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Freeing Machines from Cartesian Chains

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Cognitive Technology: Instruments of Mind (CT 2001)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 2117))

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Abstract

The impact of technology on thinking about behaviour has shifted from mechanistic descriptions towards the computational stance of cognitive science and classical Artificial Intelligence. All these approaches share an output-oriented black-box rationalism, which is also the foundation of neo-Darwinistic accounts of behaviour. To gauge the limitations of this type of explanations and of ethological methods in particular, I analysed the behaviour of simple robots as if they were living creatures. This revealed interesting patterns but did not take the lid of the black box. The self-organized cooperative behaviour of the robots could only be understood if feedback from environmental changes was considered. Furthermore, the robots were not designed by “engineering from scratch” or a “problem-solving approach”, but instead by an almost task-free attitude without preconceptions like “imperfect design” and “behavioural errors”. This questions the use of a priori stated “costs” and “benefits”, and thus is at odds with the starting points of normative and rationalistic theorizing.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Information Technology, University of Zürich, Switzerland

    René J. A. te Boekhorst

Authors
  1. René J. A. te Boekhorst
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. The Empirical Modeling Research Group, Department of Computer Science, University of Warwick, Coventry, CV4 7AL, UK

    Meurig Beynon

  2. Adaptive Systems Research Group, Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences, University of Hertfordshire, College Lane, Hatfield Herts, AL10 9AB, UK

    Chrystopher L. Nehaniv  & Kerstin Dautenhahn  & 

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© 2001 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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te Boekhorst, R.J.A. (2001). Freeing Machines from Cartesian Chains. In: Beynon, M., Nehaniv, C.L., Dautenhahn, K. (eds) Cognitive Technology: Instruments of Mind. CT 2001. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 2117. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-44617-6_9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-44617-6_9

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-42406-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-44617-0

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