The Role of AI in the Paradigm Shift towards Enaction

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?


The major transitions of cognitive science

Varela (1999)


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.


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.


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.


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.


A first paradigm shift

Cognitivism

Embodied-EmbeddedCognitive Science

Failure of symbolic AI / emergence of nouvelle AI

The Cartesian tradition


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.


Towards a new dialectic

rational empirical

rational empirical


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.


Organization of the living body: Autopoiesis


Operational closure

Rudrauf, et al. (2003)


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.


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


Towards a new dialectic?

rational empirical

rational empirical

experiential


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.


A second paradigm shift?

Cognitivism


Failure of symbolic AI / emergence of nouvelle AI.

Enactivism

?

The Cartesian tradition


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?


Two explanatory paths

Maturana’s (1988) “ontological diagram”


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


The role of experience

Cognitivism


Empirical

Enactivism

Philosophical

Experiential


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?

The Role of AI in the Paradigm Shift towards Enaction

Documents

mind seminar

cognitive behavior

cognitive sciences

cognitive domains

cognitive agent

role of ai

dynamical system

form of centralized