Between the Authentic and Artificial: From the Perspective of Contingency

How to deal with a contingency? A contingent situation plays a vital role in challenges with uncertainty and unpredictability. This is because contingency requires the subject to be adaptive and flexible in the given condition. Regarding the development of robotics, soft robotics is highly anticipated to be more adaptable and flexible to contingency with its bodily inputs. In contrast, material-wise, conventional hard robotics may fit more for fixed, stable, static, or predictable situations. The latest development in new materials has opened a window for more usable and useful artificial body parts as advanced tools. This short article first highlights the types of artificial body parts and summarises the role of contingency in robotics development. In addition, it analyses the various phases of the concept of the embodied mind in link with contingency. Additionally, for further discussion, it questions ethical, moral, and legal aspects regarding the future development of artificial body parts.


Introduction: Types of Artificial Body Parts
Soft robotics opens the possibility to various tools that work closely interacting with the human body, which may add new capabilities to the living human corps.Robots were once only objected to or externalised to humans.However, with new materials introduced, a window is opened to seek for humans not only the substituting but also the extended body parts that further the ability to interact with the surrounding environment.Parallel to such developments, different dimensional problems regarding ethics, morality, and legality are beginning to emerge.
In terms of developing artificial body parts as tools, soft robotics may provide high adaptability to both users and the user environment.Because of its plasticity, it has increased its dynamism with much complex feedback for users to easier interact with the robots under a given condition.Such interaction includes but is not limited to enabling a range of sensitivity, such as haptics of the soft robots to be possible with better visual aesthetics of its softness, which may better accommodate the users' social needs.The human body, in nature, responds to real timeliness in dealing with and corresponding with the physical world.The softness and dynamism of the soft robotics enable the robotic body parts to resonate with the given condition more effectively and through interactions with users that lead to spontaneous engaging responses than with conventional hard robotics.The robotic body parts as tools may provide a wide range of possibilities, as summarised in Figure 1.Externalised body parts are a complete object of the human body and are teleoperated, such as in robot-assisted surgery.Substituting body parts work as an artificial biometric hand and prosthetic leg that substitutes the amputated original body parts.Currently, the challenges to better the aesthetics and function of the substituting body parts are the most discussed.Extended body parts are robots added to the human body to provide new functions, such as a tail and a third and fourth arms.Internalised body parts may work as a substitute for internal organs implanted entirely or partially into the human body.If utilised for assisting organ function, internalised body parts may lead to protecting animal rights and animal welfare that otherwise may be exploited for human needs.Although those artificial body parts do not necessarily relate to artificial intelligence, such needs depend on how much we require the artificial body parts to be ready for the contingent situation.

Embodied Mind and its Relation to Contingency
The concept of an embodiment of the mind has long been one of the critical themes in the field of cognitive philosophy [1].The interplay and inter-responses between cognition (brain), body, and the environment are crucial to generate an adaptive and flexible fit to the given circumstances.Evolutionary robotics may bring about readiness to contingency with its improved algorithms using artificial intelligence [2].However, the adaptability and readiness to contingency depend on the assumption of the contingency level that differs based on the supposed time range targeting future [3].Still, the combination of soft robotics and artificial intelligence in body part development may possess high potential for coming human needs.
In terms of the fit for the robots to the level of contingency, in precise, it differs based on how much humans can predicate the uncertain and unpredicted situation beforehand, where robots are given the autonomy to adaptively react to fit with such situation.Contingency may occur with axes of the time range, noise, errors, and unusual settings, where humans cannot predetermine and manipulatively provide a program beforehand.In other words, full contingency is a situation that is a complete external happening to the predicted and structured environment where humans cannot provide a manipulation plan beforehand.Thus, for the robots to manage well with any level of contingency, their autonomous judgement and adaptative movement to the given situation will be required. 1Japanese philosopher, Shūzō Kuki (九鬼周造, 1888-1941), worked on the notion of the level of contingency by examining the notion of necessity.According to Kuki, there lie different levels between 1 Daniel Dennett articulates in Kinds of Minds (2007) pp.27-41, [4], physical stance, design stance, and intentional stance regarding how system could be designed taking in consideration of the future prediction.Intentional stance is to treat an entity as an agency that can predict on its own, while physical stance predicts future based on the law of physics, and design stance has its limitation in prediction from its design.In respect to contingency, the more the situation is contingent, the more the intentional stance would be required for smooth adaptation to the contingency, whereas predictable situation can be pre-programmed through physical and design stance.necessity and contingency between the inevitable necessity, which he calls an absolute necessity (zettaiteki-hitsuzen, 絶対的必然), and the metaphysical contingency (keijijō-teki-gūzen, 形而上的偶然); namely hypothetical (仮説的) and empirical (経験的) as shown in Figure 2. 2 In terms of psychologists' perspective, Kuki's notion of metaphysical contingency may refer to future prediction, a hypothetical contingency to the theory of mind, and empirical contingency to interactions with others.From Kuki's notion of the spectrum of necessity to a contingency, this paper intends to draw out implications that may well depict the different stages involved amid intelligence and contingency.Necessity (inevitability) ranges from absolute, empirical, and hypothetical necessities.An absolute necessity is occurrences that are entirely certain and predictable.An empirical necessity involves accumulative experiments that reduce uncertainties leading to reaction fixations.In contrast, hypothetical necessity involves a situation such as an if-then/when-then statement.On the other hand, contingency ranges from metaphysical (future prediction), hypothetical (theory of mind), and empirical (interaction with others) contingencies.Empirical contingency involves a more uncertain situation requiring neat correspondence and interactions with the environment, substances, and other living things compared with a hypothetical necessity.Hypothetical contingency may involve more flexibility and adaptability in building mutuality and inter-relationality.Metaphysical contingency involves a future prediction beyond one's experiment, which happens once in a blue moon and is unpredictable and uncertain, in the more extended chronological range than the hypothetical contingency.

Figure 2. Contingency and Embodied Intelligence
Regarding the embodied mind, the author thinks that Kuki's notion provides implications for the future development of embodied mind in alignment with the spectrum of intelligence, from material to plant, swarm, animal, and human intelligence. 3Figure 2 intends to show such a diverse spectrum of intelligence in accordance with the range of necessity and contingency.Primitive intelligence can be seen in mechanics as in soft materials, such as short-term memories of the material without neurons (nobrain reaction) that reform itself reactionary through its structure (body) to the given environment.Such primitive intelligence using soft materials reactively and reflexively adapts itself without neurons, which depends on the mechanical switch of the materials without using a sensor.
No-brain reactions are further broken down into categories with or without neurons.Plant intelligence is intelligence without neurons but has a reflexive (automatic) and responding mechanism to stimulative inputs, for example, which acts against sunlight, water, and other nutrients.In comparison, even without a brain, living beings such as seashells and octopuses own their embedded neuron (sensory) system within their body.With respect to no-brain intelligence, because of their flexible response to the given environment, it may imply possibilities that lead to developing a new different type of artificial intelligence, in other words, bodily artificial intelligence.Compared to the existing brain artificial intelligence that imitates brain neurons as a relay of stimulations that selects and processes information, bodily intelligence requires the body as a stimulative sensor that acquires direct information through embodiment.
Uexküll's notion of Umwelt [5] and Gibson's idea of affordance [6] both argue that the surrounding environment is conditional to subjective judgement.Concerning the robot's response to the surrounding environment, subject to the softness of the soft robots enables more flexibility and plasticity to the given condition, which may well adapt to unpredictable contingencies than the body of the hard robots.In such a sense, a soft robot can develop a new type of intelligence closely attached to bodily movement and bodily inputs rather than the existing artificial intelligence that imitates the works of brain neurons in a closed setting of existing processed information.In other words, because the weight on the body is put more on robotics, through sensory inputs such as haptics, bodily intelligence (no-brain intelligence) being closer to raw information and more open to the surrounding environment may be more adaptable to contingencies that derives from the given environment.
With-brain intelligence represents by a swarm, animal, and human intelligence in Figure 2. Swarm intelligence only requires a limited amount of information exchange using local communication.However, the more complex the intelligence becomes, the more the range of self-awareness is required.Self-awareness enables passive and active information collection based on interest (intention). 4The collected information is used for building mutual relationships between the self and others.Such intention leads to delicate interactions surrounding the subject, dependent on the ability for a short-term prediction of how the subject predicts the significant other's wants and needs.An example of this interaction is pet dogs responding to their owner's wants and needs.Higher intelligence, therefore, involves predictions of a more extended range of future where the rate of uncertainty and unpredictability is undetermined and limitless.Such higher intelligence can be achieved not only through the existing brain focused artificial intelligence, but with the artificial intelligence that enables processing more on the surrounding environment through sensuous inputs from bodies.For robotics to acquire such higher intelligence, connectivity with various kinds of artificial intelligence that provides chances to analyse various opportunities and options for future prediction becomes necessary.

Discussion
The paper summarised the types of artificial body parts.Additionally, it summarised the concept of the embodied mind and its relation to contingency.In terms of mind, there needs to be further discussion on the differentiation between the wide range of primitive to sophisticated intelligence: such as the clear difference between consciousness, intelligence, and mind, with and without a body. 5However, because of the space limitation, this paper will not explore further, leaving the question open for further discussion.
Regarding ethics, morality, and legality, the discussion is open to which extent we would like our artificial body parts to acquire intelligence in terms of adaptability and responsivity to unpredictability and uncertainty that might happen in a hypothetical or metaphysical contingency. 6The growing apprehension is whether humanity would compromise the right to amputate one's congenital body and reform one's body partially into cyborgs once the artificial body parts get better than the nature of the body.The future discussion also needs to shed light on the question of to which extent we, as humans, let our desire flourish to modify our bodies.Do we need to legally cap the desire to transform and modify our bodies using artificial body parts?Or is it up to one's preference and everlasting desire to decide whether we want to become a cyborg, dependent on an individual's aspiration to change, as we see in the plastic surgery business?
There is still some time left for a further in-depth discussion on the dimension of ethics and morality to decide on the common goals and standard settings of where we are heading and what we want from the artificial body parts that may lead to the maximisation of human capacity using artificial body parts as a tool.The author hopes this paper opens a window for engineers to have the above questions in mind while busy developing artificial body parts.