Models of Environment

Herbert Simon

The thirteenth in a series of excerpts from Minds, Models and Milieux: Commemorating the Centennial of the Birth of Herbert Simon.

Marcin Miłkowski

Herbert A. Simon is well known for his account of bounded rationality. Whereas classical economics idealized economic agency and framed rational choice in terms of the decision theory, Simon insisted that agents need not be optimal in their choices. They might be mere satisficers, i.e., attain good enough goals rather than optimal ones. At the same time, behaviorally as well as computationally, bounded rationality is much more realistic.

One of the most important factors in his theorizing on bounded rationality was the structure of the environment of the agent (Simon, 1956). This might sound surprising today because Simon is all too often classified as one of the proponents of classical, symbolic cognitive science. After all, he favored symbolic models over situated action frameworks (Vera and Simon, 1993). However, already in his 1956 paper, he acknowledged that his account of bounded rationality is similar to robotic models built by Grey Walter. Moreover, Simon’s (1996) story about the ant that uses the environment to make the navigational task easier has become one of the classical examples for later proponents of the extended mind (Clark and Chalmers, 1998). So why did Simon stress the situatedness of cognition and denied that symbolic modeling is to be rejected? Was he deluded or self-contradictory?

The purpose of this chapter is to understand the role of the structure of the environment in Simon’s work on models of cognition. It will be shown that his modeling methodology includes both internals of the information-processing architectures and environmental constraints. The inner architecture is important insofar as it is a constraint on adaptation to the environment, and remains invariant over multiple different environments; hence, it is relevant to explaining behavior in any environment. For this reason, physical symbol systems are to be understood as both situated and adaptive; otherwise, they cannot be flexible and support cognition. Even if Simon’s treatment of symbols remains vague and underspecified, the idea that naturalistic models need to interleave internal and external states remains surprisingly timely.

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Walker Percy Wednesday 83

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There is nothing like a liberal gone sour.

*****

I told him this for two reasons. One was that it was the only reason he would believe, believing as he did that I was still a liberal and therefore capable of any madness. (Yet curiously it was for him an understandable madness: you know how old Lance is, etc., etc.)

The other reason was that my explanation was, in a sense, true.
“Yeah,” said Macklin. “A wonderful cause. In fact I agree with you, that’s what they need.”

*****

The drug was acting. A certain distance set in between me and myself. Here’s what I hoped for from the pills: a little space between me and the pain. I understood what Margot said but I couldn’t stand it. But how do you live with something you can’t stand? How do you get comfortable with a sword through your guts? I didn’t expect a solution or even relief. I only wanted a little distance: how does one live with it—the way a drunk lives with being a drunk, or a crook lives with being a crook? No problem! I envied both. But this! How do you live with this: being stuck onto pain like a cockroach impaled on a pin? The drug did this: before, I was part of the pain, there was no getting away from it. Now I had some distance. The pain was still there, but I stood off a ways. It became a problem to be solved. Hm, what to do about the pain? Who knows, there might even be a solution. Perhaps there’s something you can do to ease it. Let’s see.

*****

Often they hold down a small political job at the courthouse, or sell Tupperware—perhaps Cousin Callie has been Judge Jones’s mistress for twenty years. At any rate, they outlive everybody. They are healthy. They show up at funerals, weddings, and New Year open houses. One can’t imagine what they do between times.

*****

You always got it backward: you don’t set out looking for clues to God’s existence, nobody’s ever found anything that way, least of all God.

*****

Don’t you see? Virginia is neither North nor South but both and neither. Betwixt and between. An island between two disasters. Facing both; both the defunct befouled and collapsing North and the corrupt thriving and Jesus-hollering South. The Northerner is at heart a pornographer. He is an abstract mind with a genital attached. His soul is at Harvard, a large abstract locked-in sterile university whose motto is truth but which has not discovered an important truth in a hundred years. His body lives on Forty-second Street. Do you think there is no relation between Harvard and Forty-second Street? One is the backside of the other. The Southerner? The Southerner started out a skeptical Jeffersonian and became a crooked Christian. That is to say, he is approaching and has almost reached his essence, which is to be more crooked and Christian than ever before. Do you want a portrait of the New Southerner? He is Billy Graham on Sunday and Richard Nixon the rest of the week. He calls on Jesus and steals, he’s in business, he’s in politics. Everybody in Louisiana steals from everybody else. That is why the Mafia moved South: because the Mafia is happier with stealing than with pornography. The Mafia and the Teamsters will end by owning the South, the pornographers will own the North, movies, books, plays, the works, and everybody will live happily ever after.

California? The West? That’s where the two intersect: Billy Graham, Richard Nixon, Las Vegas, drugs, pornography, and every abstract discarnate idea ever hit upon by man roaming the wilderness in search of habitation.

Washington, the country, is down the drain. Everyone knows it. The people have lost it to the politicians, bureaucrats, drunk Congressmen, lying Presidents, White House preachers, C.I.A., F.B.I., Mafia, Pentagon, pornographers, muggers, buggers, bribers, bribe takers, rich crooked cowboys, sclerotic Southerners, rich crooked Yankees, dirty books, dirty movies, dirty plays, dirty talk shows, dirty soap operas, fags, lesbians, abortionists, Jesus shouters, anti-Jesus shouters, dying cities, dying schools, courses in how to fuck for schoolchildren.

The Virginian? He may not realize it yet, but he is the last hope of the Third Revolution. The First Revolution was won at Yorktown. The Second Revolution was lost at Appomattox. The Third Revolution will begin there, in the Shenandoah Valley.

*****

By the way, it is not true that Americans are by nature the most pornographic people on earth. The Russians and the Chinese are simply behind times, busy catching up. Ha, wait till those buggers get the forty-hour week.

*****

To live in the past and future is easy. To live in the present is like threading a needle.

*****

The Jews called it knowing and now I knew why. Every time I went deeper I knew her better. Soon I would know her secret. We were watching each other. We were going to know each other but one of us would know first and therefore win. The watching was a contest. I was coming close, closer. We watched each other watching. It was a contest. She lost. When I found it out, the secret, she closed her eyes and curled around me like a burning leaf.

*****

In my confessional I fell to musing. Why does love require the absolute polarities of divinity-obscenity?

*****

An odd thing about New Orleans: the cemeteries here are more cheerful than the hotels and the French Quarter. Tell me why that should be, why two thousand dead Creoles should be more alive than two thousand Buick dealers?

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Hume’s Call to Action

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A review article of James Harris’ Hume: An Intellectual Biography

Hume reconceived the task of philosophy. It ought not to be championed, as the ancient schools had done, as a “medicine for the mind.” Nor was it a source of rules for action that would guarantee righteousness. Its role was critical reflection rather than exhortation or consolation.

More recent developments in Anglo-American thought have tended to withdraw from practical analysis into speculative accounts of ideal value. This has resulted in a species of political philosophy that has lost any grasp of the social world on which it pretends to reflect. The sterility of many of the resulting debates serves to recommend Hume’s ambition to make philosophy historical and to render history philosophical.

Why Spinoza still matters

Spinoza

Steven Nadler writes in Aeon that “At a time of religious zealotry, Spinoza’s fearless defence of intellectual freedom is more timely than ever.” This fundamental liberal value is of course foreign to the regressive left.

In his distress over the deteriorating political situation in the Dutch Republic, and despite the personal dantheoger he faced, Spinoza did not hesitate to boldly defend the radical Enlightenment values that he, along with many of his compatriots, held dear.

Spinoza is one of history’s most eloquent advocates for freedom and toleration.

All opinions whatsoever, including religious opinions, are to be absolutely free and unimpeded, both by necessity and by right.

No matter what laws are enacted against speech and other means of expression, citizens will continue to say what they believe, only now they will do so in secret.

Spinoza understands that there will be some unpleasant consequences entailed by the broad respect for civil liberties. There will be public disputes, even factionalism, as citizens express their opposing views on political, social, moral and religious questions. However, this is what comes with a healthy, democratic and tolerant society.

Hegel on Hamlet

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Simon Critchley and Jamieson Webster in Spiked Review.

Perhaps it is this yearning for a Catholic Shakespeare that must be given up in order to see Hamlet aright and see ourselves in its light. Perhaps we will have to dispense with the ghost’s prayer for an unadulterated life, for Catholic absolution, for an absolute.
Hegel doesn’t put it as strongly as this, and, in any case, he has a dialectical trump card up his sleeve: tragedy is overcome by comedy, and both are overcome by philosophy.

Simon on Social Identification: Two Connections with Bounded Rationality

Herbert Simon

The twelfth in a series of excerpts from Minds, Models and Milieux: Commemorating the Centennial of the Birth of Herbert Simon.

Rouslan Koumakhov

Social identifications are one of Herbert Simon’s most recurrent themes. Starting with Administrative Behavior (hereafter, AB) (Simon, 1947/1997), he investigates that theme throughout his scientific work on an impressive number of occasions. Perhaps it is section 3, entitled Perception and identifications, of chapter 6 (“Cognitive Limits on Rationality”), in March and Simon (1958/1993), that symbolizes Simon’s main concern in this issue – its connection with human rationality and emphasis on every individual’s multiple “belongings” to social groups (in the broad sense, i.e. from primary groups to formal organizations to the whole of society). From this general standpoint, “identification with groups is the major selective mechanism controlling human attention in organizations (and elsewhere) (…)” (Simon, 1993, p. 137). Accordingly, social identification is a process allowing people to stabilize their anticipations, to coordinate perceptions and interpretations of reality. While this tendency to identify with groups appears necessary to build and maintain social systems, it also leads to mimetic opinions and behavioral conformity.

Compared with the notion of bounded rationality, however, Simon’s analysis of identification was only taken up to a limited extent by the social and human sciences that he so strongly influenced. Because his analysis is complex and appeals to major concepts developed in related disciplines, this begs the question of the exact place of social identification in Simon’s account of decision process and social interaction. My argument is that, in this account, not only is there a strong connection between bounded rationality and social identification, but also that such connection implies value systems and cognitive representations. Considered in this manner, the problem of identification is central in Simon’s decision-making and social theory, with its focus on mental states and understanding reality.

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Sociology and Classical Liberalism

sociology

We venture to say that self-reinforcing sorting mechanisms now make the discipline unapproachable by anyone who is unabashedly classically liberal.

— full article.

This was all true (and patently obviously so) even thirty years ago. I, however, got very lucky — I had the amazing Paul Hirst as a tutor. Almost ten years ago I wrote: “Paul was the only member in the School of Politics and Sociology that “got it”. He never allowed his own ideological predelictions to colour his approach to students’ work – he relished giving a fair and insightful account of positions he didn’t hold to, which I noticed confused students who were there precisely because of Paul’s viewpoint. Indeed, he once told me that he thought it tiresome that the departmental profile was so ideologically homogenous.” Where are the Pauls of today? 

Though he began as a Marxist, his ideas helped to provide the intellectual scaffolding for New Labour. His irreverent approach to conventional political ideas gained him many admirers who, fired by his spirit, went on to break new ground of their own. Above all, he was a fierce egalitarian, an evangelist of honesty and the enemy of can’t.

— The Guardian

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The Real Adam Smith

adam smith

What can a man with a plain name who lived over 200 years ago tell us about life today? Who was The Real Adam Smith? And why should we care? In this two-hour, two-part documentary, Swedish author, commentator and Cato Senior Fellow Johan Norberg explores Adam Smith’s life, his ideas about morality and economics, and how the concepts he discussed in his books and lectures are still relevant today. (H/T Jason Potts).

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