And then you ran into the and he irrevocably burned your brain because you had no epistemological defenses against his embodimentalism and you despaired and because a Buddhist
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Just for the historical record, Phil Agre and I got embodiment from Lucy Suchman and Hubert Dreyfus. Rod came to it independently at the same time (as did Leslie Kaelbling & Stan Rosenschein).
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When I read Dreyfus, I already had a strong epistemological filter in place, and was only parsing him as: what does he see that everybody else (Turing, Minsky, etc.) is missing? But to read him as primary indoctrination... OMG
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When I first read Dreyfus, I had completed a math undergrad degree, a master’s degree in AI, and extensive graduate work in mathematical logic. I was not naive…
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The essential insight is not about bodies but about the world: that it is radically unknowable, due to ontological nebulosity, and effective action has to work under that constraint
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This does not go far enough. The very notion of a world that underlies the premise of embodiment is questionable. The meaning of information is only its relationship to changes in other information, not its reference to facts in the world, even of they are nebulous.
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The ideas of embodiment lead to anti-representationalism and anti-functionalism. Mind was no longer emergent over the computational activity of a nervous system but over the interaction between somehow non-computational body and environment.
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I don't even see a way to conceive of the existence of non-computational things; everything that exists must be implemented, and computation (which can be characterized by sets of discernible differences and transition functions) is precisely the realm of implementation.
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it's kind of hard to model/perceive noncomputational behavior in your surroundings when all you have is a wet computer