Enactivism and Robotic Language Acquisition: A Report from the Frontier

In this article, I assess an existing language acquisition architecture, which was deployed in linguistically unconstrained human–robot interaction, together with experimental design decisions with regard to their enactivist credentials. Despite initial scepticism with respect to enactivism’s applicability to the social domain, the introduction of the notion of participatory sense-making in the more recent enactive literature extends the framework’s reach to encompass this domain. With some exceptions, both our architecture and form of experimentation appear to be largely compatible with enactivist tenets. I analyse the architecture and design decisions along the five enactivist core themes of autonomy, embodiment, emergence, sense-making, and experience, and discuss the role of affect due to its central role within our acquisition experiments. In conclusion, I join some enactivists in demanding that interaction is taken seriously as an irreducible and independent subject of scientific investigation, and go further by hypothesising its potential value to machine learning.Peer reviewedFinal Published versio

Accounting for the Specious Present: A Defense of Enactivism

I argue that conscious visual experience is essentially a non-representational demonstration of a skill. The explication and defense of this position depends on both phenomenological and empirical considerations. The central phenomenological claim is this: as a matter of human psychology, it is impossible to produce a conscious visual experience of a mind-independent object that is sufficiently like typical cases, without including concomitant proprioceptive sensations of the sort of extra-neural behavior that allows us to there and then competently detect such objects. I then argue that this view, which is a version of enactivism, best explains the temporality of conscious experience—what is often called the specious present

Interaction and Experience in Enactive Intelligence and Humanoid Robotics

We overview how sensorimotor experience can be operationalized for interaction scenarios in which humanoid robots acquire skills and linguistic behaviours via enacting a “form-of-life”’ in interaction games (following Wittgenstein) with humans. The enactive paradigm is introduced which provides a powerful framework for the construction of complex adaptive systems, based on interaction, habit, and experience. Enactive cognitive architectures (following insights of Varela, Thompson and Rosch) that we have developed support social learning and robot ontogeny by harnessing information-theoretic methods and raw uninterpreted sensorimotor experience to scaffold the acquisition of behaviours. The success criterion here is validation by the robot engaging in ongoing human-robot interaction with naive participants who, over the course of iterated interactions, shape the robot’s behavioural and linguistic development. Engagement in such interaction exhibiting aspects of purposeful, habitual recurring structure evidences the developed capability of the humanoid to enact language and interaction games as a successful participant

Distal engagement: Intentions in perception

Non-representational approaches to cognition have struggled to provide accounts of long-term planning that forgo the use of representations. An explanation comes easier for cognitivist accounts, which hold that we concoct and use contentful mental representations as guides to coordinate a series of actions towards an end state. One non-representational approach, ecological-enactivism, has recently seen several proposals that account for “high-level” or “representation-hungry” capacities, including long-term planning and action coordination. In this paper, we demonstrate the explanatory gap in these accounts that stems from avoiding the incorporation of long-term intentions, as they play an important role both in action coordination and perception on the ecological account. Using recent enactive accounts of language, we argue for a non-representational conception of intentions, their formation, and their role in coordinating pre-reflective action. We provide an account for the coordination of our present actions towards a distant goal, a skill we call distal engagement. Rather than positing intentions as an actual cognitive entity in need of explanation, we argue that we take them up in this way as a practice due to linguistically scaffolded attitudes towards language use

Color Relationism and Enactive Ontology

In this paper, I present the enactive theory of color that implies a form of color relationism. I argue that this view constitutes a better alternative to color subjectivism and color objectivism. I liken the enactive view to Husserl’s phenomenology of perception, arguing that both deconstruct the clear duality of subject and object, which is at the basis of the other theories of color, in order to claim the co-constitution of subject and object in the process of experience. I also extend the enactive and phenomenological account of color to the more general topic of the epistemological and ontological status of sensory qualities (qualia), outlining the fields of enactive phenomenology and enactive ontology

Extending the Extended Mind : From Cognition to Consciousness

Where does conscious experience stop and the rest of the world begin? Is the material basis of consciousness confined to the brain, or can it be extended to include other parts of the body and environmental elements? This study proposes an extended account: when all the requirements are fulfilled, an external tool may become part of the realising basis for certain experiential processes. Andy Clark and David Chalmers argued famously that the material basis of cognitive states sometimes extends out of the barriers of skin and skull to external objects such as notebooks and other everyday tools. However, they draw the line there: only cognition, but not consciousness can have an extended base. The central argument of this study is that their constraint is not legitimate. If one is accepted, the other one follows. The first chapter lays an overview of the theoretical background of externalism and the 4E-theories in present-day philosophy of mind and cognitive sciences. It also examines the central concepts, accounts and methodological questions that will be used and further developed in later chapters. The second chapter presents three arguments for the position defended in this thesis, namely the hypothesis of extended conscious mind. The third chapter analyses the ongoing debate in the interface of philosophy of mind and philosophy of science about the causal–constitution distinction, and argues that rather than in mechanist terms, the causal–constitution distinction should be interpreted in diachronic terms when dealing with mental phenomena. When depicted that way, the extension relation in the hypothesis of extended conscious mind counts as constitutive. The fourth chapter distinguishes between several different levels of extension, from mere short-term extension to more robust functional incorporation, where the external tool has become part of the transparent bodily point of view of the subject. Based on the notion of functional incorporation, a set of demarcation criteria for the hypothesis of extended conscious mind will be developed. The chapter closes by discussing sensory substitution as a concrete example of functional incorporation. Finally, the fifth chapter introduces the most influential counter-arguments that have been set forth against the hypothesis of extended conscious mind. The critiques will be examined and answered.Väitöstutkimus esittää, että mielen ja tietoisen kokemuksen rajat laajentuvat pään ja ruumiin ulkopuolelle, esimerkiksi teknologisiin apuvälineisiin. Tutkimus kyseenalaistaa mielenfilosofiassa perinteisesti vallassa olleen näkemyksen, jonka mukaan mielen toiminnot voitaisiin selittää pelkän aivotoiminnan pohjalta – sen sijaan mielen toiminnot syntyvät aivojen, ruumiin ja ympäristön vuorovaikutuksessa. Andy Clark ja David Chalmers esittivät kuuluisassa artikkelissaan, että jokapäiväiset apuvälineet voivat olla kognitiivisten prosessien muodostamisessa mukana biologisen ruumiin ohella. Clark ja Chalmers kuitenkin rajoittivat laajentumisen tähän: heidän mukaansa pelkästään kognitiivisilla prosesseilla voi olla laajentunut perusta, mutta tietoinen kokemus rajoittuu pään sisään. Tämän tutkimuksen uusi avaus ja ydinargumentti on, että tällaista rajanvetoa ei ole mahdollista tehdä johdonmukaisesti. Jos hyväksymme kognitiivisten tilojen laajentumisen, tietoinen kokemus seuraa mukana. Biologisten toimintojen ohella esimerkiksi muistikirja tai älypuhelin voi toimia muistoja ja uskomuksia osaltaan toteuttavana välineenä, ja sokeankeppi tai tekoraaja osana tuntoaistimuksen toteuttavaa materiaalista pohjaa. Jotta laajentuminen voi tapahtua, ulkoisen välineen tulee täyttää tietyt ehdot, sen täytyy muun muassa tulla osaksi funktionaalista ruumiillista identiteettiä. Ulkoisiin apuvälineisiin laajentuminen on mahdollista aivojen ja ruumiin rakenteellisen muovautuvuuden ansiosta: ruumiillistetun osan ei tarvitse olla biologinen, mutta sen täytyy tulla ”läpinäkyväksi” osaksi subjektin näkökulmaa. Käsitteellisen analyysin lisäksi työssä käsitellään useita empiirisiä tutkimustapauksia (kuten aistikorvaavuuslaite-teknologia ja empiirinen unitutkimus). Mielen ja tietoisen kokemuksen laajentumisella on kauaskantoinen vaikutus, joka näkyy filosofian ohella useilla muillakin aloilla. Tutkimus auttaa vastaamaan erittäin ajankohtaisiin kysymyksiin, kuten millainen status käyttämillemme jokapäiväisille teknologisille laitteille tulisi antaa: tulisiko niitä pitää vain fyysisinä esineinä vai kognitiivisten prosessien jatkeena? Yksi esiin nouseva käytännönläheinen kysymys jatkotutkimukselle on kuinka ympäristön muokkaaminen (esim. hoitolaitoksissa tehtävät ratkaisut) vaikuttaa mieleen – ja tästä seuraa myös monenlaisia eettisiä kysymyksiä

Empirical and Epistemological Implications of an Enactive Sensorimotor Contingency Theory

By virtue of Kevin O’Regan and Alva Noë’s enactive sensorimotor contingency theory, and its central tenets- perception is constituted by mastery of occurrent sensorimotor contingencies used for thought and action-guidance- the theory suggests the resolution of the explanatory gap problem and provides arguments to dismantle representationalist research programs. Central objections to O’Regan and Noë’s sensorimotor contingency theory are addressed: (1) synaesthetic visual color-perception and the problem of non-identical ratios of qualitative experience from peripheral inputs (2) sensorimotor contingency theory implies propositional knowledge- consequently perceptual consciousness is state-based. Temporal coupling shows synaesthesia does not have to be constituted by isomorphic input-output mappings for perceptual consciousness. Objection (2), for radical enactivism lacks epistemological implications for both enactive cognition and future research in perceptual consciousness. Epistemological implications of the sensorimotor contingency theory are addressed through Varela, et al.’s embodied cognition and mindfulness theory which demonstrates pragmatic value for a sensorimotor contingency theory