Embodied Cooperation to Promote Forgiving Interactions With Autonomous Machines

During every waking moment, we must engage with our environments, the people around us, the tools we use, and even our own bodies to perform actions and achieve our intentions. There is a spectrum of control that we have over our surroundings that spans the extremes from full to negligible. When the outcomes of our actions do not align with our goals, we have a tremendous capacity to displace blame and frustration on external factors while forgiving ourselves. This is especially true when we cooperate with machines; they are rarely afforded the level of forgiveness we provide our bodies and often bear much of our blame. Yet, our brain readily engages with autonomous processes in controlling our bodies to coordinate complex patterns of muscle contractions, make postural adjustments, adapt to external perturbations, among many others. This acceptance of biological autonomy may provide avenues to promote more forgiving human-machine partnerships. In this perspectives paper, we argue that striving for machine embodiment is a pathway to achieving effective and forgiving human-machine relationships. We discuss the mechanisms that help us identify ourselves and our bodies as separate from our environments and we describe their roles in achieving embodied cooperation. Using a representative selection of examples in neurally interfaced prosthetic limbs and intelligent mechatronics, we describe techniques to engage these same mechanisms when designing autonomous systems and their potential bidirectional interfaces.

Finding Health Between Personal and Disease Processes

Patient autonomy on a personal level is ultimately rooted in biological autonomy on a subpersonal level. Patient decisional autonomy concerns the conscious choices patients make concerning treatments and lifestyle, whereas biological autonomy concerns the ability of patients to shape their environment. To understand the roots of health in this biological autonomy, we must bridge the chasm characteristic of modern natural science between personal meaning and impersonal mechanism. We will find that “health” and “action” represent blind spots for medical and biological theory, respectively. Modern medicine strongly distinguishes the impersonal disease from the patient who has the disease. Four disciplines at the margin of biomedicine are reviewed that challenge this separation: psychosomatics, placebo, alternative medicine, and geriatrics. Attention to personal goals during diagnosis and treatment is one way to bridge the gap between impersonal disease and the patient as person. But, ultimately, the impersonal biomedical disease model needs to be challenged.

Seeking the Roots of Health and Action in Biological Autonomy

The roots of biological autonomy and health are the same. Goals make biology distinct as a science, for without goals, we cannot understand why a biological trait exists. Organisms are autonomous biological entities because they define what is inside and what is outside themselves. This boundary between inner and outer gives the organism a self-referential purpose. Claude Bernard made experimental physiology possible with his concept of the internal environment, but he was unable to explain how the organism established the boundary between itself and its environment. Hence, homeostasis portrays the organism as reactive not active. Autopoiesis is an alternative defining characteristic of living beings. It generates biological autonomy through additional biological constraint on chemical processes, not through a special vital force. Healthy organisms can construct their own environmental niche. For humans, this niche is social and is constructed with a social physiology. Both exercise and education increase health by increasing capacity for niche construction.

Matching concepts and phenomena: A review of Biological Autonomy

This paper discusses Moreno and Mossio’s book Biological autonomy: A philosophical and theoretical enquiry. The book provides an up-to-date overview of the authors’ work within the organizational approach to mind and life, which is linked to the work of Maturana and Varela but which is here developed in new ways and with a strong focus on the autonomy of living systems. After an overview of the book, the paper focuses on the choice of the guiding concepts for this enterprise – autonomy, agency, organism and cognition – and discusses whether these notions are still up to the task of formulating the key issues to be targeted by the organizational approach.