Bio-agency and the possibility of artificial agents
Bio-agency and the possibility of artificial agents
Within the philosophy of biology, recently promising steps have been made towards a biologically grounded concept of agency. Agency is described as bio-agency: the intrinsically normative adaptive behaviour of human and non-human organisms, arising from their biological autonomy. My paper assesses the bio-agency approach by examining criticism recently directed by its proponents against the project of embodied robotics. Defenders of the bio-agency approach have claimed that embodied robots do not, and for fundamental reasons cannot, qualify as artificial agents because they do not fully realise biological autonomy. More particularly, it has been claimed that embodied robots fail to be agents because agency essentially requires metabolism. I shall argue that this criticism, while being valuable in bringing to the fore important differences between bio-agents and existing embodied robots, nevertheless is too strong. It relies on inferences from agency-as-we-know-it to agency-as-it-could-be which are justified neither empirically nor conceptually.
65-93
Springer International Publishing AG
Meincke, Anne Sophie
f1270441-464f-4860-b52e-8dc9ef661ab9
2018
Meincke, Anne Sophie
f1270441-464f-4860-b52e-8dc9ef661ab9
Meincke, Anne Sophie
(2018)
Bio-agency and the possibility of artificial agents.
In,
Christian, Alexander, Hommen, David, Retzlaff, Nina and Schurz, Gerhard
(eds.)
Philosophy of Science : Between the Natural Sciences, the Social Sciences, and the Humanities.
Springer International Publishing AG, .
(doi:10.1007/978-3-319-72577-2_5).
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Book Section
Abstract
Within the philosophy of biology, recently promising steps have been made towards a biologically grounded concept of agency. Agency is described as bio-agency: the intrinsically normative adaptive behaviour of human and non-human organisms, arising from their biological autonomy. My paper assesses the bio-agency approach by examining criticism recently directed by its proponents against the project of embodied robotics. Defenders of the bio-agency approach have claimed that embodied robots do not, and for fundamental reasons cannot, qualify as artificial agents because they do not fully realise biological autonomy. More particularly, it has been claimed that embodied robots fail to be agents because agency essentially requires metabolism. I shall argue that this criticism, while being valuable in bringing to the fore important differences between bio-agents and existing embodied robots, nevertheless is too strong. It relies on inferences from agency-as-we-know-it to agency-as-it-could-be which are justified neither empirically nor conceptually.
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e-pub ahead of print date: 27 March 2018
Published date: 2018
Identifiers
Local EPrints ID: 428398
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/428398
PURE UUID: b5b934a8-8216-4337-b59b-a201bdd811ee
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Date deposited: 22 Feb 2019 17:30
Last modified: 27 Apr 2022 06:37
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Contributors
Author:
Anne Sophie Meincke
Editor:
Alexander Christian
Editor:
David Hommen
Editor:
Nina Retzlaff
Editor:
Gerhard Schurz
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