18n July 2009

Nicholas Gessler

nickdotgessleratdukedotedu
http://isis.duke.edu/gessler

DEGREES:

DISSERTATION & CURRENT RESEARCH:

Artificial Culture - Experiments in Synthetic Anthropology.

Empirically, culture is the product of individuals, groups, artifacts, workplaces, architectures and settlements in their natural and social environments, a complex web of interacting matter, energy and information taking place among various levels of complexity. Cultures are different. Not only do cultures vary with time and place, but within each culture each individual member of society shares both similarities and differences with others. Moreover, within an individual mind there are different and competing thoughts which change in different contexts. Further complexifying the human situation, is the recognition that cognition does not reside exclusively in one's head; it is unevenly distributed in one's natural, social and technological environments. Culture is the product that emerges, through dynamical hierarchical synthesis, from all these unruly things. More formally, we might define culture as the pattern of activity interconnecting multiple webs of mutual causation, a massively parallel multiagent computational process of intermediation. Everywhere in human experience we find complexity which defies traditional description and analysis, largely intractable to discursive and mathematical representations. In contrast, the "new sciences of complexity" offer some promising alternatives. Although computational languages in use for describing, explaining and understanding these dynamic interactions came into being around 1950, the means for investigating their entailments have only recently become easily available. Artificial Culture is the research enterprise that extends work which began with distributed artificial intelligence, artificial life and artificial society, towards a new scientific practice of synthetic anthropology. Necessarily creative, yet cautiously critical and informed by practice and experiment, Artificial Culture recasts discursive and mathematical cultural theory as simulations utilizing evolutionary computational . In order to build an Artificial Culture, we synthesize a hypothetical world inhabited by a multitude of individual agents, complete with the social and physical environments in which they live, all inside a computer simulation. By varying the parameters of their world, or letting it evolve on its own, we can evaluate the entailments of an entire suite of theoretical models. In this way we are better able to describe, understand and explain the complex web of biological and cultural processes that distinguish us as human. Experiments of this kind allow us to synthesize large constellations of alternative counterfactual "what if" scenarios and enable us to observe the outcomes of different patterns of similarity and difference, individual and group (local and global) interaction, and ideational & material (cognitive & physical) agency. On the Web we have uploaded over 200 simulations which generate the consequences of alternative kinship systems and marriage rules, alternative foraging strategies on alternative patterns of resources, alternative criteria for segregation and assimilation, aggregation, dispersion and diffusion, individual choices leading to flocking, schooling, herding and crowd behavior, aggregation and diffusion. We also showcase different examples of the the representations of space and time in cellular automata and evolutionary models. In addition to the anthropological and social sciences, applications address problems in geography (GIS, GPS), robotics and realworld sensing and actuation and cryptology. My present research focuses on the search for methods which encourage automatic second and higher order emergences in both natural and artificial worlds. This challenge has been addressed in three international workshops under the rubrics of computational synthesis, dynamical ontology and hierarchical selection. The tacit goal of this research is to build simulations in which individually local rules automatically synthesize global patterns of behavior, which then become automatically captured as the primitive local constructors of even higher levels of global organization. Harold Morowitz outlines the problem succinctly in his book, The Emergence of Everything - How the World Became Complex. How do local / global interactions become creative? How do levels of abstraction interact? What is the realationship between. bottom-up and top-down processes? Within the context of anthropology, this work enlists the convergence of both evolutionary and computational epistemologies towards providing new insights into distributed cultural cognition, the rich intermediation between humans and their social, natural and technological environments, the processes of evolution leading to the origin of the rich variety of cultural "things-that-think."

EMPLOYMENT:

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TEACHING:
Pioneering courses in hands-on cultural programming, multiagent simulation, emergence and evolution with graphical visualizations in Borland Rapid Application Development platform for the universal and ubiquitous standard language of C++ for Windows PCs. No previous computer programming experience required.

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