Chapter 5 Flashcards
What two theories are key to embodied cognitive science?
Situatedness (how an environment is sense) and embodiment of the agent (or how the agent is able to interact in the world, which is dependent on the agent’s physical form).
What is posthumanism?
The result of when the content of information is more important than the physical medium in which is represented; specifically it is when consciousness is considered to be epiphenomenal, and where the human body is considered just a prosthetic.
Describe methodological solipsism
The individuation of representational states only in terms of their relation to other representational states. Relations of the states to the external world - the agent’s environment - are not considered; in psychology this is the view that psychological states should be construed without reference to anything beyond the boundary of the individual who has those states
What is the parable of the ant?
The theoretical situation of observing an ant on the beach. Initially one might think that the ant is producing complex behaviour, a series of complicated twists and turns that comprise the ant’s route. Classical cognitive scientists tend to explain these type of complexities by invoking complicated representational mechanisms.
Simon, in contrast, noted that the path of the ant might in fact merely result from simple internal processes reacting to complex external forces - the various obstacles the terrain itself provides. The complexity of the ant is really a complexity in the surface of the beach.
What are Shapiro’s key three themes which he argues are taken up by embodied cognitive scientists to varying degrees?
- Conceptualization: the concepts that an agent requires to interact with its environment depends on the form of the agent’s body. With different bodies comes different understanding/engagements with the world.
- Replacement: the idea that we do not need to have a representative world in our heads as it is already accessible in the environment.
- Constitution: the body and the world are literal constituents of the cognitive process.This connects to the extended mind hypothesis.
What is the extended mind hypothesis?
Is the belief or idea that because cognition can take place in the environment, our mind has therefore ‘leaked’ into the world around us, and the borders between mind and environment are blurred/disappeared - our mind has been extended.
» added onto this notion is the concept behind cognitive scaffolding - if we are externalizing our cognition and using information processing in this manner, than cognition is therefore “our mind” + these external processes
What is forward engineering/synthetic psychology?
The manner in which embodied cognitive science explores its theories of cognition - they build simple agents and then observe them in environments of varying complexity, which provides cognitive science with more powerful and usually much simpler theories (induction takes more time than deduction; analysis is harder than invention).
How is forward engineering different from reverse engineering?
This is different from reverse engineering, which involves observing the behaviour of an intact system in order to infer the nature and organization of the system’s internal processes. It usually relies on internal processors to explain behavioural complexity. With forward engineering a system is constructed from a primitive functions of interest, and then the system is observed for any interesting or surprising behaviour. Reverse engineers collect data to build their models, whilst forward engineers build models and rely on them for data.
What is the travelling salesman problem and why is it important?
The TSP is a vital optimization problem which involves determining the order in which a salesperson should visit a sequence of cities, stopping at each city only once, such that the shortest total distance is travelled. The problem is important because its solution can be applied to various real-world problems and situations (ie. scheduling tasks, minimizing interference amongst a network of transmitters, data analysis in psychology, warehouse order-picking problems, etc.); as the number of cities involved in the salseman’s tour increases linearly, the computational effort for finding the shortest route increases exponentially = NP-complete problem.
How do ants solve the travelling salesman problem?
By interacting with the world and basic behaviours; as the ant moves it deposits a pheromone trail which decreases in potency over time. The ant on the shortest trail will therefore deposit a trail at the decision points sooner than the ant on the longest one, and will therefore reinforce (with scent) the short route. Over time this intensification increases as more and more ants are attracted to the stronger pheromone trail, and it quickly becomes the selected route.
What is the theory of holism?
Where the regularities governing a whole system cannot be easily reduced to a theory that appeals to the properties of the systems part; Gestalt psychologist popularized the notion of “the whole is not merely the sum of its parts”, and Wheeler proposed the notion of the ‘superorganism’, which is comprised of individual colony members but has higher-order properties that cannot be reduced to these component parts.
How is the construction of wasps nests an example of dynamic environmental control guides?
The individual’s behaviour is a program whose actions are under some type of environmental control; there is no need for direct communication amongst the insects because they act on the environment in a manner which signals to the others to act on it in another way.
In the instance of the wasps, the insects build a nest consisting of a lattice of cells, where each cell is essentially a comb created from a hexagonal arrangement of walls. The decisions to add new cells is driven by the perception of existing ones, and two simple rules (theorized by Theraulaz and Bonabeau):
1. if there is a location on the nest in which three walls of a cell already exist, then this acts as a stimulus to prompt the wasp to add another wall there with high probability
2. if only two walls already exist as part of a cell, this also acts as a stimulus, albeit one with less probability
Define stigmergy
The notion that the environment is a stimulus that causes particular work, or behaviour to occur (a circular action, in which the agent changes the environment, which elicits new behaviour, which changes the environment, which now elicits different behaviour, and so on). Stigmergy only works when an agent can sense the world, and when they can physically act on the world.
What does it mean to be embodied to different degrees?
Some definitions of embodiment relate to the extent to which an agent can alter its environment; embodiment is grounded in the relationship between a system and its environment. The more a robot can perturb an environment, and be perturbed by it, the more embodied that robot is. In the same argument, a robot that is more embodied than another is more capable of affecting, and being affected by, its environment.
Describe feedback and how it works in embodied cognition.
The power of embodied cognitive science emerges from agents that are situated and embodied because these two features allow for a source of non-linearity called feedback. Feedback occurs when information about an action’s effect on the world is used to inform the progress of that action (the circularity of action exists between the parts of a dynamic system).
What is the issue with utilizing feedback as an important component of cognition?
It essentially makes computational analysis extraordinarily difficult due to intractability of the mathematics of even a small number of interacting components. Ashby (1956) argued that a number as small as four produced a system which could not be analysed. This is precisely why embodied cognition employs forward engineering as a method of composing theories.
What is behind the idea of uphill analysis and downhill synthesis?
This is terminology used by Braitenberg, and refers to the problem of doing analysis with induction, and the ease of performing inventive measures using deduction (which follows a straightforward path).
What is umwelten?
A term used to describe the “island of senses” produced by the unique way in which an organism is perceptually engaged with its world; because different organisms experience the world in different ways, they can live in the same world but at the same time exist in different umweltens.
What is the idea of ecological theory of perception?
The notion that one cannot separate the characterisitics of an organism from the characteristics of its environment (animal and environment make an inseparable pair).
Describe affordances
The affordances of an object are the possibilities for action that a particular object permits a particular agent. Affordances emerge from an integral relationship between an object’s properties and an agent’s abilities to act.
