Mind, Body, World- Foundations of Cognitive Science, 2013a

Similarly, Braitenberg (1984) argued that when researchers explain behaviour
by appealing to internal processes, they ignore the environment: “When we analyze
a mechanism, we tend to overestimate its complexity” (p. 20). He suggested an
alternative approach, synthetic psychology, in which simple agents (such as robots)
are built and then observed in environments of varying complexity. This approach
can provide cognitive science with more powerful, and much simpler, theories by
taking advantage of the fact that not all of the intelligence must be placed inside an
agent.
Embodied cognitive scientists recognize that the external world can be used
to scaffold cognition and that working memory—and other components of a classical
architecture—have leaked into the world (Brooks, 1999; Chemero, 2009;
Clark, 1997, 2003; Hutchins, 1995; Pfeifer & Scheier, 1999). In many respect, embodied
cognitive science is primarily a reaction against the overemphasis of internal
processing that is imposed by the classical sandwich.
5.4 Embodiment, Situatedness, and Feedback
Theories that incorporate stigmergy demonstrate the plausibility of removing central
cognitive control; perhaps embodied cognitive science could replace the classical
sandwich’s sense-think-act cycle with sense-act reflexes.
The realization was that the so-called central systems of intelligence—or core AI
as it has been referred to more recently—was perhaps an unnecessary illusion, and
that all the power of intelligence arose from the coupling of perception and actuation
systems. (Brooks, 1999, p. viii)
For a stigmergic theory to have any power at all, agents must exhibit two critical
abilities. First, they must be able to sense their world. Second, they must be able to
physically act upon the world. For instance, stigmergic control of nest construction
would be impossible if wasps could neither sense local attributes of nest structure
nor act upon the nest to change its appearance.
In embodied cognitive science, an agent’s ability to sense its world is called situatedness.
For the time being, we will simply equate situatedness with the ability to
sense. However, situatedness is more complicated than this, because it depends critically
upon the physical nature of an agent, including its sensory apparatus and its
bodily structure. These issues will be considered in more detail in the next section.
In embodied cognitive science, an agent’s ability to act upon and alter its world
depends upon its embodiment. In the most general sense, to say that an agent is
embodied is to say that it is an artifact, that it has physical existence. Thus while
neither a thought experiment (Braitenberg, 1984) nor a computer simulation
(Wilhelms & Skinner, 1990) for exploring a Braitenberg vehicle are embodied, a
216 Chapter 5