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

were machines. Men too were machines, but unlike automata, they also had souls.
It was the appearance of clockwork automata that led to their popularity, as well as
to their conflicts with the church. “Until the scientific era, what seemed most alive
to people was what most looked like a living being. The vitality accorded to an object
was a function primarily of its form” (Grey Walter, 1963, p. 115).
In contrast, Grey Walter’s Tortoises were not attempts to reproduce appearances,
but were instead simulations of more general and more abstract abilities central
to biological agents,
exploration, curiosity, free-will in the sense of unpredictability, goal-seeking, selfregulation,
avoidance of dilemmas, foresight, memory, learning, forgetting, association
of ideas, form recognition, and the elements of social accommodation. Such is
life. (Grey Walter, 1963, p. 120)
By situating and embodying his machines, Grey Walter invented a new kind of
scientific tool that produced behaviours that were creative and unpredictable,
governed by nonlinear relationships between internal mechanisms and the surrounding,
dynamic world.
Modern machines that mimic lifelike behaviour still raise serious questions
about what it is to be human. To Wood (2002, p. xxvii) all automata were presumptions
“that life can be simulated by art or science or magic. And embodied in each
invention is a riddle, a fundamental challenge to our perception of what makes us
human.” The challenge is that if the lifelike behaviours of the Tortoises and their
descendants are merely feedback loops between simple mechanisms and their environments,
then might the same be true of human intelligence?
This challenge is reflected in some of roboticist Rodney Brooks’ remarks in
Errol Morris’ 1997 documentary Fast, Cheap & Out of Control. Brooks begins by
describing one of his early robots: “To an observer it appears that the robot has
intentions and it has goals and it is following people and chasing prey. But it’s just
the interaction of lots and lots of much simpler processes.” Brooks then considers
extending this view to human cognition: “Maybe that’s all there is. Maybe a lot of
what humans are doing could be explained this way.”
But as the segment in the documentary proceeds, Brooks, the pioneer of behaviour-based
robotics, is reluctant to believe that humans are similar types of devices:
When I think about it, I can almost see myself as being made up of thousands and
thousands of little agents doing stuff almost independently. But at the same time I
fall back into believing the things about humans that we all believe about humans
and living life that way. Otherwise I analyze it too much; life becomes almost meaningless.
(Morris, 1997)
Conflicts like those voiced by Brooks are brought to the forefront when embodied
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