
example in the creative domain, such as painting a picture. Yokochi and Okada
( 2005 ) analyzed the painting process of a famous Japanese painter. He found that
the artist began with a vague “directive” (our term) that is then refi ned and explored
through interacting with the painting. Each new line adds an additional constraint
and affects all the existing constraints created by previous lines. Whenever the
painter decides to alter some part of the image, the enactive perspective would claim
he has defi ned a “task” for himself. This task is similar to a goal in goal-based AI;
in Fig. 7.3 , tasks correspond to the small actions that serve to explore the problem
space of the directive. Accomplishing a task can be modeled in an enactive manner
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