The traditional efforts to mimic basic human behavior in embodied agents use an approach that draws a clear line between the “mind” and the “body” of those agents. However, recent findings in neuroscience show that our bodies have an active role in what we call “intelligence”. We studied several processes related with our body and propose a model to integrate them in generic embodied agents. Th...

This chapter conceives the history of neural networks emerging from two millennia of attempts to rationalise and formalise the operation of mind. It begins with a brief review of early classical conceptions of the soul, seating the mind in the heart; then discusses the subsequent Cartesian split of mind and body, before moving to analyse in more depth the twentieth century hegemony identifying ...

The central issue addressed in the Mind Minding Agents symposium is how theories of the Theory of Mind can inform the design of social agents in multi-agent systems and embodied conversational agents interacting with a human interlocutor. Related to this are the questions on how to build and use computational models of the Theory of Mind. The concept of Theory of Mind has been proposed in the p...

Until recently, the constraints imposed on decision makers by the human physical condition - situated both as a physical agent and within physical space - have played only an incidental, if not entirely inconsequential, role in conceptualizations of human decision making. The act of deciding has been positioned as the quintessence of traditional decision theory, while actual enactment of the de...

a bstr act Mark Johnson’s work The Meaning of the Body presents John Dewey’s pragmatism and pragmatist aesthetics as the forerunners of the anti­ Cartesian embodied enactive approach to human experience and meaning. He rejects the Kantian noncognitive character of aesthetics and emphasizes that aesthetics is the study of the human capacity to experience the bodily conditions of meaning constitu...

Embodied cognition is a theoretical stance which postulates that sensory and motor experiences are key parts of the representation of our knowledge. This view has challenged the longstanding assumption that knowledge is represented abstractly in an amodal conceptual network. There now exist a large number of interesting and intriguing demonstrations of embodied cognition. Examples include chang...