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I’ve always thought that proponents of “embodied cognition” are onto something. Like the whole field of so-called machine learning is missing something fundamen
by mindgam3 8y ago
I’ve always thought that proponents of “embodied cognition” are onto something. Like the whole field of so-called machine learning is missing something fundamental about how humans learn. This article provides a cogent explanation for what could be missing.
“When children are learning their first language, Macedonia argues, they absorb information with their entire bodies. A word like “onion,” for example, is tightly linked to all five senses: Onions have a bulbous shape, papery skin that rustles, a bitter tang and a tear-inducing odor when sliced. Even abstract concepts like “delight” have multisensory components, such as smiles, laughter and jumping for joy. To some extent, cognition is “embodied” — the brain’s activity can be modified by the body’s actions and experiences, and vice versa. It’s no wonder, then, that foreign words don’t stick if students are only listening, writing, practicing and repeating, because those verbal experiences are stripped of their sensory associations.“
Frankly I find this explanation very convincing. I have absolutely no idea how one would go about trying to design intelligent machines using embodied cognition. Feels like we are light years away from anything close to this, which is why no mainstream AI researchers are working on it or even discussing it as far as I know. Would love to see some counter examples if anyone is more knowledgeable about the space.
- vga805 8y agoYou might find some of this researcher's work of interest: http://www.cs.otago.ac.nz/staffpriv/alik/research.php http://www.cs.otago.ac.nz/staffpriv/alik/research.php It's not quite cutting edge AI, but it is a lab that takes seriously embodied cognition.
- gumby 8y agoYou might be interested in the work of Jean Piaget, a constructivist child psychologist. One of his PhD students was a South African scientist you may have heard of: Seymour Papert, longtime collaborator with Marvin Minsky. There are a couple of companies working on embedded cognition but they are in stealth. Academic work in this area has pretty much faded since the late 1980s.
- visarga 8y agoEmbodied cognition is being studied in reinforcement learning with virtual agents in simulated environments. It's not just about the body, but mostly about the environment. Think of the environment as an infinite dataset, always providing new experiences and their consequences to the agent. By comparison, even a dataset of millions of images or gigabytes of text is static.
- vga805 8y agoAmong psychologists, Laurence Barsalou is one of the most prominent academics working in the emobodied cognition, or as his lab calls it, grounded cognition, tradition: http://barsaloulab.org/ http://barsaloulab.org/ His work has influenced one of the most distinguished philosophers of mind working in this area: Jesse Prinz: http://subcortex.com/ http://subcortex.com/