Prepared for but not delivered at Ribbinfarm Refactor Camp 2012 -- dredged up some old ideas from dissertation that refuse to die.

1. Why VitalismWon’t Die; or
Refactoring Agency
Mike Travers
mt@hyperphor.com
http://omniorthogonal.blogspot.co
m
RefactorCamp 2012

2. Trained in the
mechanist/reductionist tradition
• The world consists of physical objects and
forces
• This is theoretically enough to explain
everything
• Success story: molecular biology
• Not-so-successful story: AI

4. Vitalism / Animism
• Mechanism violates people’s
commonsense intuitions (eg free will)
• Not going to get into this tired debate
• Old, more or less discredited theories of
“life force”

5. My nagging itch
• Despite its unscientificness,
• There’s something in vitalist and similar
theories that we need to pay attention to.

6. How to be a vitalist at MIT
• I cheated -- with the epistemological /
metaphorical turn
• How do people understand the world, and
computers, and systems?
• Through a wide variety of metaphors
including
– Animate Metaphors
– Agents
– Programming by creating networks of agents

7. Distributed Agency
• Minsky’s Society of Mind
• EO Wilson’s Ant Colonies
• Hewitt’s Actor Model of Computation
• Agre& Chapman’s Situated Action

8. Vivarium Project
(Apple and MIT)

11. Other neo-vitalists
• Christopher Alexander
from Pattern Language to a radical
metaphysics of the living
• Bruno Latour and followers
A democracy of objects

13. Refactoring Agency
‘In the case of ... potato chips, it seems appropriate to
regard the hand’s actions as only quasi- or semi-
intentional, for the chips themselves seem to call forth, or
provoke and stoke, the manual labor…To eat chips is to
enter into an assemblage in which the I is not necessarily
the most decisive operator”
-- Bennett, Vibrant Matter

14. Refactoring the grammar of
agency
I ate the potato chips.
The potato chips were eaten by me.
The potato chips compelled me to eat them
I ate the potato chips.
The potato chips eta me.
???

15. So what?
• We are increasingly embedded in complex
networks of sociotechnology
• How do we make sense of it?
• We need to be able to analyze systems
through simultaneous application of a variety
of cognitive systems:
– Mechanical
– Tool
– Agency
• Software has goals of its own, whether we
acknowledge it or not

16. End