2. Fabricating fictions using social role
Lynne E. Hall, Simon Oram · Advances in consciousness research · 2008
Existing within any human culture demands consideration of human interactivity, mutual engagement and reflections on our collective representations. As humans we are not hermetically sealed individuals, we learn about our world and how to operate within it from others in a myriad of ways. Embodied agents operate within culture; they “work” in a particular situation carrying out a particular role. It is the aim of our research to construct an agent that is “aware” of its social situation, that is, the agent has the ability to emit signs that contextualise it within a real world setting. Culture, unlike a written narrative, is transitory: it may be the case that once the present has receded into the past there is a level of narrative fixity (Event A happened which lead to event B), but the present is still an open ended play of improvisation (Layton, 1997). This is not to say that individuals have an unbridled ability to think in an infinite number of different ways, from an infinite number of different positions. Human action, ways of communicating and thinking are limited by particular historical and spatial constraints, that of living in a particular culture at a given moment in time. Given these conditions, how we articulate this in an agent’s behaviour is, to say the very least, problematic. Current technology doesn’t have the ability to produce cultural complexity in any convincing way; passing the Turing test looks further away from being realised now than it did when it was first proposed. Firstly, quite simply, present programming paradigms cannot produce simulations of cultural behaviour in any believable way (Dreyfus, 1992). Secondly, to many observers, the humanities have reached a crisis of representation, that is a “science” or meta-theory of the social is not achievable (Spiro, 1996).