Dr. Heylighen,
My name is Chhavi Sachdev and I am a writer for Science and Theology News (formerly Research News & Opportunities in Science and Theology). I am currently writing a story on a web-based agent-simulation model that seeks to interface between questions of science and religion, such as the nature of cooperation or altruism and variables that could be personalized for scientists and theologians alike in accounting for faith or the nature of a supreme power. I'd like your opinion on this tool, called the Theological Artificial Intelligence Simulation Tool, or THAIST (still in prototype phase).
More on THAIST can be found here: http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/5/1/5.html
To that end, I have a few questions for you.
*What is your field of study? Please describe it as simply as possible.
Evolutionary cybernetics, i.e. the study of how goal-directed
organization (studied by cybernetics) can arise through the processes
of blind variation, (re)combination and selection (studied by
evolutionary theory). see http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/EVOLCYB.html
*What do you think of this application?
It makes me smile ;-)
*How does this application fit into the ongoing research in the field? What does it mean for the the field of AI or game theory or theology, for that matter?
The intention of drawing theological debate into a more
systematic, scientific mode of investigation by using simulation
models to explore various religious explanations of altruism can only
be applauded. It may even provide some new inspiration to more
traditional simulation approaches.
However, I don't believe such a model can ever answer
fundamental theological questions such as "Does God
exist?". The postulated relations in the model between agents
and a "God" entity could just as well be labeled
differently, as relations between agents and Nature, Instinct,
Culture, Society, Morals, Institutions, Authority, and a whole
variety of other supra-individual systems that have been postulated
as imparting some sense of altruism ("grace") onto
individual agents.
My own approach in this regard is to integrate all these
hypotheses into the single concept of a "Mediator", as a
self-organizing, emergent form of organization that steers the
agents' actions towards a more altruistic (or in my terminology,
"synergetic") interaction. Since the mediator emerges
through simple variation and selection from the very interactions
that it comes to coordinate, it cannot be interpreted as ordained by
a pre-existing deity. See
http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/Papers/MediatorEvolution.html
--
Francis Heylighen
Center "Leo Apostel"
Free University of Brussels
http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/HEYL.html
Francis Heylighen
Center "Leo Apostel"
Free University of Brussels
http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/HEYL.html
