Identifying Contemplative Intensity in Cognitive Architectures for Virtual-Agent Minds by Jeremy O. Turner M.A. (Interactive Arts and Technology), Simon Fraser University, 2010 B.A. (History in Art), University of Victoria, 1997 Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the School of Interactive Arts and Technology Faculty of Communication, Art and Technology Jeremy O. Turner 2018 SIMON FRASER UNIVERSITY Fall 2018 Copyright in this work rests with the author. Please ensure that any reproduction or re-use is done in accordance with the relevant national copyright legislation. Approval Name: Jeremy O. Turner Degree: Doctor of Philosophy (Interactive Arts & Technology) Title: Identifying Contemplative Intensity in Cognitive Architectures for Virtual-Agent Minds Examining Committee: Chair: William Odom Assistant Professor Steve Dipaola Senior Supervisor Professor Jim Bizzocchi Co-Supervisor Associate Professor Joseph Thompson Internal Examiner Sessional Instructor Psychology Hamid Ekbia External Examiner Professor Informatics/Cognitive Science Indiana University, Bloomington Date Defended/Approved: November 29, 2018 ii Ethics Statement iii Abstract This interdisciplinary dissertation identifies contemplative intensity in cognitive architectures for virtual-agent minds. This research semantically interprets contemplative intensity through rubrics derived from Kantian Aesthetic Philosophy and Crawfordian Interaction Design. This dissertation adopted mentalist rather than behaviorist epistemological approaches towards exploring the artificial psyche and the interactive capabilities of a virtual-agent’s mind (from mechanistic finite-state machines to “deep thinkers”). A qualitative methodology was selected to triangulate hermeneutic exegesis alongside an expert interview validation process. These methods scrutinized the: state-of-the-art; architectural cognitive components, interconnections; and their relationship to five speculative virtual-agent contemplation scenarios. This hermeneutic exegesis was conducted with graph-based flow-chart representations of these scenarios. These graphs were created with the PyPhi calculator which normally deals with quantitative measurements of consciousness (i.e. Integrated Information Theory, aka. IIT) rather than the qualitative assessment of contemplative intensity. These flow-chart examples represent the component configurations of three established cognitive architectures: ACT- R, SOAR, and CLARION. The purpose of this study was to determine whether contemplative intensity could be detectable through IIT-graph visualization at an architectural level in a virtual-mind and which cognitive architecture (and/or architectural components) was most likely to intensify contemplation for this mind in a virtual world. These flow-chart illustrations representing architecturally enhanced minds helped categorize virtual-agents according to their overall cognitive capabilities and provided discussion inspiration for the experts during the interviewing process. A combination of solo hermeneutic exegesis and expert opinions determined that the IIT lens could not sufficiently qualify contemplative intensity for virtual-agent minds at an architectural resolution level of flow-chart analysis. On a positive note, the experts confirmed the validity of the mentalist epistemological perspective as well as the initial assumption that CLARION was the best architecture to intensify contemplation. However, these experts attributed their CLARION preference to architecturally-agnostic metacognitive properties rather than to CLARION’s idiosyncratic architectural configuration. These experts also insisted on the value of extra-architectural mechanisms and algorithms as well as the semantics from the virtual environment. These additional findings further confirm the qualitative limitations of the IIT lens for architecturally identifying contemplative intensity in virtual-agent minds. This dissertation concluded with proposed heuristics and suggestions for future research. iv Keywords: Virtual-Agents; Artificial General Intelligence; Cognitive Architectures; Aesthetic Philosophy; Contemplation; Integrated Information Theory v Dedication This dissertation thesis is dedicated to my son, Nolan Turner-Skuce (b. 2005). Raised on video-games, Nolan has been very curious as to what it is like to reach the “highest level” in school. I can now show him what is it like to finish the largest “boss battle” in academia. Nolan might live in a time in the near future where aesthetically engineered super- intelligent agents interact with him in a synthetic reality. Such a reality would blur the semantic boundaries between "virtual" and "real". vi Acknowledgements I wish to thank my family, friends, supervisory committee and dissertation support group for their continued support of my academic endeavours. I also extend thanks to the AI/AGI communities on social networks such as: Facebook (AI Philosophy Group), Quora, GameAIDev, InstaEDU, and LinkedIn. I am grateful for the generous feedback I have received from the various AI/AGI scholars and practitioners that I have corresponded with via email. These experts include: Juergen Schmidhuber, Eray Ozkural, Selmer Bringsjord, Alex Champandard and Nate Derbinsky. Max Tegmark at MIT deserves an honorable mention for providing me with Tononi’s manifesto via email. It was Tegmark’s talk at BICA 2014 (MIT) that inspired me to consider Tononi’s lens. I would also like to thank Jim Andrews for acting as my AI tutor by helping me to rapidly gain some degree of computational literacy with AI-specific equations and fundamental AI concepts. Jim Andrews and Neil Bliss also helped me resolve some crucial technical and conceptual ambiguities with Balduzzi’s and Tononi’s key article about the heuristics for counting ɸ (phi) bits. I want to also give credit to Marek Hatala’s AI course and Philippe Pasquier’s Metacreation course. Those courses allowed me to consider my AI ideas with computational rigour. I am also grateful to my programming-colleague Michael Nixon who co-authored my first paper about my own virtual-agent, “Qiezli” and my second paper about “SL Bots” (co-authored by Jim Bizzocchi). Both Nixon and I are grateful to the Odyssey Island community (Second Life) for interacting with Qiezli and providing valuable heuristic feedback. I would like to thank Ulysses Bernardet and Miles Thorogood for discussing the possibilities of AI Cognitive Architectures. I would also like to thank Graeme McCaig for ensuring that my hermeneutic lens worked properly and for providing valuable feedback during my proposal defense. I would also like to Ben Unterman for giving me advice on how to manage my work-flow and Ethan Soutar-Rau for expert-level feedback on finite-state machines and the Two-Machine problem. I would like to thank Jeffrey Ventrella for our many skytrain conversations about AI innovations and their aesthetic relationship to avatars/virtual-agents. I would also like to thank Marbas who governs the “mechanical arts” for providing me with otherworldly dissertation inspiration. I would also like to thank Michael Heidt for converting the PyPhi calculator to a cloned version running on my own server to test whether the IIT lens was appropriate. Finally, I would like to thank former committee member, John Bowes. John provided valuable insight into the need for setting up boundary conditions about a particular aesthetic intensity, the sublime. vii Table of Contents Approval .............................................................................................................................ii Ethics Statement ............................................................................................................... iii Abstract .............................................................................................................................iv Dedication .........................................................................................................................vi Acknowledgements .......................................................................................................... vii Table of Contents ............................................................................................................ viii List of Tables ................................................................................................................... xiii List of Figures.................................................................................................................. xiv List of Acronyms .............................................................................................................. xvi Glossary ......................................................................................................................... xvii Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 1.1. Dissertation Chapter Overview ................................................................................ 6 1.2. Research Subjects: Virtual-Agents .......................................................................... 7 1.3. Dissertation Scope ................................................................................................... 9 1.3.1. Overall Research Focus ............................................................................. 10 1.3.2. A Focus on Constructionist and Hybrid Cognitive Engineering Approaches ...............................................................................................