Open peer commentary on the article “Circularity and the Micro-Macro-Difference” by Manfred Füllsack. Upshot: We join Füllsack in his effort to untangle the concepts of circular causation, macro states, and observation by reanalyzing one of our own simulations in the light of these concepts. This simulation presents an example agent that keeps track of its own macro states. We examine how human observers can consider such an agent as an observing agent on its own.

Open peer commentary on the article “Subsystem Formation Driven by Double Contingency” by Bernd Porr & Paolo Di Prodi. Upshot: Agents that learn from perturbations of closed control loops are considered constructivist by virtue of the fact that their input (the perturbation) does not convey ontological information about the environment. That is, they learn by actively experiencing their environment through interaction, as opposed to learning by registering directly input data characterizing the environment. Generalizing this idea, the notion of learning by (...) experiencing provides a broader conceptual framework than cybernetic control theory for studying the double contingency problem, and may yield more progress in constructivist agent design. (shrink)

Open peer commentary on the article “Exploration of the Functional Properties of Interaction: Computer Models and Pointers for Theory” by Etienne B. Roesch, Matthew Spencer, Slawomir J. Nasuto, Thomas Tanay & J. Mark Bishop. Upshot: We support Roesch and his co-authors’ theoretical stance on constructivist artificial agents, and wish to enrich their “exploration of the functional properties of interaction” with complementary results. By revisiting their experiments with an agent that we developed previously, we explore two issues that they deliberately left (...) aside: autonomous intentionality and dynamic reutilization of knowledge by the agent. Our results reveal an alternative pathway to constructivism that addresses the central question of intentionality in a single agent from the very beginning of its design, suggesting that the property of distributed processing proposed by Roesch et al. is not essential to constructivism. (shrink)