all,
One of the reasons I came to Santa Fe and hitched up with FRIAM is that I
thought the people in this group were particularly well suited to help me solve
the problem of self knowledge. what it means to say that an entity knows about
itself. However, while we have had many interesting discussions, I have never
managed to quite get that subject on the table. So here goes.
Let us imagine that we want to program a robot to do stuff .... many of you
have, I gather. Now, I assume that any robot worth it's salt, will have a
certain amount of self knowledge. It will know, for instance, where it is. It
will know the position of its effectors. It may also know something about what
it has done recently.
So how do roboteers provide their robots with such knowledge.? Now, I assume,
such knowledge gathering is accomplished through sensors. And while the
sensors gather information sufficient for the knowledge in question given the
context, the actual information that they supply is much more limited. So, for
instance, the sensor that senses "the position of the forelimb" actually
measures a current coming through a resistor, attached to the joints in the
limb and a small onboard computer calculates the position of the limb based
on a bunch of reasonable assumptions about the shape of the robot and the
configuration of the world it is operating in. So even the knowledge of
robots is intentional, in the sense that it is incomplete, based on
assumptions, and from a definite point of view.
There are other questions I want to ask, but let me stop here for the moment
and see what The List has to say.
Nick
Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,
Clark University ([email protected])
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
