Notions of embodiment, situatedness, and dynamics are increasingly being debated in cognitive sci ence. However, these debates are often carried out in the absence of concrete examples. In order to build intuition, this paper explores a model agent to illustrate how the perspective and tools of dynam ical systems theory can be applied to the analysis of situated, embodied agents capable of minimally cognitive behavior. Specifically, we study a model agent whose “nervous system” was evolved using a genetic algorithm to catch circular objects and to avoid diamond-shaped ones. After characterizing the performance, behavioral strategy and psychophysics of the best-evolved agent, its dynamics are analyzed in some detail at three different levels: (1) the entire coupled brain/body/environment sys tem; (2) the interaction between agent and environment that generates the observed coupled dynam ics; (3) the underlying neuronal properties responsible for the agent dynamics. This analysis offers both explanatory insight and testable predictions. The paper concludes with discussions of the overall picture that emerges from this analysis, the challenges this picture poses to traditional notions of rep resentation, and the utility of a research methodology involving the analysis of simpler idealized mod els of complete brain/body/environment systems.

Key words: dynamics, minimally-cognitive behavior, categorical perception

Excerpt: Emergence and Embodiment is a collective effort to update the historical legacy of second-order cybernetics. In order to understand today’s hyperacceleration of technoscientific incursions into the human and in order to arrive at more highly articulated observations of the systemic situatedness of cognition, all of the contributors correlate epistemological closure with the phenomena of ontological emergence. In this respect, and despite their diversity, they forcefully testify that the latter cannot be understood independently of the former. The contemporary understanding that the human is and has always already been posthuman could not have emerged, and cannot be rendered productive, without the perspective afforded by neocybernetic recursion.

This essay offers an overview of the issues addressed in our volume Emergence and Embodiment: New Essays in Second-Order Systems Theory (Clarke & Hansen, 2009), a collective effort to update the legacy of second-order thinking in systems theory. We review the history that has unfolded secondfrom first-order cybernetics, and take exception to some recent accounts that discount the importance of the second-order or neocybernetic line of development. We argue that neocybernetic concepts in the line from von Foerster to Maturana, Varela, and Luhmann challenge not just the rigidities of AI and first-order mechanical and social systems engineering, but also, and more profoundly, the epistemological foundations of philosophical humanism. We join Dirk Baecker and others’ calls for a slowing down of systems theorizations, and acknowledge a similar need for a slowing down, in our case of everything that has recently come together under the rubric of the posthuman, for the purpose of careful neocybernetic consideration. To understand today’s hyper-acceleration of technoscientific incursions into the human, and to arrive at more highly articulated observations of the systemic situatedness of cognition, we correlate epistemological closure with the phenomena of ontological emergence. If the human is and has always already been posthuman, this understanding demands the perspective afforded by neocybernetic recursion.

The last fifteen years have seen a sea change in cognitive science where issues of embodiment, situatedness and dynamics have become central to the explanatory resources in use. 
This paper evaluates the suggestion that representation should be eliminated from the explanative vocabulary of cognitive science. We trace the history of the issue by examining the usefulness of action-oriented representation (AOR), and we reassess if there is still a good explanatory role for the notion of representation in contemporary cognitive science by looking at contexts of re-use, contexts of informational fusion and elaboration, contexts of virtualist perception, and contexts of representational extension, restructuring and substitution. We claim that in these contexts the notion of representation continues to fulfill a valuable function in linking the inner informational economy of cognitive systems to how they interact and couple with the world, and that the role of representation in explanation has not been superseded by enactive and radical embodied theories of cognition. The final section of the paper suggests that we might be better off adopting a more pluralist research perspective, accepting that certain branches of cognitive science seem to require the positing of representations in order to develop, whereas others (e.g. research into minimal cognitive systems), do not appear to require it. We conclude that trying to suppress the notion of representation in all areas of cognitive science is seriously misguided.

Key words: representation, action-oriented representation (aor), embodied cognitive science, space

Critics of the paradigm of enaction have long argued that enactive principles will be unable to account for the traditional domain of orthodox cognitive science, namely “higher-level” cognition and specifically human cognition. Moreover, even many of the paradigm’s “lower-level” insights into embodiment and situatedness appear to be amenable to a functionalist reinterpretation. In this review, I show on the basis of the recently published collection of papers, Enaction, that the paradigm of enaction has (a) a unique foundation in the notion of sense-making that places fundamental limits on the scope of functionalist appropriation; (b) a unique perspective on higher-level cognition that sets important new research directions without the need for the concept of mental representation; (c) a new concept of specifically human cognition in terms of second-order sense-making; and (d) a rich variety of approaches to explain the evolutionary, historical, and developmental origins of this sophisticated human ability. I also indicate how studies of the role of embodiment for abstract human cognition can strengthen their position by reconceiving their notion of embodiment in enactive terms.

Key words: cognitive science, enactive approach, higher-level cognition, representation, functionalism.

This thesis addresses computer gameplay activities in terms of the physical handling of a game, players’ meaning-making activities, and how these two processes are closely interrelated. It examines in greater detail what role the body plays in gameplay as well as how gameplay is shaped by sociocultural factors outside the game, including different kind of tools and players’ participation in community practices. An important step towards an understanding of these key factors and their interaction is the consideration of gameplay as situated activity where players who actively engage with games are situated in both the physical world and the virtual in-game world. To analyze exactly how players interact with both worlds, two case studies on two different games have been carried out. Three different levels of situatedness are identified and discussed in detail in this thesis on the basis of existing theories within situated cognition research.

For cognitive systems, embodiment appears to be of crucial importance. Unfortunately, nobody seems to be able to define embodiment in a way that would prevent it from also covering its trivial interpretations such as mere situatedness in complex environments. The paper focuses on the definition of embodiment, especially whether physical embodiment is necessary and/or sufficient for cognitive systems. Cognition is characterized as a continuous complex process rather than ahistorical logical capability. Furthermore, the paper investigates the relationship between cognitive embodiment and the issues of understanding, representation and task specification.

Key words: Complexity, constructivism, design, embeddedness, representation, teleonomy, understanding

Lewin raises four major issues for constructivism in the opening chapter of this section: how we think of ‘self’ within a constructivist framework; how constructivism addresses the notion of paideia – ‘the complete process of education through which one becomes a competent participant within a culture’; how science and mathematics differ from the humanities because of different constraints and forms of viability in them; and whether constructivism should produce an ethics of the field. Lewin’s concern with ‘self’ is that without some understanding of how our being arises from our situatedness in time, we are cut off from understanding our conditions as biological organisms and historical persons. Although asking questions about what constitutes self may seem unrelated to mathematics and science education, the way in which students construct their relationship to knowledge (mathematical or scientific) and to their learning and doing of the knowledge in question is one of the major problems confronting constructivist educators in these fields.

This paper discusses different approaches incognitive science and artificial intelligence research from the perspective of radical constructivism, addressing especially their relation to the biologically based theories ofvon Uexküll, Piaget as well as Maturana and Varela. In particular recent work in ‘New AI’ and adaptive robotics on situated and embodied intelligence is examined, and we discuss in detail the role of constructive processes as the basis of situatedness in both robots and living organisms.

Key words: adaptive robotics, artificial intelligence, embodied cognition, radical constructivism, situatedness