From Artificial Life to Artificial Embodiment: Using human-computer interfaces to investigate the embodied mind 'as-it-could-be' from the first-person perspective

There is a growing community of cognitive scientists who are interested in developing a systematic understanding of the experiential or ‘lived’ aspects of the mind. We argue that this shift from cognitive science to consciousness science presents a novel challenge to the fields of AI, robotics and related synthetic approaches. AI has traditionally formed the central foundation of cognitive science, and progress in artificial life has helped to pioneer a new understanding of cognition as embodied, situated and dynamical. However, in the current experiential turn toward the phenomenological aspects of mind, the role of these fields still remains uncertain. We propose that one way of dealing with the challenge of phenomenology is to make use of artificial life principles in the design of systems that include human observers inside the technologically mediated sensorimotor loops. Humancomputer interfaces enable us to artificially vary the embodiment of the participants, and can therefore be used as novel tools to systematically investigate the embodied mind ‘as-it-could-be’ from the first-person perspective. We illustrate this methodology of artificial embodiment by drawing on our research in sensory substitution, virtual reality, and interactive installation.