Life, Mind, and Robots: The Ins and Outs of Embodied Cognition

Many believe that the major problem facing traditional artificial intelligence (and the functional theory of mind) is how to connect intelligence to the outside world. Some turned to robotic functionalism and a hybrid response, that attempts to rescue symbolic functionalism by grounding the symbol system with a connectionist hook to the world. Others turned to an alternative approach, embodied cognition, that emerged from an older tradition in biology, ethology, and behavioural modelling. Both approaches are contrasted here before a detailed exploration of embodiment is conducted. In particular we ask whether strong embodiment is possible for robotics, i.e. are robot “minds” similar to animal minds, or is the role of robotics to provide a tool for scientific exploration, a weak embodiment? We define two types of embodiment, Loebian and Uexküllian, that express two different views of the relation between body, mind and behaviour. It is argued that strong embodiment, either Loebian or Uexküllian, is not possible for present day robotics. However, weak embodiment is still a useful way forward.