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Information and regulation in robots, perception and consciousness: Ashby's embodied minds
Abstract
This article considers W. Ross Ashby's ideas on the nature of embodied minds, as articulated in the last five years of his career. In particular, it attempts to connect his ideas to later work by others in robotics, perception and consciousness. While it is difficult to measure his direct influence on this work, the conceptual links are deep. Moreover, Ashby provides a comprehensive view of the embodied mind, which connects these areas. It concludes that the contemporary fields of situated robotics, ecological perception, and the neural mechanisms of consciousness might all benefit from a reconsideration of Ashby's later writings.
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- Available online: 30 Jan 2009
Author affiliations
- a Center for Cultural Analysis, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, USA
- b Department of Media Studies and Film, New School University, New York, USA
Author biographies
Peter Asaro earned his Doctorate in the History, Philosophy and Sociology of Science, Master of Computer Science, and Master of Arts in Philosophy at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has worked at the National Center for Supercomputer Applications (NCSA), the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, and Iguana Robotics, Inc. in the areas of virtual reality, artificial intelligence, machine learning, robot vision, and neuromorphic robotics. His dissertation examined the relationships between brain modelling, the development of early computers, and cybernetic and cognitive theories of mind in the 1940s and 1950s. He has held post-doctoral fellowships at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna, Umeå University in Sweden, and at the Center for Cultural Analysis at Rutgers University. He is currently teaching media theory at The New School, and investigating the ethical dimensions of autonomous and tele-operated military robotics, as well as the concepts of agency and responsibility in distributed socio-technical systems. (Homepage: www.cybersophe.org)
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