the role of ai in the paradigm shift towards enaction
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The Role of AI in the Paradigm Shift towards Enaction. Life and Mind seminar #2 Tom Froese. Overview. Cognitivism Embodied-Embedded Cognitive Science Enactivism Beyond?. The major transitions of cognitive science. Varela (1999). Cognitivism. - PowerPoint PPT PresentationTRANSCRIPT
The Role of AI in the Paradigm Shift towards
Enaction
Life and Mind seminar #2Tom Froese
Life and Mind seminar #2 2
Overview
• Cognitivism
• Embodied-Embedded Cognitive Science
• Enactivism
• Beyond?
Life and Mind seminar #2 3
The major transitions of cognitive science
Varela (1999)
Life and Mind seminar #2 4
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 #2 5
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 #2 6
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 #2 7
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 #2 8
A first paradigm shift
Cognitivism
Embodied-EmbeddedCognitive Science
Failure of symbolic AI / emergence of nouvelle AI
The Cartesian tradition
Life and Mind seminar #2 9
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 #2 10
Towards a new dialectic
rational empirical
rational empirical
Life and Mind seminar #2 11
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 #2 12
Organization of the living body: Autopoiesis
Life and Mind seminar #2 13
Operational closure
Rudrauf, et al. (2003)
Life and Mind seminar #2 14
The Enactive Approach3. Cognition, conceived fundamentally as meaning-
generation, arises from the sensorimotor coupling between organism and environment. Cognition is a form of embodied action.
4. The organism’s 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 organism’s experiential awareness is a central feature of its lived embodiment in the world.
Life and Mind seminar #2 15
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 #2 16
Towards a new dialectic?
rational empirical
rational empirical
experiential
Life and Mind seminar #2 17
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 1st 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 #2 18
A second paradigm shift?
Cognitivism
Embodied-EmbeddedCognitive Science
Failure of symbolic AI / emergence of nouvelle AI.
Enactivism
?
The Cartesian tradition
Life and Mind seminar #2 19
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 #2 20
Two explanatory paths
Maturana’s (1988) “ontological diagram”
Life and Mind seminar #2 21
The role of experience
rational empirical
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.
Being-in-th
e-world
Being-in-th
e-world
Life and Mind seminar #2 22
The role of experience
Cognitivism
Embodied-EmbeddedCognitive Science
Empirical
Enactivism
Philosophical
Experiential
Life and Mind seminar #2 23
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?