Robotics: Philosophy of Mind Using a Screwdriver

Rob otics Philosophy of Mind using a Screwdriver Inman Harvey Scho ol of Cognitive and Computing Sciences University of Sussex Brighton BN QH UK Abstract The design of autonomous rob ots has an intimate relationship with the study of autonomous animals and humans rob ots pro vide a convenient pupp et show for illustrating currentmyths ab out cognition Like it or not any approach to the design of autonomous rob ots is underpinned by some philosophical p osition in the designer Whereas a philosophical p osition normally has to survive in debate in a pro ject of building situated rob ots ones philosophical p osition aects design decisions and is then tested in the real world doing philosophy of mind with a screwdriver Traditional Go o d Old Fashioned Articial Intelligence GOFAI approaches have b een based on what is commonly called a Cartesian split b etween b o dy and mind though the division go es backat least to Plato The Dynamical Systems approach to cognition and to rob ot design draws on other philosophical paradigms We shall discuss how suchvaried philosophers as Heidegger MerleauPonty or Wittgenstein in the improbable event of them wanting to build rob ots mightbetemptedtosetaboutthetask Intro duction Car manufacturers need rob ots that reliably and mindlessly rep eat sequences of actions in some wellorganised environment For many other purp oses au tonomous rob ots are needed that will b ehave appropriately in a disorganised environment that will react adaptively when faced with circumstances that they havenever faced b efore Planetary exploring rob ots such as the So journer rob ot sent to Mars cannot aord to wait the long time needed for radio communication with p eople on earth for consultation on every indi vidual movetheymake The user of a semiautonomous wheelchair should b e able to delegate the same sort of decisions that a horse rider delegates to herhorsehow to mano euvre around obstacles and react instinctively to other trac Wewantsuch rob ots to b ehave to some extentintelligently or adaptivelyinfacttobehave in some small part as if they had a mind of their own It has b een tempting to think of this as merely a technical scientic problem we should study in an ob jective scientic fashion the basic re quirements for adaptiveintelligence and then systematically engineer into our rob ots what wehave found to b e necessary But likeitornotany approach to the understanding of cognition and adaptiveintelligence and hence to the design of autonomous rob ots is inevitably framed within some philosophical p osition in the scientist or designer In a pro ject of building situated rob ots ones philosophical p osition aects design decisions and is then tested in the real world doing philosophy of mind with a screw driver We use basic working metaphors to make sense of scientic theories billiard balls and waves on a p ond have b een much used in physics The metaphor of animals or even humans as machines as comparable to the technical artefacts that we construct is a p owerful one When we try to build autonomous rob ots they are almost literally pupp ets acting to illus trate our currentmyths ab out cognition The word myth sounds p ossibly derogatory as it often implies a ction or halftruth it is not intended as such here I am merely trying to emphasise that our view of cognition is a humancentred view from the end of the second millennium some billion years after the origin of life on this planet Someone coming from the conventional scientic p ersp ectivemay sug gest that our current cultural context is irrelevant After all ob jectivityin science is all to do with discounting the accidental p ersp ectives of an ob server and discovering universal facts and laws that all observers can agree on from whatever place and time in which they are situated However to pursue this line to o far leads one intoaparadox What theories if any did the organisms of billion years ago have ab out the cognitive abilities of their contemp oraries Clearly nothing like ours What theories mightour descendants if any billion years hence have ab out the cognition of their contemp oraries It would b e arrogant indeed unscientic to assume that they would b e similar to ours The Cop ernican revolutions in science have increased the scop e of our ob jective understanding of the world by recognising that our observations are not contextfree Cop ernicus and Galileo used their imagination and sp eculated what the solar system mightlooklike if our view from the planet Earth was not a privileged view from the xed centre of the universe but merely one p ossible p ersp ective amongst many Darwin op ened up the way to appreciating that Homo Sapiens is just one sp ecies amongst manywitha common mo de of evolutionary development from one common origin Ein stein brought ab out a fresh Cop ernican revolution with Sp ecial Relativity showing how our understanding is increased when we abandon the idea of some unique xed frame of reference for measuring the sp eed of anyobject The history of science showsanumber of advances now generally accepted stemming from a relativist p ersp ective that surprisingly is asso ciated with an ob jective stance toward our role as observers Cognitive science seems one of the last bastions to hold out against a Cop ernican relativist revolution In this pap er I will broadly distinguish between the preCop ernican views asso ciated with the computationalist ap proach of classical Go o d Old Fashioned Articial Intelligence GOFAI and the contextual situated approaches of nouvelle AI The two sides will b e rather crudely p ortrayed with little attempt to distinguish the many dier ing factions that can b e group ed under one ag or the other The dierent philosophical views will b e asso ciated with the direct implications that they have for the design of rob ots It is worth mentioning that Bro oks recent collection of his early pap ers on rob otics Bro oks explicitly divides the eight pap ers into four under the heading of Technology and four as Philosophy though the division is somewhat arbitrary as the two asp ects go together throughout Cartesian or Classical approaches to Rob otics Descartes working in the rst half of the seventeenth century is considered by many to b e the rst mo dern philosopher A scientist and mathematician as much as philosopher his ideas laid the groundwork for much of the waywe view science to day In cognitive science the term Cartesian has p erhaps rather unfairly to Descartes come to exclusively characterise a set of views that treat the division b etween the mental and the physical as fundamental the Cartesian cut Lemmen One form of the Cartesian cut is the dualist idea that these are two completely separate substances the mental and the physical which can exist indep endently of each other Descartes prop osed that these twoworlds interacted in just one place in humans the pineal gland in the brain Nowadays this dualism is not very resp ectable yet the common scientic assumption rests on a variant of this Cartesian cut that the physical world can b e considered completely ob jectively indep endent of all observers This is a dierent kind of ob jectivity from that of the Cop ernican sci entic revolutions mentioned ab ove Those relied on the absence of any privileged p osition on intersub jective agreementbetween observers inde p endentofany sp ecic observer The Cartesian ob jectivity assumes that therejustisawaytheworld is indep endentofany observer at all The scientists job then is to b e a sp ectator from outside the world with a Go dseye view from ab ove When building rob ots this leads to the classical approach where the rob ot is also a little scientistsp ectator seeking information from outside ab out how the world is what ob jects are in which place The rob ot takes in information through its sensors turns this into some internal representation or mo del with which it can reason and plan and on the basis of this formulates some action that is delivered through the motors Bro oks calls this the SMPA or sensemo delplanact architecture Bro oks The brain or nervous system of the rob ot can b e considered as a Black Box connected to sensors and actuators such that the b ehaviour of the ma chine plus brain within its environment can b e seen to b e intelligent The question then is What to put in the BlackBox The classical compu tationalist view is that it should b e computing appropriate outputs from its inputs Or p ossibly they maysay that whatever it is doing should b e interpretable as doing such a computation The astronomer and her computer p erform computational algorithms in order to predict the next eclipse of the mo on the sun mo on and earth do not carry out such pro cedures as they drift through space The co ok follows the algorithm recip e for mixing a cake but the ingredients do not do so as they rise in the oven Likewise if I was capable of writing a computer program which predicted the actions of a small creature this do es not mean that the creature itself or its neurons or its brain was consulting some equivalent program in deciding what to do Formal computations are to do with solving problems suchaswhenis the eclipse But this is an astronomers problem not a problem that the solar system faces and has to solve Likewise predicting the next movement of a creature is an animal b ehaviourists problem not one that the creature faces However the rise of computer p ower in solving problems naturally though regrettably led AI to the view that cognition equalled the solving of problems

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