embodied cognition
In plain wordsThe idea that thinking is not something the brain does on its own: the body, its senses and movements, and its surroundings play a real part in how we think and understand.
A family of views in cognitive sciencecognitive science, n.: The scientific study of how minds work — how we reason, use language, remember and see — combining psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, philosophy, anthropology and artificial intelligence. holding that cognition depends deeply on the body and its interaction with the environment, rather than being abstract computation over internal symbols that could run in any medium. Claims range from modest — sensorimotor experience shapes concepts, as reflected in bodily metaphors such as grasping an idea — to radical: enactivism holds that cognition consists in an organism's skilled activity in its world, and some versions reject internal representations altogether. Embodied cognition is grouped with embedded, enactive and extendedextended mind, n.: The idea that the mind can reach beyond the head into tools we rely on — a notebook, a phone, perhaps an AI assistant — when they play the same role that memory or reasoning would. cognition as '4E cognition'. For AI it supports arguments that intelligence and meaning require a body and sensorimotor groundinggrounding, n.: Connecting an AI's words to something real — trusted documents, a live search, images or the physical world — so that its answers rest on evidence rather than only on what it absorbed in training. — a motivation for embodied AIembodied AI, n.: AI that has a body, usually a robot and sometimes a simulated character, and learns or acts by sensing and moving in a world rather than only processing text or images. and robotics — and underlies doubts that text-trained models understand the world; critics reply that language itself encodes much embodied knowledge.
Origin
Drawing on Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology and James J. Gibson's ecological psychology, the approach was shaped by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson's work on bodily metaphor (1980), Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch's The Embodied Mind (1991) and Rodney Brooks's behavior-based robotics (1991).
Related
- embodied AIembodied AI, n.: AI that has a body, usually a robot and sometimes a simulated character, and learns or acts by sensing and moving in a world rather than only processing text or images.
- extended mindextended mind, n.: The idea that the mind can reach beyond the head into tools we rely on — a notebook, a phone, perhaps an AI assistant — when they play the same role that memory or reasoning would.
- symbol grounding problemsymbol grounding problem, n.: The puzzle of how words or symbols inside a machine can mean anything by themselves, rather than only pointing to more symbols — like a dictionary that defines every word using other words.
- Dreyfus's critique of AIDreyfus's critique of AI, n.: The philosopher Hubert Dreyfus's argument, from the 1960s on, that rule-based AI could never match human intelligence, because much human skill rests on bodily know-how and intuition rather than explicit rules.
- predictive processingpredictive processing, n.: The idea that the brain is a prediction machine: it constantly guesses what its senses will report next and learns mainly from its mistakes, so what we perceive is largely its best guess.
- Moravec's paradoxMoravec's paradox, n.: The observation that what is hard for people, like chess or algebra, is often easy for computers, while what toddlers do effortlessly, such as seeing, walking and picking things up, is very hard for machines.
- computational theory of mindcomputational theory of mind, n.: The idea that thinking is a kind of computation: the mind processes information by following rules, much as a computer runs a program, and the brain is the machine doing it.
Sources
- Varela, F. J., Thompson, E. & Rosch, E. (1991). The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. MIT Press.
- Brooks, R. A. (1991). Intelligence without Representation. Artificial Intelligence 47(1–3), 139–159.
Mentioned in
cognitive sciencecognitive science, n.: The scientific study of how minds work — how we reason, use language, remember and see — combining psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, philosophy, anthropology and artificial intelligence., computational theory of mindcomputational theory of mind, n.: The idea that thinking is a kind of computation: the mind processes information by following rules, much as a computer runs a program, and the brain is the machine doing it., embodied AIembodied AI, n.: AI that has a body, usually a robot and sometimes a simulated character, and learns or acts by sensing and moving in a world rather than only processing text or images., Hubert DreyfusHubert Dreyfus, prop. n.: An American philosopher who argued from the 1960s that computers following explicit rules could never match human intelligence, which rests on bodily, intuitive know-how., predictive processingpredictive processing, n.: The idea that the brain is a prediction machine: it constantly guesses what its senses will report next and learns mainly from its mistakes, so what we perceive is largely its best guess., Rodney BrooksRodney Brooks, prop. n.: An Australian-American roboticist who argued that intelligence grows out of acting in the world rather than abstract reasoning, and who co-founded the company behind the Roomba vacuum., symbol grounding problemsymbol grounding problem, n.: The puzzle of how words or symbols inside a machine can mean anything by themselves, rather than only pointing to more symbols — like a dictionary that defines every word using other words., active inferenceactive inference, n.: A theory that living things, and machines built on the same idea, act in order to make the world match their predictions, choosing actions expected to keep them in preferred states and reduce their uncertainty., artificial lifeartificial life, n.: The study of life by building lifelike systems — in computer simulations, robots or chemistry — to learn how living things organize themselves, reproduce and evolve, and what other kinds of life could exist., Dreyfus's critique of AIDreyfus's critique of AI, n.: The philosopher Hubert Dreyfus's argument, from the 1960s on, that rule-based AI could never match human intelligence, because much human skill rests on bodily know-how and intuition rather than explicit rules., extended mindextended mind, n.: The idea that the mind can reach beyond the head into tools we rely on — a notebook, a phone, perhaps an AI assistant — when they play the same role that memory or reasoning would., proprioceptionproprioception, n.: A robot's sense of its own body: where its joints are, how fast they are moving and how hard its motors are pushing, measured by internal sensors rather than cameras., subsumption architecturesubsumption architecture, n.: A way to build robot brains from stacked, reflex-like behaviors — a bottom layer that keeps clear of obstacles, others that roam or explore — where higher layers can take over from lower ones, with no central map or plan.