How Brooks' behavior-based robots teach us a lesson about the definition of knowledge

Saskia Neumann

Abstract:

The world is its own best model (Brooks, 1989)! Or at least it is for Brooks’ behavior-based robots. Robots such as Herbert, whose task consisted in stealing empty soda cans from offices, and Squirt, whose task was to follow around noises, prove that complex behavior such as following specific sounds after a specific time interval, avoiding obstacles and real-time recognition (Brooks, 1990) can be achieved without any inner representation of the world. If we believe Hutto and Myin (2013), we human beings are not too different from Herbert or Squirt. Our behavior can be explained without assuming that we mentally represent our world. In my talk, I want to show evidence against this claim. While some of our behavior might be explainable without us representing the world, most of our storing-behavior of the interaction with our world we have is indicative of us representing the world mentally. My claim will be based on empirical evidence stemming from non-linguistically based spreading activation (Barr et al., 2014), false memories (Roediger, 2001), false recognition (Meade et al., 2007) and the processing of visuospatial information (Foster et al., 2017). I will, furthermore, expand this theory and argue for human beings being different in knowledge acquisition to behavior-based robots due to the nature of our memory. While behavior-based robots do not need to represent the world, we human beings have to represent the world in a specific manner to be able to continue to act with the world successfully. The knowledge we acquire is mainly based on our inner representation of the world.

Bibliography

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