Robology

Study robot behavior (individual or "social") as one would study human behavior: using the tools of social sciences. 

Now, since we may have access to the routines that generate their programmed intentionality, the results of this "robological" (anthropo-logical) study can be confronted with predictions from a more reductionistic, bottom-up approach to complex systems analysis. 

And even if one does not have access to these routines, the approach can be interesting: the intuition here is that when a system (animal or computer) becomes extremely complex, there are emergent behaviors that cannot be captured or understood by the bottom-up analysis. The tools of social sciences may be needed anyway (for asking the right questions and answering in the same non reductionistic language).

Alvaro Cassinelli
Tokyo, 17.9.2009


ps: Idea paper for IACAP? (International Association for Computing And Philosophy)

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