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    • AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.
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from Rota, The Barrier of Meaning
  • His critique of AI is not really on point for Minsky-AI, although probably for most AI it is valid – Agre made the same point in his essay on homunculus and orbiculus .
from antiphilosophy
  • I came by my anti-philosophy stance at MIT, of course, where the standard line was that AI and cybernetics had rendered all past philosophical discourse obsolete and irrelevant. This was not quite the case (See Heideggerian AI , and Phil Agre on AI's contempt for philosophy The Soul Gained and Lost )
from LWMap/The Rocket Alignment Problem
from situated action
from Antiformalism Apology
  • GOFAI failed for a variety of reasons but one was the overemphasis on formalism and logic, and bad choices regarding how that worked. I was heavily influenced by the work of Phil Agre and David Chapman. Back in the 1980s, they did a very thorough critique of AI's intellectual approach. Very well informed both technically and and intellectually. The nub of their critique was that intelligence was grounded in concrete situated activity, symbolic reasoning was a secondary phenomenon, and the standard model of action involving symbolic world models and planning algorithms was just wrong (as well as being computationally intractable).
from Meaningness
  • David Chapman (aka @meaningness) has been a major influence on my own thinking. His work at the MIT AI lab with Phil Agre made a deep impression on me when I was trying to figure out my own academic path. This included a critical take on the standard cognitive science view of the mind, which is pretty much Rationalism minus the more cultish and cartoonish aspects.
from writing
  • On the nature of writing and its relationship to thought, or how we think about thought, Orality and Literacy blew my mind, along with Phil Agre's Writing and Representaton. Highly recommend.
from Joseph Goguen
  • Cited and acknowleged in Phil Agre's Towards a Critical Technical Practice
from orbiculus
  • A term proposed by Phil Agre in his essay @Writing and Representation , meaning, the environment in which a mental homunculus operates. In the classical AI planning model, the homunculus is some kind of general problem solver or optimizer, that operates within an environment made up of representations.
from Infrastructure of intention
from equality and hierarchy
  • Phil Agre on Conservatism: What Is Conservatism and What Is Wrong with It?
    • From the pharaohs of ancient Egypt to the self-regarding thugs of ancient Rome to the glorified warlords of medieval and absolutist Europe, in nearly every urbanized society throughout human history, there have been people who have tried to constitute themselves as an aristocracy. These people and their allies are the conservatives.
    • The tactics of conservatism vary widely by place and time. But the most central feature of conservatism is deference: a psychologically internalized attitude on the part of the common people that the aristocracy are better people than they are. ... People who believe that the aristocracy rightfully dominates society because of its intrinsic superiority are conservatives; democrats, by contrast, believe that they are of equal social worth. Conservatism is the antithesis of democracy. This has been true for thousands of years.
    • The defenders of aristocracy represent aristocracy as a natural phenomenon, but in reality it is the most artificial thing on earth.
from Orality and Literacy
  • Phil Agre՚s Writing and Representation caused a related and similarly violent lurch in my thinking, because it made me realize that the metaphor of writing underlies the technology of computing in a fundamental way, all the way back to the Turing machine. And while from a computer-as-medium perspective that was interesting but not problematic, from an AI standpoint it seemed to fatally compromise the whole operation. The strengths of writing (definiteness, stability, abstractness) were a late achievement of human minds and thus obviously unsuitable to be the building blocks of human minds, which evolved under conditions of orality (and before that, from animal signalling and sociality).
from Words of Power
  • book by Andrea Nye. A feminist critique of logic (as in philosophical logic). I remember reading this back in grad school when I was souring on logic, for not particularly feminist reasons, but it helped build the case. Probably got the ref from Agre or Chapman.
from Symbol Disease
  • First pointed out to me by Agre and Chapman. Articulated most clearly in that McDermott paper, Artificial intelligence meets natural stupidity | ACM SIGART Bulletin
    • As a field, artificial intelligence has always been on the border of respectability, and therefore on the border of crackpottery. Many critics have urged that we are over the border.
    • Unfortunately, the necessity for speculation has combined with the culture of the hacker in computer science to cripple our self-discipline. In a young field, self-discipline is not necessarily a virtue, but we are not getting any younger.
    • Wishful Mnemonics A major source of simple-mindedness in AI programs is the use of mnemonics like "UNDERSTAND" or "GOAL" to refer to programs and data structures. This practice has been inherited from more traditional programming applications, in which it is liberating and enlightening to be able to refer to program structures by their purposes.
    • Alright I'm in danger of quoting the whole paper so will stop. Very Relevant to My Interests, and interesting to think about in the context of LLMs and vibecoding. It sounds positively quaint to think you can or should think of your program in mechanistic rather than intentional terms.
    • OK one more
    • Charniak <1972> pointed out some approaches to understanding stories, and now the OWL interpreter includes a "story-understanding module". (And, God help us, a toplevel "ego loop". <Sunguroff, 1975>)
from Protocols/Protocol Thinking 2023
  • Phil Agre, Routines (maybe a stretch? But shows some new ways to think about the emergence of patterns of interaction)
from Mastodon 20 books project
  • 14 Computation and Human Experience, Phil Agre
from Heidegger
  • A big influence on Meaningness and Phil Agre and thus indirectly on me. But I also have a pretty deep resistance; the man was a Nazi, and when the anti-rationalism starts to shade into fascism that's where I get off the train.
from Protocols as Cognitive Primitive
  • That is: reifying episodes of experience and discovering and re-enacting patterns of interaction is what minds do, down at the most basic level. Some elevated thinkers like to say that we are composed of stories, which isn't wrong, but stories are mere fictions, protocols are what we actually do, our real-world habits and routines.
Twin Pages

Phil Agre

30 Oct 2021 - 01 Nov 2026
Open in Logseq
    • One of my main influence s. I learned a lot from Phil, who despite being a grad student in an engineering department seemed to have read widely in philosophy, sociology, and other exotic subjects. But the main lesson he taught was a stance-related thing; that one could do technical work while at the same time having a rigorously critical attitude about the work, the field, and society. Probably his essay Towards a Critical Technical Practice is the best explicit articulation of this, but it's a quality that comes through in much of his work.
    • Phil was also one of the first public internet intellectuals, pioneering the format of one-man newsletter with is Red Rock Eater New Service (now, some 20 years later, everyone is doing this via Substack, but Phil did this on his own with no recompense). Some of this stuff is dated but a lot holds up well, for instance this essay on Institutions and the Entrepreneurial Self.

    • Routines

      • One of Agre's AI ideas was that it should focus on the structure of routine activity, rather than elaborate goal-and-plan thinking. Routine as a cognitive primitive (is how I would put it, I'm not sure Phil would approve, "cognitive" and "primitive" seem suspiciously like old-regime thinking). Very protocol-ish.
      • Routines (1985)
        • Regularities in the world give rise to regularities in the way in which we deal with the world. That is to say, we fall into routines. I have been studying the phenomena of routinization, the process by which institutionalized patterns of interaction with the world arise and evolve in everyday life. Underlying this evolution is a dialectical process of internalization: First you build a model of some previously unarticulated emergent aspect of an existing routine. Armed with an incrementally more global view of the interaction, you can often formulate an incrementally better informed plan of attack. A routine is not a plan in the sense of the classical planning literature, except in the theoretical limit of this process.
      • Here is some of the theory in Abstract Reasoning as Emergent from Concrete Activity | Meta-rationality written by him and David Chapman
        • Study of the emergence of abstract reasoning must begin with an understanding of concrete activity. We believe that the beginnings of such an understanding are found in Gary Drescher’s work on the machinery to implement infant sensorimotor learning and in Agre’s work on that needed to implement adult routine activity.
        • Agre’s theory of routine activity describes adult action when everything is going well: the fluent, regular, practiced, unproblematic activity that makes up most of everyday life.6
        • The theory includes an account of the innate hardware, which we believe is, loosely, connectionist. It also includes a description of the sorts of cognition and activity that are most appropriate to that hardware. It turns out that the sort of computation most appropriate to the hardware is also the primary sort of computation that actually transpires in everyday life, namely concrete activity.
        • Routine activity is situated: it makes extensive use of the immediate surrounds and their accessibility for observation and interaction. Rather than using internal datastructures to model the world, the world is immediately accessed through perception. Much of the theory is concerned with the emergence of routines, which are dynamics of interaction: patterns of activity that occur not as a result of their representation in the head of the agent, but due to a Simon’s-ant7 relationship to a complex environment. The world and the mind interpenetrate.8 Routine activity is conducted in a society of other people, who provide a variety of types of support, from helping when asked to transmitting cultural techniques for solving classes of problems. Routine activity is concerned with the here-and-now; it rarely requires planning into the future, reflection upon the past, or consideration of spatially distant causes. It rarely involves thinking new thoughts; for the most part existing patterns of activity suffice to cope with the situation. Finally, routine activity takes the forms most natural to the hardware: those that can be implemented efficiently on a connectionist architecture.