Page 254 - Socially Intelligent Agents Creating Relationships with Computers and Robots

Perceptions of Self 237

semination of an art experience. The current pursuit of re-embodiment as a
creative act answers to the cultural dominance of simulation in image-making,
and also makes a direct appeal to emotion – think of the associative power of
smell. While emotion has always had a place at the core of aesthetic theory,
its manifestation adapts to changing cultural conditions. Greater embodiment
in the art experience still implies for the viewer an expansion of the sense of
self, through these various solicitations of an integrated somatic, perceptual and
intellectual response.
In IA research, embodiment is a quite extensive concept that underlies many
of the more "lifelike" features of intelligent agents. The autonomous robotic or
computer-based agents of IA research are built to be aware of and interact with
their environment, as well as interacting with each other and with humans. The
types of possible interactions are broadly defined enough to encompass simple
behaviours, usually hard-wired to be adaptive to the immediate environment,
as well as complex routines such as learning, some level of intentionality, and
other features of emergent, evolved behaviour.
Even if "self" in everyday speech signifies the human ability to attach both
intellectual and emotional meaning to a lifetime of accumulated memory, the
languagethat describes characteristicsof emergent order suchasself-organizing
or self-regulating, when applied not to physical processes but to these embodied
artificial entities, implies at least in principle a generating of "selfhood." This
follows especially from the Alife logic that programmed functions of agents
parallel life processes, so that emergent and fully autonomous behaviour would
equal alive – which would then entail a sense of self [1]. Equally, there are
descriptions from the cultural domain of such a non-anthropocentric idea of
self. French theoretician Georges Bataille says, "Even an inert particle, lower
down the scale than the animalcula, seems to have this existence for-itself,
though I prefer the words inside or inner experience" [3, p. 99]. He does go on
to say, though, that this elementary feeling of self is not consciousness of self,
that is distinctly human. Thus the two meanings of embodiment, and therefore
the kind of experience that a person might have in relation to either an artwork
or an IA, at first seem to meet in their privileging of some kind of selfhood. The
features of an IA that are an effect of its artificial, non-human self-recognition
may very well mirror and enhance the sense of self in a person interacting with
it. This would be most ensured by well-developed characteristics of social and
emotional intelligence built into the agent, so that interactions with it seem
natural.
But while concepts of embodiment are representational issues dependent on
the intrinsic qualities of artifacts and how those are conveyed, the investigation
of selfhood vis-ˆ-vis these artifacts of research or art practice is necessarily in-
teractive. It is bound up in our relations with them. Given the strong humanist
tradition of art and the implicit technological nature of IAs, our relational expe-