Dynamics, Representation and Embodied Agents

抄録

How should we study the embodied, environmentally embedded mind? The problem becomes acute once we realize that nature's solutions will often confound our guiding images and flout the neat demarcations (of body, brain, and world) that structure our thinking. The biological brain is, it seems, both constrained and empowered in important and sometimes non-intuitive ways. It is constrained by the nature of the evolutionary process—a process that must build new solutions and adaptive strategies on the basis of existing hardware and cognitive resources. And it is empowered, by the availability of a real-world arena that allows us to exploit other agents, to actively seek useful inputs, to transform our computational tasks, and to offload acquired knowledge into the world.
A major debate in contemporary cognitive science thus concerns the correct choice of exploratory apparatus for modeling such multi-faceted processes. Recent work in robotics, developmental psychology and cognitive neuroscience has been taken (See e.g. Thelen & Smith (1994), Kelso (1995), Beer (1995)) to suggest the need for a dynamical systems perspective in addition to, or (more radically) in place of, the traditional apparatus of computational and representational explanation. In this paper I sketch some examples of embodied, environmentally embedded problem solving and argue for a hybrid explanatory apparatus incorporating both dynamical and more traditional (computational and representational) elements.