The Role of AI in the Paradigm Shift towards Enaction Life and Mind seminar #2 Tom Froese

Life and Mind seminar #22 Overview Cognitivism Embodied-Embedded Cognitive Science Enactivism Beyond?

Life and Mind seminar #23 The major transitions of cognitive science Varela (1999)

Life and Mind seminar #24 Cognitivism Cognition is taken to be essentially a form of centralized problem solving in the form of logical inference through abstract symbol manipulation. Mind and world are conceived of as fundamentally distinct. Hence, the need for representations. The body is conceptualized as an input/output device, the environment as a domain for problem solving. Connectionism: cognition as less centralized.

Life and Mind seminar #25 Symbolic AI The commonsense knowledge problem: –The move beyond toy worlds leads to a combinatorial explosion of representations and rules needed for cognitive behavior. The frame problem: –How does an abstract symbol processor determine what is relevant to its current situation? Infinite regress of symbol structures. The cognitivist mainstream (and its Cartesian assumptions) have been put to the test.

Life and Mind seminar #26 Nouvelle AI Following Brooks, the field looked for new directions: Situatedness: a robot does not deal with abstract descriptions but with the world directly. Embodiment: a robot has a body in such a way that its actions form a dynamic with the world and have immediate feedback on its sensations. Emergence: the behavior of a robot emerges from its interactions with the world. It cannot be reduced to a particular part of the systemic whole.

Life and Mind seminar #27 Embodied-Embedded Cognitive Science 1.Cognition is essentially fluid, flexible, real-time, context-sensitive, skillful, and adaptive coping. 2.Cognition is a dynamical process which spans an extended brain-body-system. 3.Cognition is a process which is embodied in an organism and embedded within a world. 4.A cognitive agent is best understood and analyzed as a dynamical system.

Life and Mind seminar #28 A first paradigm shift Cognitivism Embodied-Embedded Cognitive Science Failure of symbolic AI / emergence of nouvelle AI The Cartesian tradition

Life and Mind seminar #29 The role of AI and robotics It has provided the foundation for a lot of the conceptual developments. In its role as a subversive science it was able to question and undermine the constitutive assumptions underlying cognitivism. Philosophical stalemates could be resolved in the empirical domain of the cognitive sciences.

Life and Mind seminar #210 Towards a new dialectic rationalempirical rationalempirical

Life and Mind seminar #211 The Enactive Approach More recently the paradigm shift has been moving towards an enactive perspective: 1.Organisms are autonomous agents that actively generate and maintain their identities, and thereby enact or bring forth their own cognitive domains. 2.The nervous system is autonomous: it actively generates and maintains its own coherent and meaningful patterns of activity according to its operation as an operationally closed system.

Life and Mind seminar #212 Organization of the living body: Autopoiesis

Life and Mind seminar #213 Operational closure Rudrauf, et al. (2003)

Life and Mind seminar #214 The Enactive Approach 3.Cognition, conceived fundamentally as meaning- generation, arises from the sensorimotor coupling between organism and environment. Cognition is a form of embodied action. 4.The organisms world is not a pre-specified, external realm somehow represented internally, but a relational domain enacted or brought forth by its autonomous agency and mode of coupling with the environment. 5.The organisms experiential awareness is a central feature of its lived embodiment in the world.

Life and Mind seminar #215 The problem of subjectivity A central concern of enactivism is an improved understanding of subjectivity. It does this from 2 complementary perspectives: –Biological agency: an autonomous system that produces and maintains its own identity. –Phenomenal agency: non-intentional and pre-reflective, lived bodily self-awareness. The explanatory gap is no longer absolute as both aspects of subjectivity make common reference to living being: –The living body as object –The living body as subject

Life and Mind seminar #216 Towards a new dialectic? rationalempirical rationalempirical experiential

Life and Mind seminar #217 The role of AI and robotics Can we still say that this shift towards enactivism is driven by developments in AI and robotics? How can its experimental results inform the experiential (phenomenological) component? How can insights gained from the principled use of 1 st person methodologies inform AI research? Momentarily at least it appears that AI and robotics is trailing behind the shift towards enactivism.

Life and Mind seminar #218 A second paradigm shift? Cognitivism Embodied-Embedded Cognitive Science Failure of symbolic AI / emergence of nouvelle AI. Enactivism ? The Cartesian tradition

Life and Mind seminar #219 The nature of the second shift Just like the cognitivism, the enactivist paradigm necessarily has its own set of metaphors (e.g. dynamics) and constitutive assumptions (e.g. embodiment). Both paradigms are based on distinct premises which therefore entail non-overlapping rational domains. Because of this there is a fundamental stalemate in the philosophical domain. Since the stalemate cannot be resolved rationally, a paradigm shift cannot be induced by means of argument alone. In the end the stalemate has to be resolved in the empirical domain of the cognitive sciences. But even empirical data has to be interpreted from a point of view. What determines which one we adopt for ourselves?

Life and Mind seminar #220 Two explanatory paths Maturanas (1988) ontological diagram

Life and Mind seminar #221 The role of experience rationalempirical experiential All 3 domains do not only presuppose a background of non-thematic skillful coping, but also one of pre- reflective lived experience – our way of living/being.

Life and Mind seminar #222 The role of experience Cognitivism Embodied-Embedded Cognitive Science Empirical Enactivism Philosophical Experiential

Life and Mind seminar #223 Concluding remarks It is clear that AI and robotics has contributed immensely to the shift towards embodied-embedded cognitive science. It has done so by shifting the disputes from the philosophical domain to the empirical domain. The next challenge for this field is to improve our understanding of agency. Is it possible to synthesize autonomous agents? Nevertheless, a shift towards an enactive cognitive science appears to require shifting the dispute from the philosophical and empirical domains to the experiential domain. Open question: What are the consequences?