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

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