Embodied robots -- Post #2 on Wilson & Golonka 2013

There's some cool stuff highlighted by W&G including robots that tidy up without being programmed to do so, robots that walk (downhill) with only the power of gravity simply because their bodies were designed in the right way, and cricket robots that find the best mate automatically due to the architecture of the sound localization system. We've discussed sound localization previously so let's focus on the two other examples.Robots that tidy without the intention to do so or knowledge they did it. Robots with two sensors situated at 45 degree angles on the robot's "head"and a simple program to avoid obstacles detected by the sensors will after a while tidy a room full of randomly distributed cubes into neat piles:W&G conclude from this that, Importantly, then, the robots are not actually tidying – they are only trying to avoid obstacles, and their errors, in a specific extended, embodied context, leads to a certain stable outcome that looks like tidying The point here is that the robots did not have a representation for, or a desire to, tidy or even any knowledge that they had tidied.  A complex "cognitive" behavior can emerge from "a single rule, 'turn away from a detected obstacle'" to quote W&G.  This is cool.  But it neither rules out computation/information processing as the basis of mental function nor tell us how and why humans tidy.  Regarding my first point, notice that even though there is no program in the...
Source: Talking Brains - Category: Neurologists Authors: Source Type: blogs