These are excerpts and elaborations from my book "The Nature of Consciousness"
Situated Cognition The US computer scientist
Rodney Brooks, the originator of
"situated cognition", shifted the emphasis of Artificial Intelligence
to the interaction between an agent and its environment. Brooks’ “situated” agents have no knowledge. Their memory is not a locus of
representation but simply the place where behavior is generated. In Brooks' "subsumption" architecture, behavior is determined by the
structure of the environment. The cognitive system has no need to represent the
world, but only for how to operate in the world. There is no centralized
function that coordinates the entire cognitive system, but a number of
distributed decisional centers that operate in parallel, each of them
performing a different task. The system does not have the explicit representation
of what it is doing. It does have parallel processes that represent only their
very limited goals. The system decomposes in
layers of goal-driven behavior, each layer being a network of finite-state
automata, and incrementally composes its behavior through the interaction with
the world. Brooks can therefore account for the
very fast response times required in the real world. In the real world there is
no clear-cut difference between perception, reasoning and action. Brooks turns the mind into one of many
agents that live in the environment.
The environment is the center of action, not the mind. The environment is action,
continuous action, continuously changing.
Only a system of separate, autonomous control systems could possibly
react and adapt to such a context. The world contains all the
information that the organism needs. Therefore there is no need to represent it
in the mind. The environment acts like a memory external to the organism, from
which the organism can retrieve any kind of information through
perception. "Intelligent"
behavior can be partitioned into a set of asynchronous tasks (eating, walking,
etc.), each endowed with a mechanism of perception and action. An artificial organism can be built
incrementally by gradually adding new tasks.
Behavior arises from layers of competence. Cognition is rational
kinematics. Brooks’ ultimate point is that every intelligent being has a body! Back to the beginning of the chapter "Ecological Realism: The Embodied Mind" | Back to the index of all chapters |