An embodied agent influences its environment and is influenced by it. We use the sensorimotor loop to model these interactions and quantify the information flows in the system by information-theoretic measures. This includes a measure for the interaction among the agent's body and its environment, often referred to as morphological computation. Additionally, we examine the controller...
Dualisms are pervasive. The divisions between the rational mind, the physical body, and the external natural world have set the stage for the successes and failures of contemporary cognitive science and artificial intelligence.1 Advanced machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) systems have been developed to draw art and compose music. Many take these facts as calls for a radical...
Artificial Life2018Eran Agmon, Matthew D. Egbert, Nathaniel Virgo1 citation
This is a report on the Biological Foundations of Enactivism Workshop, which was held as part of Artificial Life XV. The workshop aimed to revisit enactivism's contributions to biology and to revitalize the discussion of autonomy with the goal of grounding it in quantitative definitions based in observable phenomena. This report summarizes some of the important issues addressed in the...
Concepts of emergence and autonomy are central to artificial life and related cognitive and behavioral sciences. However, quantitative and easy-to-apply measures of these phenomena are mostly lacking. Here, I describe quantitative and practicable measures for both autonomy and emergence, based on the framework of multivariate autoregression and specifically Granger causality. G-autonomy...
The embodiment hypothesis is the idea that intelligence emerges in the interaction of an agent with an environment and as a result of sensorimotor activity. We offer six lessons for developing embodied intelligent agents suggested by research in developmental psychology. We argue that starting as a baby grounded in a physical, social, and linguistic world is crucial to the development of the...