Chaos and Aesthetics Survey Results

My friend Dora (a Portland State University grad student) has completed the project paper based on her Chaos and Aesthetics Survey - thanks very much to any Existence is Wonderful readers who helped provide her with data!

The "short version" of the results is here (note: it may not make a lot of sense to folks outside Artificial Life classes); a (more accessible) PDF of her presentation explaining the survey's creation process and offering an analysis of the results is here.

I'm not particularly well-versed in Artificial Life studies myself, but I'm definitely intrigued by the idea, and I find it super-nifty indeed that there exists a field of study wherein art, math, and computer programming are so closely intertwined.

(Also, I should point out that in Dora's presentation PDF, the bulk of the text was written as a script to be read by a computerized text-to-speech program -- hence the occasional "odd" spelling here and there.)

More Robot Art!

Well, more of a robot/zombie comic, but comics are still art!

Anyway, below is the comic itself: it's really cute, and was drawn by my friend Margaret, who amazes me with her mad graphics skills. It is posted here with her permission.



(The little robo-guy at the beginning of the comic is named Jim. Read more about him here!)

Robots: Evolution of a Cultural Icon

On Saturday, April 26, 2008 I visited the Robots: Evolution of a Cultural Icon exhibit at the San Jose Museum of Art. I'd been quite excited to go (being a shameless robo-fangirl and all) and the exhibit did not disappoint.



Matt (my steadfast and very patient Significant Other) and I arrived in downtown San Jose shortly after noon, where we joined up with two local friends and proceeded to catch a quick lunch prior to entering the exhibit. A large banner hung on the front of the museum displaying a gigantic image of a metal robot with a clock embedded in its chest. The connotation was unmistakable: here, there be robots.

There were no "No Photography!" signs up at the museum, so initially I had my camera out, and managed to get two or three shots of several exhibits before a museum employee informed me that picture-taking was verboten. I apologized and put the camera away, and do not plan on publicly displaying the exhibit photos I took (in deference to the Lords of Copyright), but you can still view images of some exhibits on the museum's Web site. The museum has also released an online video series which includes a fair bit of exhibit footage and commentary.

First Impressions

The exhibit includes paintings of robots, sculptures of robots, quilted robots, model robots, toy robots, drawings of robots, metal robots, and plastic robots.

Implementations range from the simple line drawing to the highly complex electromechanical avatar.

One of the latter is equipped with two flat-screen monitors, each displaying a large humanlike eye (and yes, the eyes follow you).

Another is constructed almost entirely of small CRT television monitors, each showing an identical animated pattern flashing through endless cycles of decidedly psychedelic imagery. The CRT-monitor 'bot was rather unnerving to stand near -- not because of its appearance (I was actually quite excited at all the power strips and outlets all over it, as I am totally Arthur Weasley when it comes to electrical plugs and sockets), but because of the massively multiplied high-pitched whine chorus emanating from all those CRTs.

I don't know if the artist was trying to make a statement about the pervasiveness of electronic "noise" in the world these days or whether that particular piece was there to keep bats away, but it was definitely one of the more abstract pieces in the exhibit.

Another piece is humanoid in form, mostly metal in its construction, but adorned with a pair of deer antlers, one on each side of its head: a mechanized Herne. In its belly behind a clear plexiglass cover sits a smaller metal humanoid, pumping and pedaling away so as to drive different but coincident motions in the larger figure. That one evoked all kinds of weird associations, but most predominantly it seemed an irreverent wink at the notion of the homunculus. And it was probably one of the most damn-cool looking things I've ever seen in an art museum.

On the "low-tech" side of things, a particularly impressive structure stands nearly ceiling-height (in a room with a very high ceiling); it is constructed entirely of Styrofoam package inserts from actual electronic products. It presides over a circle of surrounding, smaller Stryobots and several tables at which visitors are invited to build their own model robots out of provided Lego bricks.

A quote on the wall reads: We Were Promised Robots, in reference to the contrast between the retrofuturist-nostalgia version of a robot-enhanced reality and the actual present and emerging era of pervasive electronics that, while certainly more impressive in some ways than previous generations could have imagined, is decidedly different from what was imagined.

In reflecting upon that contrast, I cannot help but feel at once that things have turned out better than imagined in many respects (and I'm not just talking about iPods and flat-screen TVs here, but about civil rights, womens' rights, gay rights, etc.), but that we as a species still have a tremendously long way to go with regard to things like resource distribution, respect for our neighbors (regardless of who we are or where we live), and sustainable development. I'm not sure how to feel (much less what to do) about the fact of my having a nice shiny computer, a comfy apartment in a reasonably safe neighborhood, and easy access to art museums, while half the world population doesn't even have access to flush toilets.

Did the futurists of the 1950s and 1960s (who envisioned widespread atomic superabundance) expect fair and ethical resource-distribution systems to come about by magic, or perhaps with the help of friendly robot assistants?

The Robot as Self and Other

In film, art, and literature, robots have appeared to cross all cultural and class lines. Sentient robots in stories have been portrayed almost as a kind of enslaved underclass in some scenarios, even as they've busily worked toward taking over the world in other scenarios.

Iconic robots can serve to reflect ubiquitous anxieties present in modern industrialized culture: perhaps unresolved guilt and fear about the consequences of maintaining an underclass or worker class (whether that be the continued and un-addressed exploitation of sentients, or the classic "robot uprising"), as well as a sense that maybe the collective will of the machinery we construct might be essentially shackling us to its agenda, rather than the other way around.

But just as our machines do in life, the robots represented by the exhibit pieces defy confinement to any one role or position, and instead overlap and inhabit multiple contexts. One universal feature of life (especially human life) is that it co-opts pieces of its environment over time, as is required to maintain itself as a process. Humans are particularly adept at this, to the point where we are not only becoming increasingly able to maintain ourselves in the face of circumstances that would assuredly have killed our ancestors, but also increasingly confronted by the blurring of boundaries between self, tool, and resource.

Fictionalized and aestheticized robots are perhaps the ultimate confrontation in this regard, existing as they do somewhere between extension-of-self (in tool form) and autonomous "other", and frequently muddling this distinction entirely.

The Robots: A Cultural Icon exhibit provides many representative examples of this muddling.

One stark set of line drawings (done in classic Chinese pen and ink style) shows a humanlike figure sailing through the air, borne on the back of a birdlike robot, into which another humanlike figure has been inserted or merged. It is impossible to tell who is calling the shots (pilot, craft, or passenger) and perhaps the point is that it is not necessarily useful to attempt to delineate such things in the first place, at least not in any absolute sense.

On a wall in the museum, a projector plays the Björk video, All is Full of Love on infinite repeat. The inclusion of this video in the exhibit was somewhat surprising to me at first (as you don't exactly need to go to a museum to access a popular music video these days), but in the context of the exhibit, viewers are encouraged to consider All is Full of Love in a mindset which is less MTV and more imagery-focused. I'd seen this video before and found it at once unsettling and gorgeous, and watching through it again my reaction was similar.

However, with this viewing of the video I also noticed a lot more of what I like to refer to as "stuff English teachers love", by which of course I mean "stuff that can be interpreted as having sexual connotations". Nevertheless, there is no human flesh to be seen in the video; the closest we get are the stylized humanlike faces of the two gynoids that move through varying stages of construction and deconstruction and entanglement and separation.

The video is also interesting in that it simultaneously shows robots of an obviously fantastic nature, and robots that are more realistic and familiar to anyone who has ever seen an actual industrial robot. The gynoids look more human than the faceless hydraulic mechanisms disassembling them in reverse, but who built the mechanisms? Which type of machine more properly suggests the usual output of human will? And more importantly, what does each of us want the output of our will to look like?



On a less serious note, the exhibit also provides a set of easels at which visitors can sit and draw their own "robotic self-portrait" with provided crayons. Two mirrors printed with "robot face" outlines hang on the wall facing the easel seat, presumably so we'll be compelled to line up our actual faces within the outlines. This was all a bit silly, but too much fun to resist; I spent about two minutes sketching a (very rough) AnneBot.

The idea of the exercise is to draw a robot and think about how your robot reflects how you see yourself. I'm not exactly sure what my result says about me (if it says anything at all), but it was neat to have the opportunity to sit and play with crayons in a public place. And the exercise did get me thinking about how robotic imagery has historically tended to communicate things about both its creators and the cultures they inhabit.

Robots That Think And Feel

Text painted on one of the exhibit's walls declares: "The bipedal humanoid robot with fully developed artificial intelligence may be realized in the near future".

As is commonly the case with declarations such as this, little is offered in explanation of what "artificial intelligence" actually means, let alone what it means for such a thing to be "fully developed". My guess, though, is that when people make predictions about "fully developed AI", they are envisioning artificial "brains" that function exactly the way human brains do, albeit on some substrate other than biological wetware.

Such "AIs" have existed in literature for quite some time, however, they are conspicuously absent from the real world. My guess is that they will likely continue their absence indefinitely. Even if "artificial humans" were feasible to construct, humans of sufficiently differing internal architecture seem to have a tremendously difficult time communicating effectively with one another -- even the oft-cited human superpower of "empathy" seems in practice often restricted to persons sufficiently similar to the self.

So the question emerges: how do robots, both fictional and actual, reflect how humans think and feel about the very processes of thinking and feeling?

In some depictions, robots are assumed stonily indifferent and consequently feared. After all what could be more dangerous than an enemy who does not see you as an enemy, but as a pile of raw materials to be exploited or recycled? In other cases, the perceived hyper-rationality of the robot is valorized and sought as an ideal, "perfect" state in which the purity of reason might shine forth without the messy complexities wrought by amygdalae and endocrine systems.

As far as I'm concerned, both these reactions are rather puerile. Robots and emotion are inextricably intertwined, no matter how you look at it, and it makes little sense to infuse them with such superlative and impersonal power whether you're drawing them or thinking about actually building them. So it was refreshing to see at the exhibit a range of different depictions, some of which went for direct subversion of the stereotypes.

One piece that compelled much in the way of lingering and staring on my part was a small, unassuming-looking "shadow box" hung on the wall in one room. Its area probably did not exceed a square foot; it commanded attention not by looming over you in the imposing manner of the giant Styrobot in the adjoining room, but by drawing you in like an open window into a miniature world.

A toy robot sits on a chair in this piece, in what looks like a handmade doll's-house living room. Tissues (both boxed and used) clutter the area; the robot also clutches a crumpled tissue in his hand. A portrait hangs on the rear wall of the shadow box/living room, depicting (presumably) the occupant's Robot Grandma. A tiny model television with a real, working screen plays clips from Fritz Lang's Metropolis.

And if you look closely, you can see a tiny lacquered tear on the watching robot's cheek.

Even if we are truly talking about robots as tools -- actually emotionless mechanisms employed in the extension of human intent -- we are still dealing with emotion-infused machines, as the emotions in that case are ours. (Sometimes our machines even prosthetically become parts of us as well, to the point where having someone else touch or take them without our permission feels like a bodily violation, because that's exactly what it is.*)

And if we are talking about fictional robots equipped with some measure of autonomy via artificial-intelligence mechanisms, you would be hard-pressed to find a literary example of a robotic character that has not been anthropomorphized in some way. And a particular challenge for artists and roboticists alike is that of determining how to "blend" mechanical and human attributes effectively for whatever purpose the robotic character or actual robot is being invoked.

On that note, I've been to a few AI-themed lectures and listened to numerous episodes of robot-related podcasts (such as Talking Robots, which I highly recommend), and one thing that seems to be coming up a lot these days is the notion of robots being designed according to [typical] human reciprocity expectations.

What concerns me (a little bit) here is that perhaps the reason why we see statements like "We'll have fully functional artificial intelligence in the near future!" on the walls of art museums is because so many public and popular demonstrations of robotics technology feature creations that set off human "comfort and familiarity" cues.

Of course this is not problematic in and of itself, but whenever I come across an article about how robots are beginning to demonstrate social reciprocity, I can't help but be reminded that actual existing people (who might not show these typical reciprocity signs in easily-recognizable ways, due to being autistic or otherwise atypical) are still being written off as "empty shells".

Don't get me wrong -- I think robotics research is super neat, and I can see how studying human reactions to a robot's nonverbal behavior might yield fascinating insights into multiple aspects of social cognition. But at the same time, I think it is interesting to look at the assumptions behind the display (or lack thereof) of certain "signals", in humans and in robots.

Hence, one of the things I've always appreciated about "robot art" is how it often actually manages to acclimate people to atypical expressions of both emotion and cognition. Iconic robots do not always look or even act typically "human" (R2D2, for instance), and yet, people come to love them anyway.

Closing Notes

Robots: Evolution of a Cultural Icon definitely lived up to my expectations (which, admittedly, were along the lines of, "This exhibit will contain cool, robot-themed art pieces"). The exhibit was not large (it spanned only part of a single floor in the multi-story museum), but it didn't need to be. I was actually rather pleased at how the setup and structure of the exhibit allowed visitors time and space for reflection on individual works -- the pieces were not crammed or crowded together, and while there was a guided tour option, this was not mandatory. The environment was also quiet and clean and not sensory-overloading (hooray for sensory accessibility!). It probably took about two hours to go through the entire exhibit (and that time span included several instances of lingering a long while to examine particular pieces) -- a pleasant length for a weekend afternoon outing.

I have definitely been inspired by what I saw, not only to write about it as I have here, but to keep exploring the cultural and artistic contextualization of robots in addition to the mechanisms by which actual robots operate in the real world.



After all, we and the robots we build, draw, and create as characters are essentially vectors along which the stuff of the universe explores different avenues of expression. And what is so strange, given that, about the idea that all (whether it be biological or mechanical) could indeed be "full of love", as Björk's video suggests, hopefully without irony? Perhaps the separations we try to enforce between what is "life" and what is hard cold material are in fact, overly facile.

In any case, it will be interesting to keep watching the interplay between real robots, humans, fictional robots, and robot-themed art as the world and its people change over time. And while there is no way to predict what shape this interplay may take in the far-off future, one thing seems likely to remain certain: our iconic robots have (and will continue to have) much to tell us about our individual and collective fantasies, fears, dreams, and priorities.

---

*Before any econ-libertarians get excited, I'm not talking about things like taxation when I talk about people feeling justifiably violated when others touch things that are "attached" to them. Rather, I'm talking about situations where someone is (for instance) using a wheelchair, and someone else comes up and starts pushing them without asking. In other words, symbolic value in the form of money is one thing, but prostheticized objects are quite another.

Something To Leave The House For: Robot Art!

I am so going to this: an exhibition of robot-themed art at the San Jose Museum of Art. From the web site:

Robots: Evolution of a Cultural Icon examines the development of robot iconography in fine art over the past 50 years. In 1920, the term robot was coined from a Czech word robota, which means tedious labor. Since then, the image and the idea of a robot have evolved remarkably from an awkward, mechanical creature to a sophisticated android with artificial intelligence and the potential for human-like consciousness. As robotic technology catches up with the wild imagination of science fiction novels, movies, and animation, dreams and fears anticipated in these stories may also become reality. Artists included in the exhibition have responded to the technological innovation with optimism, pessimism, and humor, presenting work that ultimately explores our ambivalent attitudes towards robots.

I'm not sure when I'm going yet, but I will be sure to write a report here once I've been. Yay for robot art!

The Domed, Evenly Climatized Cities of 2008

The fine folks at Modern Mechanix (one of the best things on the Internet, in my opinion, with its impressive archive of old science articles and other miscellany) bring to us this week a 1968 Mechanix Illustrated piece entitled 40 Years in the Future, by someone named James Berry.

I love this kind of thing. It's fun to see what they got right, and what they got wrong.

Probably the most accurate stuff in the entire piece had to do with commerce and/or money. I wonder why? For instance:

Computers not only keep track of money, they make spending it easier. TV-telephone shopping is common. To shop, you simply press the numbered code of a giant shopping center. You press another combination to zero in on the department and the merchandise in which you are interested. When you see what you want, you press a number that signifies “buy,” and the household computer takes over, places the order, notifies the store of the home address and subtracts the purchase price from your bank balance. Much of the family shopping is done this way. Instead of being jostled by crowds, shoppers electronically browse through the merchandise of any number of stores.

(I especially like the term "TV-telephone" -- that's a pretty darn fine description of how a goodly number of people use the Internet.)

And this:

Computers also handle travel reservations, relay telephone messages, keep track of birthdays and anniversaries, compute taxes and even figure the monthly bills for electricity, water, telephone and other utilities.

(But what they didn't predict was that people would have computers capable of doing this stuff that you could fit in your pocket!)

The predictions about media and education were somewhat more marginal. They did pick up on the whole "instantaneous information availability" thing, however, they seemed fixated on things called "TV tapes" and seemed to expect that in 2008 we'd all still have to trek to the library to access media (though to be fair, this is certainly true for people who can't afford computers, and yes, such people do actually exist -- as do people who don't have flush toilets, just to keep everyone grounded here).

Also, while "distance learning" classes are actually real, they are far from the most common means of achieving formal schooling, particularly for children. I guess the people predicting computerized classes for youngsters neglected to note that the primary purpose of school is, in fact, as Paul Graham notes, "...to keep kids locked up in one place for a big chunk of the day so adults can get things done."

In fact most schooling—from first grade through college—consists of programmed TV courses or lectures via closed circuit. Students visit a campus once or twice a week for personal consultations or for lab work that has to be done on site. Progress of each student is followed by computer, which assigns end term marks on the basis of tests given throughout the term. Besides school lessons, other educational material is available for TV viewing. You simply press a combination of buttons and the pages flash on your home screen. The world’s information is available to you almost instantaneously...

Best-selling books are on TV tape and can be borrowed or rented from tape libraries.

They also accurately predicted microwave ovens and disposable dinnerware (it seems like a lot of people in the 50s and 60s were obsessed with being able to throw things away...what was up with that?), but apparently not the fall into disfavor of the word "housewife" (or the notion that women might not always be relegated to kitchen duty...even in Really High Tech kitchens):

The housewife simply determines in advance her menus for the week, then slips prepackaged meals into the freezer and lets the automatic food utility do the rest. At preset times, each meal slides into the microwave oven and is cooked or thawed. The meal then is served on disposable plastic plates. These plates, as well as knives, forks and spoons of the same material, are so inexpensive they can be discarded after use.

And then we have the stuff that manages to be funny, telling, and wrong all at once:

The car accelerates to 150 mph in the city’s suburbs, then hits 250 mph in less built-up areas, gliding over the smooth plastic road. You whizz past a string of cities, many of them covered by the new domes that keep them evenly climatized year round. Traffic is heavy, typically, but there’s no need to worry. The traffic computer, which feeds and receives signals to and from all cars in transit between cities, keeps vehicles at least 50 yds. apart. There hasn’t been an accident since the system was inaugurated.

Oh, if only we had awesome fast self-driving hovercars and No Accidents! That's something I'd love to see, but that would require a massive change in infrastructure -- one that I don't see on the horizon anytime soon. I'm not sure about the whole "dome covered cities" thing, though...what is this, Logan's Run?

The average work day is about four hours.

(Ha! Ha ha ha. Ahem. No. Just no.)

Go read the whole article yourself, though...it's quite a find!

Facing the Quasi-Autonomous Robot Monsters Under The Bed, Part I

Commenter Geoffrey asked a whole slew of questions in response to my post on ethics and robots and autonomy, oh my!. And they aren't simple-to-answer questions. In fact, they are precisely the kind of questions I frequently avoid addressing because of their can-of-worms nature.

But I've never been very good at coming up with excuses -- more often than not, eventually I'll realize that it's taking more effort to keep explaining why I'm avoiding something than it would to just go ahead and confront the darn thing. That's where the title of this post comes from: at a certain point, thinking about the monsters (quasi-autonomous robot sort or otherwise) that might be under the bed (and how to avoid them) starts to become more exhausting and annoying than just switching on the light and proving that either there aren't any monsters at all, or just getting to know them a little better if there are.

So while this post (the first in a series) will by no means address these questions to the extent that they likely need to be addressed, it will at least be a start. I figure it's a good chance to at least try and get some of the language sorted out in my head for discussing issues like this, since they seem to come up rather a lot, and I usually respond by saying "I haven't thought that through well enough to comment yet".

In the following, G precedes each of Geoffrey's questions/statements, and A precedes each of my responses.

G: (1) What do you mean by autonomous? As far as I can tell from your post, it seems that autonomy, according to your philosophy, is the ability to make decisions for one's self. However, what does this mean?

A: Most dictionaries (see here for an example of this) seem to define "autonomy" in terms like independence, freedom, self-direction, and self-governance. I don't have any argument with the dictionary in that regard, however, in this discussion, the "autonomy" I have most in mind is that which describes a discrete and independently-operating locus of consciousness, awareness, and thought.

In this sense, humans and cats and even mice can be said to be "autonomous". Every human, cat, and mouse has some level of wholly private experience that no other entity can directly access. That is the usual sense in which I think about autonomy -- there are other complicating layers and definitions on top of that one, some involving decision-making ability and legal sorts of independence from external coercion and control, but the basic unit of "autonomy" for me is the individual mind.

As far as what it means for an entity to be capable of making decisions for itself, that's another question entirely. It's also a question that depends on what you'd consider a "decision" to be, and whether you automatically require explanations of agency in addressing that concept.

In some respects, entities (we can assume to be) wholly lacking in minds are capable of "making decisions" -- say you write a function in C that will output one string if a variable has a value of less than five and a different string if a variable has a value of five or more. Many of us would, at least colloquially, say that the function decides which string to output based on what its input value is. And if this function existed in the context of a program where any of multiple functions might be called in response to higher-level inputs, we might say that the program decides which functions it is going to call.

But if we dig a little deeper, it's clear that the colloquial conventions in which program behavior is commonly discussed do not reflect the (arguably) "ultimate" sources of the program's behavior. The software engineer writing the program in fact decides in advance what the program's outputs are going to be. She decides what inputs will prompt which functions to be called, and she also decides what criteria will determine the outputs of each function.

But! Say we dig even deeper than that! Say the software engineer is writing her program according to a set of requirements handed to her by her boss. Her boss may not even know the C language himself; all he knows is what he wants the program to do. So he provides "inputs" to the software engineer in the form of requirements, which are probably written in "natural language" as opposed to code or pseudocode. The engineer then takes the requirements and processes them into a C program.

But let's not stop there! Say the boss got the requirements from the customer over the phone. Furthermore, say that the customer speaks only Chinese, whereas the boss speaks both Chinese and English. The boss, in this case, has to translate the customer's requirements into English so that the software engineer (who doesn't know a word of Chinese) can understand them. This entails the boss having to make a lot of decisions regarding what the customer likely meant by certain turns of phrase, and it also entails the boss having to think about what points to emphasize most strongly so that the engineer gets a sense of the customer's priorities.

Now, lest anyone think I'm veering into the realm of cybernetic totalism, let's pause a moment. While one could indeed condense the software engineer herself into a code-producing box into which you put requirements and out of which you get a software package, and while one could reduce the boss into a Chinese-English requirements translation machine, surely it is apparent that there are discontinuities in this instructional chain.

That is, as you move further away from any individual program output (let's say, a string printed on the screen that reads either "X is less than five" or "X is greater than or equal to five"), things become less and less easy to determine, and far more subject to uncontrollable variables.

When writing a C program, the kinds of inputs the computer gets are constrained to a relatively narrow set -- the programmer generally uses a keyboard interface to type the code in, and very specific rules of syntax must be followed in order for the program to do anything at all when it is compiled (much less the precise thing the programmer wants it to do).

What's more, as far as any of us knows, present-day desktop PCs don't have anything like the "internal life" that we humans do, or like chimps or cats or mice do, even. Neither the computer nor the individual program being written is "autonomous" in the basic sense of having a private vista of self-aware reflection embedded in a larger reality -- notions of the computer and program "making decisions" are found only in a kind of linguistic folklore rather than in literal points of fact. Certainly one might suggest that "random quantum events" or short circuits or power surges might result in the program being written behaving differently than the programmer specifies it to behave, but essentially, the program's outputs are severely and rigorously constrained by the programmer's textual inputs.

The programmer, on the other hand, is autonomous in the sense defined at the beginning of this writing. She has a mind that nobody else can experience the way she experiences it. She can have thoughts that aren't detectable by any other people or by any measuring instruments. And she can, in the most general folk sense of the word "choice" (the one that ignores the vast and convoluted and seemingly never-ending Free Will Debate), choose:

(a) whether or not to write the program at all

(b) whether or not to come to work in the morning

(c) whether to keep this job or seek another

(d) whether to make one function perform a particular task (or split the task across two functions, one of which calls the other)

...or any number of other options that will affect the nature of the program, up to and including whether or not it comes into being at all.

Similarly, the engineer's boss can make a whole slew of decisions (from the vantage point of his autonomous perspective) that will also affect the fate of the program, albeit not as directly and obviously as the decisions made by the engineer will. He can, like the programmer, make decisions that result in the program not being written at all -- e.g., he might decide not to give her the requirements because he wants her to focus on a different task for the rest of the afternoon. He might decide to second-guess something the customer said on the basis of a perception that he knows slightly more about programming than the customer does (whether or not this is a wise move is beside the point for now). Etc.

And by extension, the customer can choose to describe the requirements in one way rather than another based on how important he or she believes this particular project to be -- e.g., s/he might be more thorough and concerned about making sure the engineer's boss really understands the requirements, or s/he might just rattle off the requirements vaguely and carelessly due to feeling that the project is inadequately funded to begin with.

So far, I've described the program's pseudo-decision-making process -- e.g., the fact that the program branches at certain points, but not due to any kind of internally conscious self-reflection on the program's or the PC's part. I've also described the "volitional-feeling" choices made by the engineer, her boss, and the customer. But there are other factors that can indirectly affect the program as well that come from the human agents in the instructional chain without necessarily feeling like choices.

For instance, if the engineer is tired or hungry, she might not consciously decide to make the program sloppier and less modular, but it might come out that way anyway because she's not performing at her best. Similarly, if the engineer is well-rested and cheerfully sipping away at her Mountain Dew (provided generously by the company), the program might come out in a much slicker and more efficient form -- again, without any conscious feeling on the engineer's part that she's choosing for the program to come out that way as a result of sentient and deliberate decision-making.

And if the boss is distracted by other projects when he's taking the customer call, he might inadvertently write down the requirements sloppily. He might make typographical errors by mistake. He might hear the customer say a Chinese phrase he doesn't recognize, at which point he'll look it up in his Chinese-English dictionary, and in doing so discover that there's another phrase he got wrong earlier in the conversation. In any case, the program is going to be affected by things the boss does and various inputs he might receive and consider on a non-volitional-feeling level. The same goes for the customer -- their instructions might seem to say one thing rather than another based on whether or not the customer has a scratchy throat, or based on background noise in the customer's or boss's office. And so on, and so forth.

This is probably a good point to address the following assertion of Geoffrey's:

G: It seems to me that if everything is contingent upon determining material processes, then everything is determined and true decisions don't exist.

A: Here we encounter the can of worms that is the Free Will Debate. I'll go into my own detailed thoughts on that debate in a later post in this series, but for now I would like to ask Geoffrey what he considers to be a "true decision". In my example above, I'd be plenty satisfied to classify the "volitional-feeling" choices made by the engineer, the boss, and the customer as about as close to "true decisions" as humans can assert the existence of. Certainly, one can try and claim that everything about that person's life up to the moment they made the decision about this program actually "determined" its final state, and that there was nothing truly "volitional" about their decision, but one cannot deny that in everyday life, things we do on purpose feel qualitatively different than things we don't do on purpose.

Additionally, there's a whole weird and interesting realm of cognitive psychology related to matters of coercion and "compulsion". Yes, people can be coerced (by other people, by physiological inputs registered subconsciously, etc.), and in some cases people might "feel like" they are acting volitionally even when they're mainly responding to deep, low-level impulses like fear and reward. But at the same time, people are also capable of emerging from coercion and being able to look back and identify when they were actually being coerced (or compelled) and when they weren't.

In light of all that, even if you're a "hard determinist" in the "we're all just objects going through the unconsciously-programmed motions that could have been extrapolated at the moment of the Big Bang if only someone had had a big enough computer, and nobody really makes any kind of meaningful choices at all because of this" sense (I'm not one of those, by the way), I don't see why you'd want to ignore the many and various levels of "feelings of volition" and emergence from/descent into coercion that humans and presumably other entities seem to experience. Clearly, there's something interesting going on in the brain across all these experiences. But more on that in Part II.