More things than are dreamt of in your biology: Information-processing in biologically inspired robots

This paper is concerned with some methodological and philosophical problems related both to the long-term objective of building human-like robots (like those ‘in the movies’) and shortand medium-term objectives of building robots with capabilities of more or less intelligent animals. In particular, we claim that organisms are informationprocessing machines, and thus information-processing concepts will be essential for designing biologically-inspired robots. However identifying relevant concepts is non-trivial since what an information processor is doing cannot in general be determined by using the standard observational techniques of the physical sciences. Having a general framework for describing and comparing agent architectures may help.