(ps 920825.1200)
i hope you get through the hurricane well!
>From Tom Bourbon [920825 -- pre-Alexander time]
I had wanted to jump into some of the discussion about "leaning
on the world" -- is that a round about way of saying that tha actions
of an organism combine with independent influences in the environment, so
that the organism need only, indeed can only, add a small influence to
what is going on? In that case, the nature of the controller becomes
critical. Do the authors of work about "leaning on the world" address
the nature of how control is achieved under those conditions?
i dunno, but i actually managed to find where agre introduces the term
(``the dynamic strucutre of everyday life'', mit ai tr 1085, 1988, pp
26-27):
why does an understanding of an agent's interactions w/ its world lead
to simpler hypothesies about its machinery? real agents
_lean_on_the_world_ (emph in orig--ps). the world is its own best
representation and its own best simulation. it isn't an obstacle or a
problem, it's a helpful place. your interations w/ the world, both
past and present, provide many ways to alleviate computational
burdens. why conduct elaborate deductions about yr surrounding when
you can look and see? in particular, why maintain elaborate control
structures when you can look and see what needs to be done? why make
highly detailed Plans when you can improvise? why required instant
expertise when you can improve by just keeping on doing it? why try
figuring it out yourself when you can collaborate w/ others who have
been there? why insist on figureing out every situation afresh when
you can trust yor accumulated experience? all the dynamic phenomena
can work together to suggest imaginative ways to simplify machinery
or even eliminate parts of it altogether. put someone in solitary
connfinement and they fall apart: people rely on the
_organizing_presence_of_the_world.
i am suggesting an inversion of values, not only in ai but in all
forms of computational and psychological inquiry. faced w/ an
empirical phenomenon to explain, our first explanatory recourse should
be to dynamics, not to machinery. faced w/ a techinical problme to
solve, our engineering should begin w/ dyunamics, not w/ machinery.
heretofore, people have gotten prizes for inventing new machinery. but
we've got far too much machinery. i would like to suggest that
people get prizes for getting_rid_of_ machinery.
cheers.
--penni