Dov must surely have intended “stigmergy”! David McFarland certainly does: pp. 166, 178, 198. I hope this is picked up for the hardcopy review of McFarland’s Guilty Robots, Happy Dogs: The Question of Alien Minds.
Robots can be simply reactive to certain elements of their environment; they can demonstrate ‘stigmercy’, or ‘[t]he production of behavior that is a direct consequence of the effects produced in the local environment by previous behavior’ (219); a robotic ‘goal-achieving system’ can change its behavior (by stopping, for instance) when a certain goal has been achieved; a ‘goal-seeking system’ is designed to work towards the accomplishment of a certain goal ‘without the goal being represented within the system’ (11), while the behavior of ‘goal-directed’ systems is informed by such representations.
manwithoutqualities 