Abstract
The paper argues that the conception of life as generalized homeostasis developed by W.R. Ashby in Design for a Brain and his other writings is orthogonal to the traditional distinction between autonomy and heteronomy that underlies much recent work in cellular biology, evolutionary robotics, ALife, and general AI. The distinction is well-entrenched in the Western philosophical canon but it fails to do justice to Ashby’s conception of life. We can assess the philosophical and technical viability of the general homeostasis thesis Ashby advocated, the paper argues, through the construction of virtual cognitive agents (i.e. simulated robots in a physically plausible environment) that replicate the architecture of Ashby’s original homeostat through a Ctrnn-like network architecture, whose outline implementation is then discussed.
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Notes
- 1.
Classical loci of this distinction are the so-called “function of man argument” in book I of Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics Aristotle (1984, v. 1, 1097b22–1098a18) and the argument for the tri-partite composition of the psyche in Phaedrus (Plato 1997, 237c–241d) and Republic (Plato 1997, 435e–441c). Both Aristotle and Plato stress that animal life is propelled by “drives” (or “passions”). The structure of this argument is repeated almost verbatim in Descartes’s study of the passions (see Descartes (1988), esp. articles 7–37 of Part 1).
- 2.
Eth. Nic. I,7, 1098a7:
- 3.
I am skipping over a few important details here, in order to get the main point across. A fuller analysis on Kantian grounds would have to specify the exact reasoning that led the human to dive. Kant himself provided the blueprint for all such analysis of autonomy in the well-known example of the shopkeeper he discusses in the Groundworks (1999, AK 397ff.). Hans Jonas (1966, 115ff.) built directly on this argument in his rebuttal of early cybernetics’ claim that a self-driven target-seeking torpedo would be acting autonomously.
- 4.
This passage from Ashby’s notebooks is reported by Andrew Pickering (2010, p. 112) and discussed by Helge Malmgren (2013) in his response to Franchi (2013). I discuss some of the possible relationships between cybernetics and psychoanalysis and give a very brief review of the sparse literature on the subject in Franchi (2011a).
- 5.
For a more detailed discussion of Ashby’s relationships with his predecessors, the cybernetics movement in general, and the relationship between physiological and cybernetic homeostases, see Franchi (2011b).
- 6.
Walter Cannon coined the term in 1929, although Claude Bernard had introduced the fundamental idea about 50 years earlier (1966[1878–1879]). Next, Lawrence Joseph Henderson in the United States and John Scott Haldane in Britain (Henderson 1928; Haldane 1917 and especially Haldane 1922) popularized it in the English speaking world. The title of Cannon’s celebrated 1932 book, The Wisdom of the Body, pays homage to William Starling’s homonym lecture, which had dealt with the self-compensating mechanisms of the heart (Starling 1923). As Pickering (2010, fn. 12, pp. 422–424) makes clear, Ashby elaborated his theory well before he became familiar with Cannon’s work, although he only started to use the term “homeostasis” after reading it.
- 7.
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Franchi, S. (2016). General Homeostasis, Passive Life, and the Challenge to Autonomy. In: Müller, V.C. (eds) Fundamental Issues of Artificial Intelligence. Synthese Library, vol 376. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-26485-1_17
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