Graham Harman mentions Manuel DeLanda’s new book, which boasts a title that should intrigue anyone reading this website: Philosophy, Emergence and Simulation. Here’s a three-minute video of DeLanda talking about it a bit more.

It sounds like the book is mostly about animal intelligence, with the connection to simulation having to do with the way different intelligence other than the human sort is becoming a model (the example he discusses above in passing has to do with the way roboticists are looking to insect intelligence as a model for system behavior). Hard to tell much from this short description, though.

published August 10, 2009

Comments

  1. Mark J. Nelson

    This pointer led me to track down a 1993 essay of his, Virtual Environments and the Emergence of Synthetic Reason, which seems to make arguments on similar subjects, and might (?) provide some sort of a preview.

    The arguments in that essay, at least, remind me of some of the dynamicist positions in artificial intelligence, which similarly focus on population- and system-level properties like attractors and stability as the right level of abstraction for talking about complex systems. They tend to make a similar anti-reductionist argument, though out of more practical concerns, that a focus on the literal operation of systems at their code or symbol level isn’t very useful for understanding how they operate, because the many of the interesting macro properties of the system as a whole are emergent effects not visible (or at least heavily obscured) at that too-far-down level of description.

  2. Michael Mateas

    I agree with Mark. From the video it sounds like he’s recapitulating the standard alife critique of AI, with a focus on dynamical systems approaches (e.g. people like Stafford Beer). In the philosophical literature, this would continue in the tradition of autopoesis, and the work of thinkers such as Maturana and Varela (e.g. Autopoiesis and Cognition).

  3. Julian Bleecker

    Sounds like more asocial alife’rs who imagine they can capture the sublime features of intelligence with barely legible arguments amongst themselves. Pfft. Son of Kurzweil. They are “2012”, BTW. And Skynet. That too.