Some epistemological implications of devices which construct their own sensors and effectors

Abstract

493. Formatting and pagination have been changed from the original. Various classes of physical devices having adaptive sensors, coordinative parts, and/or effectors are considered with respect to the kinds of informational relations they permit the device to have with its environment. Devices which can evolve their own physical hardware can expand their repertoires of measurements, computations, and controls in a manner analogous to the structural evolution of sensory, coordinative, and effector organs over phylogeny. In particular, those devices which have the capacity to adaptively construct new sensors and effectors gain the ability to modify the relationship between their internal states and the world at large. Such devices in effect adaptively create their own (semantic) categories rather than having them explicitly specified by an external designer. An electrochemical device built in the 1950's which evolved the capacity to sense sound is discussed as a rudimentary exemplar of a class of adaptive, sensorevolving devices. Such devices could potentially serve as semantically-adaptive front-ends for computationally-adaptive classifiers, by altering the feature primitives (primitive categories) that the classifier operates with. Networks composed of elements capable of evolving new sensors and