Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Here the output productions are actions rather than symbols per se, but these devices
are also not creative in that they cannot autonomously generate new behaviours.
One can then add evaluative sensors and steering mechanisms that switch the
behaviour of the computational part to produce adaptive computational machines
(Fig.
15.3
, bottom left). This is the basic high-level operational structure of vir-
tually all contemporary trainable machines that use supervised learning feedback
mechanisms (adaptive classifiers and controllers, genetic algorithms, neural net-
works, etc.). Here the internal states and their external semantics are fixed, such that
the evaluative-steering mechanism merely switches input-output (percept-action,
feature-decision) mappings using the same set of possible states. This is a form
of combinatorial creativity, because the machine searches through percept-action
combinations to find more optimal ones.
Consider the case, however, where the evaluation mechanism guides the con-
struction of the hardware of the device rather than simply switching input-output
mappings (Fig.
15.3
, bottom right). If sensors are adaptively constructed contingent
on how well they perform a particular function, then the external semantics of the
internal states of the device are now under the device's adaptive control. When a
device has the ability to construct itself, and therefore to choose its sensors—which
aspects of the world it can detect—it attains a partial degree of
epistemic auton-
omy
. Such a device can adaptively create its own meanings vis-à-vis the external
world. A system is purposive to the extent that it can act autonomously to steer its
behavior in pursuit of embedded goals. When it is able to modify its evaluative oper-
ations, thereby modifying its goals, it achieves a degree of
motivational autonomy
.
Such autonomies depend in turn on structural autonomy, a capacity for adaptive
self-construction of hardware.
To summarise, combinatoric creativity in percept-action systems entails an abil-
ity to switch between existing internal states (e.g. “software”), whereas creative
emergence requires the ability to physically modify material structures (e.g. “hard-
ware”) that create entirely new states and state-transitions, sensors, effectors, and/or
goals.
15.3.4 Pask's “Organic Analogues to the Growth of a Concept”
The most striking example of a creative emergent device is an adaptive self-
constructing electrochemical assemblage that was conceived and fabricated by the
brilliant and eccentric British cybernetician Gordon Pask in the late 1950s (Cari-
ani
1989
;
1993
,Pask
1960
;
1961
, Bird and Di Paolo
2008
,Pickering
2010
). Pask
demonstrated his device at the
Mechanisation of Thought Processes
conference in
London in 1958 and described it in a paper provocatively entitled “Organic Ana-
logues to the Growth of a Concept.” (Pask
1959
)
The device's purpose was to show how a machine could evolve its own “relevance
criteria”, i.e. its own external semantic meanings. Current was passed through an ar-
ray of platinum electrodes immersed in an aqueous ferrous sulphate/sulphuric acid
