I was planning to write about something similar myself when I have more free time. The embodied/dynamical approach to behavior is similar to Brooks anti-representationalist approach and I think its best statement is philosopher Alva Noe’s recent book Out of Our Heads. His account of perception, which builds on the ecological psychology of Gibson, is particularly excellent (he goes into more depth about it in his earlier book Action in Perception; you can also find most of his papers online). I have yet to find anything that isn’t better explained by the embodied/dynamical approach and it has the advantage over representationist/computationalist cognitive science of being biologically-plausible.
Embodied/dynamical is not orthogonal to representationist/computationalist. It’s presented that way in the literature, because a good story has to have conflict.
In my experience, behavior-based programming breaks down above about 100 behaviors, which Brooks etc. never get anywhere near in their robots. The number of interactions between n behaviors scales as n-squared. This is bad.
I find accounts that try to reconcile the two approaches unconvincing. Andy Clark tries to do this and his books and articles suffer greatly for it. There’s no reason you couldn’t combine the two, of course, but the problem is coming up with a reason why somebody would hang on to representationalism if it’s no longer “the only game in town.” Representationalism/computationalism is unmotivated by evidence, creates more problems than it explains and is biologically-implausible. If you have alternative explanations without these problems then I fail to see why you wouldn’t use them.
I was planning to write about something similar myself when I have more free time. The embodied/dynamical approach to behavior is similar to Brooks anti-representationalist approach and I think its best statement is philosopher Alva Noe’s recent book Out of Our Heads. His account of perception, which builds on the ecological psychology of Gibson, is particularly excellent (he goes into more depth about it in his earlier book Action in Perception; you can also find most of his papers online). I have yet to find anything that isn’t better explained by the embodied/dynamical approach and it has the advantage over representationist/computationalist cognitive science of being biologically-plausible.
Embodied/dynamical is not orthogonal to representationist/computationalist. It’s presented that way in the literature, because a good story has to have conflict.
In my experience, behavior-based programming breaks down above about 100 behaviors, which Brooks etc. never get anywhere near in their robots. The number of interactions between n behaviors scales as n-squared. This is bad.
I find accounts that try to reconcile the two approaches unconvincing. Andy Clark tries to do this and his books and articles suffer greatly for it. There’s no reason you couldn’t combine the two, of course, but the problem is coming up with a reason why somebody would hang on to representationalism if it’s no longer “the only game in town.” Representationalism/computationalism is unmotivated by evidence, creates more problems than it explains and is biologically-implausible. If you have alternative explanations without these problems then I fail to see why you wouldn’t use them.
Hmm, in what alternative approach do the 100 behaviors not interact?