Norm-Establishing and Norm-Following in Autonomous Agency

Abstract

One of the fundamental aspects that distinguishes acts from mere events is that actions are subject to a normative dimension that is absent from other types of interaction: natural agents behave according to intrinsic norms that determine their adaptive or maladaptive nature. We briefly review current and historical attempts to naturalize normativity from an organism-centred perspective that conceives of living systems as defining their own norms in a continuous process of self-maintenance of their individuality. We identify and propose solutions for two problems of contemporary modelling approaches to viability and normative behaviour in this tradition: 1) How to define the topology of the viability space beyond establishing normatively-rigid boundaries, so as to include a sense of gradation that permits reversible failure; and 2) How to relate, in models of natural agency, both the processes that establish norms and those that result in norm-following behaviour. In this paper we present a minimal metabolic system that is coupled to a gradient climbing chemotactic mechanism. Through studying the relationship between metabolic dynamics and environmental resource conditions, we identify an emergent viable region and a precarious region where the system tends to die if environmental conditions remain the same. We introduce the concept of normative field as the change of environmental conditions required to bring the system back to its viable region. Norm-following, or normative action, is defined as the course of behaviour whose effect is positively correlated with the normative field. We generalize from our minimal model to a wider range of theoretical and modelling approaches, and close with some discussion about the limitation of our model, possible extensions and 1 some final reflections around the nature of norms and teleology in agency.

A Dynamical Systems Account of Sensorimotor Contingencies

“…We expect this process to happen at higher levels of dynamical modulation. Luckily several other models illustrate this possibility, and demonstrate a possible way forward in the modeling of norms and values as grounded in an agent’s self-maintenance (Di Paolo, 2000; Iizuka and Di Paolo, 2007; Barandiaran and Egbert, 2013). For theoretical discussions relating norms to enactive accounts of agency compatible with our use in this text also see (Di Paolo, 2005; Barandiaran and Moreno, 2008; Barandiaran et al, 2009; Di Paolo et al, 2010; Silberstein and Chemero, 2011).…”

Embodiment of intersubjective time: relational dynamics as attractors in the temporal coordination of interpersonal behaviors and experiences

“…By producing itself, the living system actively “affirms” its own identity (it specifies what it is), and thereby defines its own intrinsic laws or norms of self-maintenance. In a word, the living system is auto-nomous (Varela, 1979; Di Paolo, 2005; Barandiaran and Egbert, 2014). …”

Autonomy and Enactivism: Towards a Theory of Sensorimotor Autonomous Agency

“…the function that made that trait an adaptation), autonomists naturalize norms within the context of the very working of the organism. The normative function of a trait or part of an organism is defined by the specific way in which it contributes to the self-maintenance of the system (Barandiaran and Egbert 2013;Barandiaran and Moreno 2008;Christensen and Bickhard 2002;Di Paolo 2005;Weber and Varela 2002). The normative nature is justified as a condition of possibility: were structure S not functioning according to the norm presupposed by the organization of the system, both the organism O (and the structure S it upholds) would not persist.…”

“…A naturalized account of norms (or normative functionality) in terms of the viability constraints of an autonomous organization has been developed at length in biology, mostly in opposition to evolutionary or adaptationist accounts of normative function (Barandiaran and Egbert 2013;Barandiaran and Moreno 2008;Christensen and Bickhard 2002;Mossio et al 2009). We have proposed that this account of normativity can be relatively easily transferred, by analogy, to mental life, through the notion of a self-sustaining network of habits and its coherentist dynamical demands.…”