Does radical externalism suggest how to implement machine consciousness?
Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications 2011 DOI: 10.3233/978-1-60750-959-2-232 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Theoretical or philosophical paper Peer reviewed |
|---|---|
| Key points | Argues that AI design should incorporate externalist principles by offloading semantics, intentionality, and teleology into the environment, and illustrates this with a robotic implementation that exploits agent-environment coupling. |
Abstract
Despite the great interest for externalist oriented models of the mind (enactivism, the extended mind, various forms of externalism, embodiment, embeddedness), most current artificial agents are designed as though the mind “is still in the head”. In other words, in the field of AI, the prevailing view still assumes that the relevant information is processed inside the system that provides the right kind of computation. In this paper, we outline a model of situated cognition that aims at offloading various aspects of cognition which are strongly related with conscious experience (semantics, intentionality, teleology) and then we discuss a robotic implementation which tries to show the kind of intimate agent-environment relationship that may be exploited by conscious agents.