Embodiment Flashcards
Q: What is Isolationism in computationalism?
A: Isolationism is the focus on a system’s internal mechanisms, disregarding environmental factors and narrowly defining the system to exclude the body.
Q: What is the stored-description model?
A: A model where programmers must:
Anticipate all conditions a robot might encounter.
Provide detailed instructions for responding to those conditions.
Q: What is the main criticism of the stored-description model?
A: It assumes programmers can anticipate all scenarios, making systems rigid and unable to adapt to unexpected or dynamic environments.
Q: What is the symbol system hypothesis?
A: The hypothesis that intelligence operates by processing symbols, which represent abstract descriptions of the world, in a domain-independent way.
Q: Why does Brooks criticize the symbol system hypothesis?
A: It relies on pre-defined symbolic descriptions and struggles in dynamic, unpredictable environments where unanticipated scenarios arise.
Q: What is Brooks’ physical grounding hypothesis?
A: Intelligence must be grounded in the physical world, meaning AI systems need sensors, actuators, and real-world interactions rather than relying on abstract symbols.
Q: What does bottom-up development in AI mean, according to Brooks?
A: AI should be built from basic interactions in the physical world, with higher-level abstractions emerging from real-world experiences.
Q: What is the main thesis of embodiment?
A: Cognitive processes are grounded in sensory, perceptual, and motoric processes, which depend on an entity’s morphology (shape and size) and physiology (internal structure).
Q: What are the three core theses of embodiment?
A:
Conceptualization: Cognition depends on the entity’s body properties.
Replacement: Replace symbol-based computational concepts with bodily-informed ones.
Constitution: The body plays a constitutive role in cognition, not merely a causal one.
Q: What is the embodiment answer to attributing cognitive processes to artificial agents?
A: Cognitive processes can be attributed if the agents are connected to the world through sensory, perceptual, and motoric systems and can navigate and solve problems in their environment.
Q: What is the problem with the default assumption in the stored-description model?
A: It assumes the perception system provides a predefined symbolic description of the world, which fails to handle unanticipated scenarios.
Q: What is the significance of the body in embodiment?
A: The body is not just a vessel but a constitutive part of the cognitive system, shaping and enabling cognition.
Q: What does “Elephants don’t play chess” criticize?
A: It criticizes the stagnation in AI development caused by reliance on the stored-description model and its inability to adapt to dynamic environments.
Q: Why is embodiment necessary for cognition?
A: Cognition is grounded in physical interactions with the world, requiring sensory, perceptual, and motoric systems to navigate and solve problems.
Q: What is the replacement thesis in embodiment?
A: Traditional computational concepts (e.g., symbols, functions) must be replaced with ideas suited to bodily-informed cognitive systems.
