Emergence and Cognition: Towards a Synthetic Paradigm in AI and Cognitive Science

0 In this paper I take the risk of predicting how the conflict between anti-symbolic Vs symbolic, emergentist Vs explicit approaches to cognition and action will be solved in the next decades. I do not believe in a ‘paradigmatic revolution’ and I argue in favour of a ‘synthesis’. I will illustrate how a synthetic paradigm can be built through the notion of different levels of reality description and of scientific theory, and through their interconnections thanks to bridge-theories, cross-layered theories, and layered ontologies. I will provide several examples of bridge-theories and layered ontologies with special attention to agents and multi-agent systems. In particular I will examine the theory of the mental counterparts of social objects illustrating the mental facet of norms and of commitment; the grounding of social power in the personal power; the cognitive bases of organisations. I will propose a layerd approach to the notions of agent, delegation, communication, conflict, as they apply to different levels of agenthood. I will sketch the problem of emergence amo ng intelligent agents by exploring the problem of unplanned cooperation and social functions. I will conclude with the importance of the new “social” computational paradigm in AI, and the emergent character of computation in Agent Based Computing. 1 Premise. At the frontier of a millennium: The challenge 0 This paper is a revised and quite extended version of my invited talk to IBERAMIA’98 Lisbon October 1998. I would like to thank Helder Coelho for inviting me and for his comments, and the participants in the conference for interesting discussions. Will the “representational paradigm” that characterised Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Cognitive Science (CS) from their very birth be eliminated in the 21th century? Will this paradigm be replaced by the new one based on dynamic systems, connectionism, situatedness, embodiedness, etc.? Will this be the end of the AI ambitious project? I do not think so. Challenges and attacks to AI and CS have been hard and radical in the last 15 years, however I believe that the next century will start with a renewed rush of AI and we will not assist to a paradigmatic revolutio, with connectionism replacing cognitivism and symbolic models; emergentist, dynamic and evolutionary models eliminating reasoning on explicit representations and planning; neuroscience (plus phenomenology) eliminating cognitive processing; situatedness, reactivity, cultural constructivism eliminating general concepts, context independent abstractions, ideal-typical models. I claim that the major scientific challenge of the first part of the century will precisely be the construction of a new “synthetic” paradigm: a paradigm that puts together, in a principled and noneclectic way, cognition and emergence, information processing and self-organisation, reactivity and intentionality, situatedness and planning, etc. [Cas98a] [Tag96]. AI is going out of a crisis: crisis of grants, of prestige, and of identity. This crisis was not only due on my viewto exaggerated expectations and overselling of specific technologies (like expert systems) tout court identified with AI. It was due to the restriction of cultural interests and influence of the discipline, and of its ambitions; to the dominance either of the logicist approach (identifying logics and theory, logics and foundations) or of a mere technological/applicative view of AI (see the debate about the ‘pure reason’ [McD87] and ‘rigor mortis’). New domains were growing as external and antagonistic to AI: neural nets, reactive systems, evolutionary computing, CSCW, cognitive modelling, etc. Hard attacks were made to the "classical" AI approach: situatedness [Suc87], anti-symbolism, reactivity [Bro89] [Agr89], dynamic systems, bounded and limited resources, uncertainty, and so on (on the challenges to AI and CS see also [Tha96]). However, by relaxing previous frameworks; by some contagion and hybridisation, by incorporating some of those criticisms; by re-absorbing as its own descendants neural nets, reactive systems, evolutionary computing, etc.; by developing important internal domains like machine learning and DAI-MAS; by important developments in logics and in languages; and finally with the new successful Agents framework, AI is now in a revival phase. It is trying to recover all the original challenges of the discipline, its strong scientific identity, its cultural role and influence. We may in fact say that there is already a neo-cognitivism and a new AI. In this new AI of the '90s systems and models are conceived for reasoning and acting in open unpredictable worlds, with limited and uncertain knowledge, in real time, with bounded (both cognitive and material) resources, interfering --either co-operatively or competitively-with other systems. The new password is interaction [Bob91]: interaction with an evolving environment; among several, distributed and heterogeneous artificial systems in a network; with human users; among humans through computers. The new AI and CS are -to meonly the beginning of a highly transformative and adaptive reaction to all those radical and fruitful challenges. They are paving the way for the needed synthesis and are starting the job.