How representational cognitivism failed and is being replaced by body/world coupling

Abstract

Reading Heidegger's Being and Time and Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception suggested that Symbolic AI with its representations of meaningless facts about the world could not solve the frame problem, and that the best representation of the world is the world itself. Now GOFAI has failed, and Rondey Brooks boasts that his animats avoid the frame problem precisely by directly relating to the world. But Brook's animates and all other versions of what some call Heideggerian AI have their own version of the frame problem, viz. that the program can't update relevance. Fortunately, there is at least one model of how the brain could provide the causal basis of such an ability. Walter Freeman, a founding figure in neurodynamics and one of the first to take seriously the idea of the brain as a nonlinear dynamical system, has worked out an account of how the brain of an active animal can directly pick up and update what counts as significant in its world. But, to program Heideggerian AI, we would not only need a model of brain functioning such as Freeman's; we would also need a model of our particular way of being embedded and embodied such that what we experience is significant for us in the particular way that it is. This shows the task of a Heideggerian AI to be overwhelmingly difficult and casts doubt on whether we will ever be able to accomplish it. © 2009 Springer Netherlands.