Systematic behavior and the varieties of

(representational) vehicles

Paco Calvo fjcalvo@um.es

Varieties of Representation: Kazimierz Naturalist Workshop 2011

Kazimierz Dolny, Poland

September 5-9th, 2011

Vehicles of content galore, what for?

Kazimierz Dolny September 6th, 2011

Paco Calvo fjcalvo@um.es

Abstract: With an eye to explaining our ability to generalize, a panoply of vehicles of content is now available in the Representations Marketplace. They range from digital to analog, from symbols to subsymbolic vectors, microfeatures, morphodynamic constituents, basins of attraction, and what may! On pain of falling prey to a neurobiologically implausible look-up table model, the underlying assumption is that these vehicles of content ultimately deliver the goods by articulating a combinatorial syntax and semantics. But in doing so, a charge of symbols-and-rules implementation keeps looming around the corner. By contrast, if you try to do away with vehicles of content altogether, then you’re not required to meet the challenge of explaining generalization; bluntly, you just play a different game. In this talk, I shall argue that this ‘implement or eliminate’ trap has to do with three interrelated concepts/problems. To wit, competence, cognition and misrepresentation. But, by choosing instead a different triplet, formed by performance, behavior and direct perception, we may ‘ecologically’ break out of the trap. For the sake of controversial illustration, and as a case in point, I shall consider root-brains in plants.

Plot summary…

1. Generalization and cognitive systems: the challenge

2. Vehicles of content galore!

3. The ‘implementation vs. elimination’ trap

4. Competence, cognition and misrepresentation: three interrelated problems

5. Performance, behavior and direct perception: an ecological way out

6. Root-brains in plants: a case in point

7. Conclusion: talking past one another?

Plot summary…

1. Generalization and cognitive systems: the challenge

2. Vehicles of content galore!

3. The ‘implementation vs. elimination’ trap

4. Competence, cognition and misrepresentation: three interrelated problems

5. Performance, behavior and direct perception: an ecological way out

6. Root-brains in plants: a case in point

7. Conclusion: talking past one another?

gatiga ganaga

wofewo wofefe

Marcus et al.’99 – Science

gatiga ganaga

wofewo wofefe

ABA

Marcus et al.’99 – Science

… PURAKIBELIGATAFODUPUFOKI …

A1 X C1 A2 X C2 A3 X C3

1.0

0.33 0.33 0.5

… PURAKIBELIGATAFODUPUFOKI …

Pinker & Ullman’02 – TiCS

GREAT PAST TENSE DEBATE

Fodor & Pylyshyn’88 – Cognition

But see Seidenberg & Elman’99 – TiCS

But see Laakso & Calvo’11 – Cognitive Science

But see Ramscar’02 – Cognitive Psychology

Plot summary…

1. Generalization and cognitive systems: the challenge

2. Vehicles of content galore!

3. The ‘implementation vs. elimination’ trap

4. Competence, cognition and misrepresentation: three interrelated problems

5. Performance, behavior and direct perception: an ecological way out

6. Root-brains in plants: a case in point

7. Conclusion: talking past one another?

vectors

clusters fan-ins

attractors

SINBAD

Monostable attractors

Context-dependency

DFA

Plot summary…

1. Generalization and cognitive systems: the challenge

2. Vehicles of content galore! WHAT FOR?

3. The ‘implementation vs. elimination’ trap

4. Competence, cognition and misrepresentation: three interrelated problems

5. Performance, behavior and direct perception: an ecological way out

6. Root-brains in plants: a case in point

7. Conclusion: talking past one another?

Elman’98 – Proc. CogSci

BUUUUUT….

just weak syst.

Plot summary…

1. Generalization and cognitive systems: the challenge

2. Vehicles of content galore!

3. The ‘implementation vs. elimination’ trap

4. Competence, cognition and misrepresentation: three interrelated problems

5. Performance, behavior and direct perception: an ecological way out

6. Root-brains in plants: a case in point

7. Conclusion: talking past one another?

As …?

Plot summary…

1. Generalization and cognitive systems: the challenge

2. Vehicles of content galore!

3. The ‘implementation vs. elimination’ trap

4. Competence, cognition and misrepresentation: three interrelated problems

5. Performance, behavior and direct perception: an ecological way out

6. Root-brains in plants: a case in point

7. Conclusion: talking past one another?

Competence

Cognition

"If you root yourself in the ground, you can afford to be stupid. But if you move, you must have mechanisms for moving, and mechanisms to ensure that the movement is not utterly arbitrary and independent of what is going on outside.' Patricia Smith Churchland, 1986, p. 13

Misrepresentation

“TYPING THE VEHICLES OF CONTENT:- (i) capture some underlying property of the network’s mechanism of operation by which it performs its task; (ii) abstract away from individual weight matrices and particular patterns of activation; (iii) be such that it may be shared by different networks trained on the same task; and (iv) form part of an explanation of the network’s ability to project its correct performance to new samples outside the training set.”

COMBINATORIAL

VS.

ATOMISTIC

(Shea’07, Mind & Language)

L&C play Fodor’s game

Plot summary…

1. Generalization and cognitive systems: the challenge

2. Vehicles of content galore!

3. The ‘implementation vs. elimination’ trap

4. Competence, cognition and misrepresentation: three interrelated problems

5. Performance, behavior and direct perception: an ecological way out

6. Root-brains in plants: a case in point

7. Conclusion: talking past one another?

Behavior(-based similarities) & Performance

Grammaticality judgement out of prediction

Behavior(-based similarities) & Performance

(Marín, Calvo & Valenzuela’03, Proc. Europ. CogSci)

Direct perception

Size constancy by picking up invariant ratios

‘‘It’s not what is inside the head that is important, it’s what the head is inside of.’’

Direct perception

Plot summary…

1. Generalization and cognitive systems: the challenge

2. Vehicles of content galore!

3. The ‘implementation vs. elimination’ trap

4. Competence, cognition and misrepresentation: three interrelated problems

5. Performance, behavior and direct perception: an ecological way out

6. Root-brains in plants: a case in point

7. Conclusion: talking past one another?

– Nonrepresentational, performance-based, adaptive behavior

tropic nastic Thigmo…

Photo… Hydro… Thermo… Gravi… Skoto… Oxy… Chemo… Trauma… Magneto… Galvano…

(Baluska et al.’09, PS&B)

volatile organic compounds (VOCs) (Baldwin et al.’06, Science)

“talking trees” light-foraging behavior

Trewavas’03, Annals of Botany

• Territorial

• Plant-invertebrate acoustic interaction (Barlow’10, Plant Biosystems)

In this book, environment will refer to the surroundings of those organisms that perceive and behave, that is to say, animals. The environment of plants, organisms that lack sense organs and muscles, is not relevant in the study of perception and behavior. We shall treat the vegetation of the world as animals do, as if it were lumped together with the inorganic minerals of the world, with the physical, chemical, and geological environment. Plants in general are not animate; they do not move about, they do not behave, they lack a nervous system, and they do not have sensations. In these respects they are like the objects of physics, chemistry, and geology (ch. 1 The Animal and the Environment, Gibson’79).

Risks: Deflate -> merely reactive

“Each root apex is proposed to harbor brain-like units of the nervous system of plants … All “brain units” are interconnected via vascular strands (plant neurons) with their polarly-transported auxin (plant neurotransmitter), to form a serial (parallel) neuronal system of plants.” (Baluška et al.’06) “The working hypothesis of plant neurobiology is that the integration and transmission of information at the plant level involves neuron-like processes such as action potentials, long-distance electrical signaling, and vesicle-mediated transport of (neurotransmitter-like) auxin” (Brenner et al.’06, TiPS)

Risks: Deflate -> mere reactive

Learning: development plasmodesmatal connections

(‘dendritic modifications’)

Beef up -> too cognitive!

The transition zone is a distinctive area of the root-apex that plays a critical role in the circuitry of auxin transport, and the integration of different types of signals… Transport of auxin throughout the whole plant body permits the integration of sensory-motoric signaling circuits (Baluška et al., 2009). The transition zone … is the one and only plant area where electrical activity is known to synchronize (Masi et al., 2009) and where – brain-like – decision making takes place that controls phenotypic changes by exchanging information vascularly all the way up from the roots themselves to the shoots and organs at the opposite end of the plant…

Risks: Deflate -> mere reactive Beef up -> too cognitive!

Risks:

merely reactive (middle ground?) too cognitive

ECOLOGICAL PRINCIPLES

III: EMERGENT AND SELF-ORGANIZED BEHAVIOR

IV: PERCEPTION AND ACTION = CONTINUOUS AND CYCLIC

V: INFORMATION = SPECIFICATIONAL

VI: PERCEPTION IS OF AFFORDANCES

II: DEFINE ENVIRONMENTAL REALITIES AT ECOLOGICAL SCALE

I: PROPER UNITS OF ANALYSIS -> ORGANISM–ENVIRONMENT SYSTEMS

García & Calvo’10, Adaptive Behavior (opportunities for action)

(irreducibility to componential properties)

NO VEHICLES!!! unique combination of invariants (a compound invariant)

Gravity = invariant

Plot summary…

1. Generalization and cognitive systems: the challenge

2. Vehicles of content galore!

3. The ‘implementation vs. elimination’ trap

4. Competence, cognition and misrepresentation: three interrelated problems

5. Performance, behavior and direct perception: an ecological way out

6. Root-brains in plants: a case in point

7. Conclusion: talking past one another?

implementational

Goodale and Milner’92, Trends in Neurosciences

Constructivist vs. Ecological

inferential

indirect

cognitive

algorithmic

direct

proximal

behavioral

Object identification (memory-based)

(guidance of motor behavior)

allocentric

egocentric

Norman’02, BBS

Methodological flaws: e.g., “special” experimental designs (lack of movement/textures, etc.)

Call “dorsal” into question

Why don’t we call into question…

Systematicity of …

IO-representations …

Mechanistic sketches Piccinini & Craver’11, Synthese

Calvo & García’10, M&M