For many decades, Artificial Intelligence adopted a platonic view that intelligent behaviour is produced in the "brain" only and any body is
only an incidental translator between thought and action. In the last two decades, in view of the successes of the subsumption architecture
and embodied robotics, this perspective has changed to acknowledge the central importance of the body and the perception-action loop as whole
in helping an organisms' brain to carry out useful ("intelligent") behaviours. A central keyword for this phenomenon is, of course,
"environmental/morphological computation" (Paul 2006; Pfeifer and Bongard 2007).
The question arises, how/why exactly does this work? What are the principles that make environmental computation work so successfully and how
can the contribution that the body provides to cognition be characterized objectively?
In the last years, Information Theory has been identified as providing a natural language to characterize cognitive processing, cognitive
invariants as well as the contribution of the embodiment to the cognitive process. The talk will present a number of intuitive and
less intuitive consequences of these considerations and provide some - sometimes quite surprising - illustrations of the power of the
informational view of cognition.
About the Speaker : Dr. Daniel Polani is the Reader in Artificial Life at the Department of Computer Science University of Hertfordshire, United Kingdom.
His research interests include Artificial Intelligence, Artificial Life and Information Theory for Intelligent Information Processing.
