A reading series on embodied cognition
Reading summary of the nature of embodied cognition and its relation to biological systems and evolution.
Embodied cognition has interested me for some time now: it seems like the logical next step to building better robots that understand their environments. Embodied cognition - cognition in a physical body. That would be the common sense understanding of the term. But it seems that in the research community, there is still much room for defining what the term means. It is a relatively young field of study but one which has roots in philosophy, exploring the effect of mind and body on each other - indeed questioning whether such a dichotomy really exists at all. As we will see, perhaps not!
Sources: …
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubert_Dreyfus%27s_views_on_artificial_intelligence https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/81143495.pdf
Definition, history and philosophical background
It is hard to pinpoint what embodied cognition means. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy says:
Cognition is embodied when it is deeply dependent upon features of the physical body of an agent, that is, when aspects of the agent’s body beyond the brain play a significant causal or physically constitutive role in cognitive processing.
Embodied cognitive science appeals to the idea that cognition deeply depends on aspects of the agent’s body other than the brain. Without the involvement of the body in both sensing and acting, thoughts would be empty, and mental affairs would not exhibit the characteristics and properties they do. Work on embedded cognition, by contrast, draws on the view that cognition deeply depends on the natural and social environment. By focusing on the strategies organisms use to off-load cognitive processing onto the environment, this work places particular emphasis on the ways in which cognitive activity is distributed across the agent and her physical, social, and cultural environment (Suchman 1987, Hutchins 1995). The thesis of extended cognition is the claim that cognitive systems themselves extend beyond the boundary of the individual organism. On this view, features of an agent’s physical, social, and cultural environment can do more than distribute cognitive processing: they may well partially constitute that agent’s cognitive system. (Clark and Chalmers 1998, R. Wilson 2004; A. Clark 2008, Menary 2010).
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/embodied-cognition/#SomHisAncForEmbCogSci So that’s saying
AI as we currently know it consists of algorithms running on computational systems. And ultimately, these computational systems aren’t grounded in the physical world. Ah, But what about robots? you say, Aren’t they part of the physical world? Yes but…
Dreyfus –
but in the end they are no different to a computer sending commands out to some machine. So we’re back to square one. An input/output system. But what’s the problem with that? In such a system you produce output (actions or some kind of prediction) and get feedback to improve these actions to achieve a goal - this feedback loop is the current state of AI algorithms. It would seem that this is exactly what we want!
The key here is that the computer or control centre which is sending out these commands lacks intentionality. That is to say, it has no stake in the body it is controlling. It is completely separate from its own body (in the case of a robot).