Alan Penn <[log in to unmask]> wrote
>
> The problem is that society is a bit like a Nekker cube - you look at it
and
> it appears one way - lots of discrete individuals - you look again and it
> has reversed into a whole series of supra-individual structures. Perhaps
> that's all there is to it: society _is_ the relations between individuals.
> You cant have the one without the other. Need we say more?
>
>
........... all there
> are are individuals and the constraints on their interrelationship (space,
> language, intergenerational knowledge transfer etc.) so any explanatory
> theory must be reducible at some stage to mechanisms based on that.
>
> Alan
>
However, not all activities may be reduced to activities of individuals.
For example, it is possible to imagine certain joint actions which may not
be decomposable into individual actions. Two individuals
(say, John and Peter) shaking hands together cannot be deifned using
individual's actions.
Thus, without Peter, it is hard to describe what John is doing in the act of
handshaking. In any case, at least in artificial agents, it is not clear
why
we can't think of collective activites and behaviours which may not be
decomposable into individual actions/behaviours.In otherwords, it is
quite reasonable to have behaviours which an agent
may not be reason about.
Also, please see: Barbara Grosz and Sarit Kraus. 1996. "Collaborative Plans
for Complex
Group Action." In Artificial Intelligence.
86(2), pp. 269-357.
at http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/grosz/
Cheers,
N Paramesh
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