Life is an Adventure! An agent-based reconciliation of narrative and scientific worldviews

counts is the direction of the deviation, since this determines the corrective action. For
example, when you drive a car, you will repeatedly need to brake, accelerate, turn to
the left, or turn to the right in order to avoid other vehicles or obstacles that appear on
your intended path. Knowing precisely where and when an obstacle will appear is
only marginally useful: you will anyway have to take corrective action once you get
there.

Diversions and the Course of Action

In spite of its flexibility and universality [Powers, 1973], the paradigm of regulation is
still too restricted to capture the full dynamics of behavior. The notion of regulation is
intrinsically conservative: it assumes that there is a single ideal state—the goal—and
that anything causing a deviation from that state constitutes a disturbance that must be
suppressed. In reality, goals are temporary and contingent on the circumstances.
Ultimately, they are all subordinated to the abstract and limitless drive for fitness
maximization. Successfully striving for fitness is as much a matter of choosing
appropriate goals as of effectively achieving these goals. For example, the lion that
failed to catch a zebra would do better to eat from the carcass of a wildebeest it just
stumbled upon than to persevere in its unsuccessful attempts at killing a far-away
prey.

To capture this notion of an opportunity or means to achieve a goal, I propose
to introduce Gibson’s [1977] concept of affordance as a complement to the term
disturbance used in cybernetics [cf. Heylighen & Vidal, 2008]. An affordance is a
phenomenon that makes possible, or affords, a particular action. It can variously
appear as a tool (e.g. a telephone, a stick), a resource (e.g. money, food, energy), or an
opportunity (e.g. encounter with someone who can help, good weather). An
affordance enables you to achieve something positive, i.e. something that contributes
to fitness. But whether you really get that benefit will depend on your ability to
recognize the affordance, to adapt your goals and strategy so as to efficiently exploit
it, and to implement the new strategy. Goals and strategy together determine an
agent’s course of action, i.e. the sequence of actions that the agent intends to execute
because they seem to lead most directly to fitness increase.

- 10 -

<<   7   8   9   10   11   12   13   >>

More intriguing information