Situatedness and Embodiment of Computational Systems (original) (raw)
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2021
Orthodox cognitive science claims that situated (world-embedded) activity can be explained as the outcome of in-the-head manipulations of representations by computational information processing mechanisms. But, in the eld of Arti cial Life, research into adaptive behaviour questions the primacy of the mainstream explanatory framework. This paper argues that such doubts are well-founded. Classical A.I. encountered fundamental problems in moving from toy worlds to dynamic unconstrained environments. I draw on work in behaviour-based robotics to suggest that such di culties are plausibly viewed as artefacts of the representational/computational architecture assumed in the classical paradigm. And merely moving into connectionism cannot save the received orthodoxy. If we adopt the perspective according to which neural networks are most naturally conceptualized as dynamical systems, it becomes appropriate to treat such networks as computational devices only if the network-dynamics are del...
Aspects of Embodied Computation: Toward a Reunification of the Physical and the Formal
Post-Moore's Law computing will require an assimilation between computational processes and their physical realizations, both to achieve greater speeds and densities and to allow computational processes to assemble and control matter at the nanoscale. Therefore, we need to investigate "embodied computing," which addresses the essential interrelationships of information processing and physical processes in the system and its environment in ways that are parallel to those in the theory of embodied cognition. We address both the challenges and opportunities of embodied computation. Analysis is more difficult because physical effects must be included, but information processing may be simplified by dispensing with explicit representations and allowing massively parallel physical processes to process information. Nevertheless, in order to fully exploit embodied computation, we need robust and powerful theoretical tools, but we argue that the theory of Church-Turing computation is not suitable for the task.
Turing’s visionary contribution to cognitive science is not limited to the foundation of the symbolist approach to cognition and to the exploration of the connectionist approach, as it additionally anticipated the germinal disclosure of the embodied approach. Even if he never directly dealt with the foundational speculation on the theoretical premises of embodiment, in his theoretical papers we find traces of the idea that a cognitive agent must develop a history of coupling with its natural and social environment, and that primitive bodily stimuli like pain and pleasure drive this coupling and elevate it to real learning by setting its normative preconditions. Turing did not consistently defend the centrality of embodiment, and ended up confounding or deemphasizing in various occasions the critical importance that he had himself implicitly recognized to the body. In line with the anti-representationist, radically enactive approaches to basic cognition, I believe that if Turing eventually failed to fully value the cognitive-developmental role played by the body, this was not because he proposed a computational and functionalist model of the mind, but because he tacitly assumed the content/vehicle dichotomy as a primitive of that model: in fact, he still believed that intelligence is a realized by decontextualized contents that can be detached and transmitted regardless of their mode of physical implementation.
2008
Abstract Post-Moore's Law computing will require an assimilation between computational processes and their physical realizations, both to achieve greater speeds and densities and to allow computational processes to assemble and control matter at the nanoscale. Therefore, we need to investigate “embodied computing,” which addresses the essential interrelationships of information processing and physical processes in the system and its environment in ways that are parallel to those in the theory of embodied cognition.
Discussion on the Relationship between Computation, Information, Cognition, and Their Embodiment
Entropy, 2023
Three special issues of Entropy journal have been dedicated to the topics of “Information-Processing and Embodied, Embedded, Enactive Cognition”. They addressed morphological computing, cognitive agency, and the evolution of cognition. The contributions show the diversity of views present in the research community on the topic of computation and its relation to cognition. This paper is an attempt to elucidate current debates on computation that are central to cognitive science. It is written in the form of a dialog between two authors representing two opposed positions regarding the issue of what computation is and could be, and how it can be related to cognition. Given the different backgrounds of the two researchers, which span physics, philosophy of computing and information, cognitive science, and philosophy, we found the discussions in the form of Socratic dialogue appropriate for this multidisciplinary/cross-disciplinary conceptual analysis. We proceed as follows. First, the proponent (GDC) introduces the info-computational framework as a naturalistic model of embodied, embedded, and enacted cognition. Next, objections are raised by the critic (MM) from the point of view of the new mechanistic approach to explanation. Subsequently, the proponent and the critic provide their replies. The conclusion is that there is a fundamental role for computation, understood as information processing, in the understanding of embodied cognition.
How minds can be computational systems
Journal of Experimental & Theoretical Artificial Intelligence, 1998
This essay explores the implications of the thesis that implementation is semantic interpretation. Implementation is (at least) a ternary relation: I is an implementation of an "Abstraction" A in some medium M. Examples are presented from the arts, from language, from computer science, and from cognitive science, where both brains and computers can be understood as implementing a "mind Abstraction". Implementations have side effects due to the implementing medium; these can account for several puzzles surrounding qualia. Finally, a benign argument for panpsychism is developed.
The Role of the Environment in Computational Explanations (with Jens Harbecke)
European Journal for Philosophy of Science , 2019
The "mechanistic view of computation" contends that computational explanations are mechanistic explanations. Mechanists, however, disagree about the precise role that the environment-or the so called "contextual level"-plays for computational (mechanistic) explanations. We advance here two claims: (i) Contextual factors essentially determine the computational identity of a computing system (computational externalism); this means that specifying the "intrinsic" mechanism is not sufficient to fix the computational identity of the system. (ii) It is not necessary to specify the causal-mechanistic interaction between the system and its context in order to offer a complete and adequate computational explanation. While the first claim has been discussed before, the second has been practically ignored. After supporting these claims, we discuss the implications of our contextualist view for the mechanistic view of computational explanation. Our aim is to show that some versions of the mechanistic view are consistent with the contextualist view, whilst others are not.
In recent decades there has been growing recognition of the importance of embodiment as a foundation for intelligence [9, 11, 12, 15, 22, 23, 34, 38–40]. Whereas it had been traditional in artificial intelligence and cognitive science to suppose that intelligence requires complex internal models of the body and the world in order to behave competently, it has been found that embodied agents can function competently without these complex models by exploiting their bodies and their physical environments as their own models.