Autonomy of Self at Criticality: The Perspective from Synthetic Neuro-Robotics

Abstract

This article investigates the phenomenological aspects of selves in relation to autonomous agents. Through a review of a series of neuro-robotics experiments conducted by the author's group, we elucidate three different aspects of selves, namely, minimal selves, social selves and self-referential selves. Upon integrative discussions of these selves, it is suggested that genuine constructs of "authentic" selves may appear with criticality, which is self-organized in the iterative interplay between regression of past experience and lookahead prediction of future outcomes. It is concluded that genuine autonomy of agents likely originates from genuine autonomy of authentic selves.

Emergence of Protosentences in Artificial Communicating Systems

“…They observed a spontaneous emergence on synchronized and unsynchronized phase movements between the human and the robot that are linked to essential psychological mechanisms of joint attention. This view was then theorized and critically explained in [22] by Tani. In this paper we extended the experiments performed by Marocco and Nolfi [15], [16] to investigate the relationship between non-verbal and verbal interactions and the relevance of such a relationship in the context of language evolution. Notably, the importance of non-verbal and verbal interactions has inspired parallel works on robotics and artificial agents, whose attempt to exploit those interactions to bootstrap "intelligent" coordinated behaviours in a human-robot interaction context [23].…”

Cognitive neurorobotics and self in the shared world, a focused review of ongoing research

“…Why do those system dynamics once converged into an attractor basin, such as a predictable or routine interaction in a region, get destabilized again, and move out to another basin of attractor? One possibility is the inherently indeterministic nature of embodied cognitive systems due to the circular causality established in the enactment loop (Tani, 1998;2009).…”

The biology of consciousness from the bottom up

“…Humans could eventually create an autopoietic, self-replicating, energy-grabbing and energy-dissipating, intelligent machine which is conscious. According to Tani (2009), for a robot to become conscious it would not only have to register its own sensorimotricity in its own action history but it would have to reach a ''critical'' ''uncertainty'' after sustained confrontation/matching of bottom-up sensorimotricity and top-down constraints such as ''goals'' provided by the designer/programmer or an overstructured ''niche,'' also provided by the designer: this self-organized criticality (SOC) would be the most primitive sense of self. The authors seem to be suggesting that a robot that does not fall, scrape its knee, and suck it up cannot have a self.…”