Open peer commentary on the article “Homeostats for the 21st Century? Simulating Ashby Simulating the Brain” by Stefano Franchi. Upshot: The target article has addressed core concepts of Ashby’s generalized homeostasis thesis as well as its relevance to building complex artificial systems. In this commentary, I discuss Ashby-inspired approaches to designing for ultrastable behaviour in robots and the extent to which complex adaptive behaviour can be underdetermined by heteronomous constraints.

Open peer commentary on the article “Interactivity and Enaction in Human Cognition” by Matthew Isaac Harvey, Rasmus Gahrn-Andersen & Sune Vork Steffensen. Upshot: In contrasting an interactivity account alternative to variants on the enactive approach, the authors discuss the role of sense-making. They claim that their interactivity perspective, unlike enactive approaches, accounts for a dependency on “non-local” resources characteristic of many organisms. I draw attention to the cybernetic-enactivist perspective on homeostatic sense-making, which may fundamentally fail to explain the operationally open nature of organismic regulatory processes better captured by Sterling’s notion of “allostasis.” This sense-making model appears to be more in line with Harvey et al.’s interactivity framework, focusing as it does on the regulatory effect of extrinsic “norms” rather than the cybernetic-enactivist focus on intrinsic “norms.”

Open peer commentary on the article “What Is a Cognizing Subject? Construction, Autonomy and Original Causation” by Niall Palfreyman & Janice Miller-Young. Upshot: Palfreyman and Miller-Young claim that their theory should be capable of accounting for whether robots are inherently autonomous or not. Unfortunately, they fail to elaborate on how and to what extent they consider robotic autonomy to fit within their framework. I allude to what phenomena and modelling approaches may contribute to the imbuing of autonomy in robots.

Open peer commentary on the article “Foresight Rather than Hindsight? Future State Maximization As a Computational Interpretation of Heinz von Foerster’s Ethical Imperative” by Hannes Hornischer, Simon Plakolb, Georg Jäger & Manfred Füllsack. Abstract: The target article outlines a Future-State-Maximization (FSX) approach whose focus on “rewarding” actions that lead to increased action possibilities serves as an alternative to standard value-based learning approaches. In my commentary, I discuss how internal states might shape future action possibilities. Specifically, the notion of allostasis is discussed in relation to how physiological (internal variable) regulation may enable or constrain future action spaces.

In this article, we review the nature of the functional and causal relationship between neurophysiologically/psychologically generated states of emotional feeling and action tendencies and extrapolate a novel perspective. Emotion theory, over the past century and beyond, has tended to regard feeling and action tendency as independent phenomena: attempts to outline the functional and causal relationship that exists between them have been framed therein. Classically, such relationships have been viewed as unidirectional, but an argument for bidirectionality rooted in a dynamic systems perspective has gained strength in recent years whereby the feeling–action tendency relationship is viewed as a composite whole. On the basis of our review of somatic–visceral theories of feelings, we argue that feelings are grounded upon neural-dynamic representations (elevated and stable activation patterns) of action tendency. Such representations amount to predictions updated by cognitive and bodily feedback. Specifically, we view emotional feelings as minimalist predictions of the action tendency (what the agent is physiologically and cognitively primed to do) in a given situation. The essence of this point is captured by our exposition of action tendency prediction–feedback loops which we consider, above all, in the context of emotion regulation, and in particular, of emotional regulation of goal-directed behavior. The perspective outlined may be of use to emotion theorists, computational modelers, and roboticists. Relevance: The paper presents an enactive/cybernetic/dynamical systems perspective on embodied emotion theory (James, Damasio, etc).

We present an evolutionary robotics investigation into the metabolism constrained homeostatic dynamics of a simulated robot. Unlike existing research that has focused on either energy or motivation autonomy the robot described here is considered in terms of energy-motivation autonomy. This stipulation is made according to a requirement of autonomous systems to spatiotemporally integrate environmental and physiological sensed information. In our experiment, the latter is generated by a simulated artificial metabolism (a microbial fuel cell batch) and its integration with the former is determined by an E-GasNet-active vision interface. The investigation centres on robot performance in a three-dimensional simulator on a stereotyped two-resource problem. Motivationlike states emerge according to periodic dynamics identifiable for two viable sensorimotor strategies. Robot adaptivity is found to be sensitive to experimenter-manipulated deviations from evolved metabolic constraints. Deviations detrimentally affect the viability of cognitive (anticipatory) capacities even where constraints are significantly lessened. These results support the hypothesis that grounding motivationally autonomous robots is critical to adaptivity and cognition.

The reciprocal coupling of perception and action in cognitive agents has been firmly established: perceptions guide action but so too do actions influence what is perceived. While much has been said on the implications of this for the agent’s external behavior, less attention has been paid to what it means for the internal bodily mechanisms which underpin cognitive behavior. In this article, we wish to redress this by reasserting that the relationship between cognition, perception, and action involves a constitutive element as well as a behavioral element, emphasizing that the reciprocal link between perception and action in cognition merits a renewed focus on the system dynamics inherent in constitutive biological autonomy. Our argument centers on the idea that cognition, perception, and action are all dependent on processes focussed primarily on the maintenance of the agent’s autonomy. These processes have an inherently circular nature – self-organizing, self-producing, and self-maintaining – and our goal is to explore these processes and suggest how they can explain the reciprocity of perception and action. Specifically, we argue that the reciprocal coupling is founded primarily on their endogenous roles in the constitutive autonomy of the agent and an associated circular causality of global and local processes of self-regulation, rather than being a mutual sensory-motor contingency that derives from exogenous behavior. Furthermore, the coupling occurs first and foremost via the internal milieu realized by the agent’s organismic embodiment. Finally, we consider how homeostasis and the related concept of allostasis contribute to this circular self-regulation.

Emotion is characterized as (a) closely connected to embodied cognition, (b) grounded in homeostatic bodily regulation, and (c) a powerful organizational principle—affective modulation of behavioral and cognitive mechanisms—that is ‘useful’ in both biological brains and robotic cognitive architectures. We elaborate how emotion theories and models centered on core neurological structures in the mammalian brain, and inspired by embodied, dynamical, and enactive approaches in cognitive science, may impact on computational and robotic modeling. In light of the theoretical discussion, work in progress on the development of an embodied cognitive-affective architecture for robots is presented, incorporating aspects of the theories discussed.