Endothelial Cells are Intelligent, Perceiving-Acting Agents

In my last post, I laid out a new project I'm working on about the perceptual life of cells. I spent the day at the Crick Institute recently to move the project forward, and this post is about developing the perception-action analysis in more detail. The goal in this post is to address the first question that needs an answer, specifically, are the cells perceiving-acting agents, or just doing something more mechanical?. In the next post, I will apply our task dynamical analysis to frame the project (from Wilson & Golonka, 2013). 

To cut to the chase, I'm now pretty happy that a perception-action analysis is appropriate at this particular cellular level. I set a high bar for this (mostly by reading Turvey & Carello papers, which should illustrate that height pretty clearly :) but it seems clear the cells are behaving with respect to information, and not simply being buffeted by forces. Applying some key criteria, and resting on the hard work of Turvey & Carello showing that intelligence isn't about brains but about behaviour, I will claim here that Bentley's endothelial cells are agents that exhibit intelligent behaviour, and there is a clear need for a behavioural scale contribution to any explanation of that behaviour.

You Cannot Perceive a Relational Affordance (A Purple Peril)

One of the more enduring arguments in ecological psychology is about the best way to formally describe affordances. The two basic approaches are that they are dispositions (Turvey, Scarantino, me) or that they are relations (Reitveld, Kiverstein, Chemero). The argument has mostly settled down into just agreeing to disagree, but I am still convinced that the relational analysis is critically flawed and I want to try and either get them to solve the problem or end the debate once and for all. I've reviewed this in a bunch of places (e.g. here, here, and here)  but this post is just setting out my challenge once and for all; you cannot perceive a relational affordance, and there is as yet no good story about how to learn new affordances.

My problem stems from this Gibson (1979) quote (we all have our favourite, but this one seems to cut to the heart of it)

The central question for the theory of affordances is not whether they exist and are real but whether information is available in ambient light for perceiving them.

Right now, the affordances-are-relations camp have no story for how these can structure light (or other energy media) and therefore create information about themselves. They are therefore, as currently formulated, not even in principle perceptible. This means affordances-as-relations is of zero use to the ecological approach. 

Bruinberg et al (2018) tried to address this problem, but as I blogged here their solution is not ecological information and it reveals that these authors do not as yet understand what information actually is. My challenge is therefore this: tell me a story in which affordances-as-relations are able to create ecological information in energy arrays, and might therefore be learned, and the debate will be back on. Until then, affordances-as-dispositions is the only account that formalises the right properties and the debate is over. 

Gibson vs Physics: Gibson Wins, at the Ecological Scale

One of the interesting questions that popped out of our discussions with Ken Aizawa about Runeson and the Ames Room is this: did Gibson and his followers banish physics and geometry from his psychology? And if so, is Runeson breaking this prohibition by talking geometrically about the Ames Room? And how can you banish physics anyway - what the hell?

I think I've convinced Ken that there is no such prohibition in the comments at the posts linked to above (I think). But it's a topic of fairly central importance to the ecological approach, so I wanted to summarise some of these ideas and examples here.

Affordances, Part 1: Affordances are real dispositions of the environment

It turns out I've been pretty confused about affordances for a long time. This is partly due to the fact that I don't (yet) do research on affordances and so don't spend much time thinking about them. However, it is also partly due to the fact that affordances are fucking weird and much has been written that is confused, incomplete and wrong.

I got back into thinking about affordances in detail by reading Anthony Chemero's mostly excellent new book, Radical Embodied Cognitive Science (Google Books preview). Actually, everything I've written so far is actually me getting my head in the game to go after something I think Tony has gotten needlessly wrong; for various reasons he thinks its time to lower the specification requirement for perceptual information. I think the reasons are flawed and that it's not even close to being an empirical reality that specification is not needed; but this is all material for later on.

When Tony talks about affordances, he proposes that they are relations. He contrasts this to the generally accepted Turvey formulation, that affordances are properties, specifically dispositional properties. This, it turns out, is a key internal battle that is ongoing within ecological psychology. I was initially on Tony's side: Turvey's account has always seemed wrong to me. But after some discussion with my PhD advisor, and after reading Heft's summary of what Gibson meant, I'm back on the side of affordances as properties.