Talk:Embodied cognitive science

message: Hi, I created a page called Embodied Embedded Cognition. Only later I found out about Embodied cognitive science. This page is pretty ok, bigger, and largely covers what I wanted to say in my 'EEC' page. There are two main differences:
* Embodied cognitive science page starts explicitly from the practices in behavior based robotics. I personaly would not claim that Pfeiffer is *the* big man in the field, but to roboticists this might be so. (Why not put Brooks up front?)  In my version of it, robotics would only be one of the practices from which ideas for the theoretical position emerged. 
* Conceptually there can be discussion about what is meant by 'embodiment'. Most of the roboticists (cf Braitenberg) stress the physical interplay between bodily properties and world properties, and how a control system can easily use these properties so as to avoid having to represent them in an internal model. Let the world be its own repres. etc... But this I would not call 'embodiment', I would call it "embeddedness" or "situatedness". See also Andy Clark who is really a big man in this field and should be mentioned on this page. Embodiment I personally associate with body-internal processes (much more biologically inspired) such as homeostatic or hormonal processes, leading to emotional states, leading to a body-based internal "bias" on the perception-action loop. Edelman stresses this point, and so does Damasio (but Damasio is much more traditional in the rest of his vies though). So embodiment for me is like: When I'm hungry I think differently. Embeddedness is: "I put my bag in front of the door so I won't forget the bag when I leave the house", and more of these things. (Also Kirsh should be mentioned in that respect). 
What do others think? Is this a valuable distinction? What to do about my newly created page: integrate it?
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A message from user Paroswiki
I am the original author of this article. I'm really wondering if the person who left the message above this one is the user called Noticket who appears all over the edit history.   Either way I would like to explain my recent edit.  That paragraph needed an overhaul. There were TOO MANY NAMES here. Remez's research is too particular for this article.  Carol Fowler should be linked to in the wikipedia article on psycholinguistics, not here in ECS. Ditto Alvin Liberman.  Ladefoged is a linguist and doesn't belong here.  Andy Clark is a philosopher/writer, not a scientist who does research.   
Embodied Cog Sci basically refers to scientists (that endorse embodied philosophy) who are doing research to ellucidate the general principles/structures/models of intelligence. 
Mind you, there are researchers who are proposing general models of intelligence that are quite alien to the principles of embodiment.  One person I can think of, in particular is Eliezer Yudkowsky with his idea of seed AI, which basically says that strong AI can be acheived with nothing but self-modifying programming languages.  This idea is, in effect, a software problem that is completely non-embodied and non-situated.
Anyways, Embodied cog sci is very much biologically-inspired but I don't see a proper way to state this in the article without delving deeply in other directions.  Also, it is not exclusively concerned with humans or human use of language.  Researchers like Pfeifer or Edelman wouldn't mind having a robust model of a rabbit's brain, for instance, especially if rabbit cognition exemplified a "general principle" of intelligence.
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Another message from user Paroswiki
"What do others think? Is this a valuable distinction? What to do about my newly created page: integrate it?"
You defined ECC as a  "philosophical position" which is not the same thing as a research area in science.  Your article is much more closely related to the wikipedia article Embodiment.  Notice that *this* article contains a link to Embodiment article way up at the top.
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This is a message from user noticket to Paroswiki: No, I am not the person who left the message at the top of the page, though after reading those comments I think that there is a lot that I agree with, though I know little about behavior-based robotics. My familiarity with embodied cognition comes from work done by scientists in psychology and linguistics that stretches back over 20-30 years and relates to the inseparability of cognition and related biological systems. Examples include the work of Eric Lenneberg in terms of the biological bases of language and Michael Turvey in terms of action-perception linkages (later also worked on by J. A. Scott Kelso). I like the clean-up that you did on the paragraph that I worked on. As background to why some of the names were included, Fowler and Remez were added because of an early paper by Fowler, Remez, Rubin and Turvey that related action to language and cognition and was very influential in this area. Also, I have been told that Fowler has done recent work in embodiment, but a reference would be needed to verify that, so leaving it out seems appropriate at this point in time. I agree that the Remez work has been focused in other areas and that his name is not essential. Regarding the comments at the top of the page, I also believe that "behavior based robotics" is only one of the areas related to embodied cognition. There has been substantial, and earlier, work in psychology, linguistics and philosophy. The cross-pollination across these various areas makes embodied cognition the fascinating area that it presently is. Because of this, the one name that I probably disagree with you about is Andy Clark. Though he is a philosopher, his writings and ideas have had great influence in this area. In summary, I think that the excellent page that you created would be best served by including the breadth of contributions to embodied cognitive science. Thanks for creating this important entry. Noticket 04:51, 26 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Untitled

message: From noticket to paros. I really like your suggestion on the re-write of the first sentence and think that the one you proposed (above) is excellent and is much better than what is presently there. I also think that your suggestions on the movement of Fowler and Remez seem like good ideas. The Andy Clark suggestion seems a little more problematic to me. I know of Andy's ideas because of other cognitive scientists and think that his writings have influenced scientific directions in embodied cognitive science. An analogy might be made to someone like Jerry Fodor, a philosopher, who, though not a scientist, has profoundly influenced scientific aspects of linguistics and psycholinguistics and is often mentioned and referenced in those contexts (for example, for his thoughts about modularity). Just because someone is a philosopher doesn't mean that they can not have a strong influence on particular scientific directions. I know absolutely nothing about AI, so I can't comment on that portion except to say that I also hope that this page does not become a subset of AI. Instead, my personal feeling is that the article should differentiate ECS from CS. In addition, the article should acknowledge the contributions from a variety of areas including cognitive science, psychology, linguistics, AI, robotics, and philosophy. What seems most important to me is those scientific approaches to studying cognition as holistic systems in which there is a crucial inseparability of individual and environment. Coming from a background in psychology and linguistics, I think that there are excellent long-standing examples from those areas, but agree that they should not in any way dominate the content of the article. Feel free to make any changes that you think are appropriate. Noticket 04:03, 28 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: ==

message: User:Wikivangelist is a reputable editor of articles.  He thought the mentioning of Lakoff and Mark Johnson at the bottom of the next paragraph was a dangling modifier.  I agree with his/her edit, but since Lakoff and Johnson are not strictly ECS researchers, I cannot see the appropriateness of mentioning their names BEFORE the other people on this page.   Due to this, I have completely removed mentioning them at all.   I know this is going to bother some of you so here is some further explanations:  I have to be honest, I both own and have read books by George Lakoff.  His works are almost entirely concerned with the basis of semantics in language. He is very much a LINGUIST and does not deserve a mentioning that high up in this article.  Lakoff's work is not concerned with ellucidating general principles of intelligent behavior.  If anything, Lakoff shows peculiarities in human language.
Now what about Mark_Johnson_%28professor%29??   This is a toss-up as far as I am concerned.  His work seems too focused on language in humans.  His most recent book is written to PHILOSOPHERS as an audience.  See the review for it at amazon for instance. Mark Johnson is first and foremost a writer whose concern is with the big questions of epistemology.  He may be better mentioned in Embodied philosophy or maybe even in the Philosophy_of_science??  ECS, on the other hand, is concerned with scientists performing experiments in research laboratories.  These scientists would endorse embodied philosophy, but they are not in the philosophical trenches battling it out with philosophers.  Edelman himself has repeated (on camera) that "You don't need a philosopher to tell you what consciousness is.  It is what you lose when you go to sleep and what you gain when you wake up."   Academic philosophers would find this kind of roughshodiness apalling in their own circles. Edelman can afford such latitude since he is a scientist, not a philosopher.
I refer you to the amazon.com page for "Philosophy in the Flesh:The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought". You can see the reviewers battling it out in their own reviews, making argument sabout consciousness in the usual epistemological rants.  There is too much mention of Kant, Plato, and Descartes here to qualify this material as "hard science".
I invite your complaints, comments, suggestions. - paros 10:45, 5 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Where is Lakoff and Johnson?

message: We need more external links.  Post any that are relevant to anything mentioned in the article itself. (DO NOT include links to home pages of particular scientists.  If people want those, they can look up the person's name and follow the links there.) paros 02:18, 13 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: External links

message: It would help if you created a USER PAGE on wikipedia so that I can respond to you personally.  I'll have to put this here instead.  I am handing the page over to you now. Please do not rename it. I repeat DO NOT RENAME IT to "Embodied Robotics" or whatever.  This particular article has risen to slot 2 on a google search.  This means your work and my work is now accessible to people all over the world.  If you renamed it, it would have to start its climb all over again, and may never make it back there.  Again for emphasis, do NOT rename this article and destroy its public exposure! 
You are in a position now to write a history of ECS, something which I can't do.  Start from Turing and include the principal ideas up through Verela and into Mark Johnson, or whoever I am leaving out.  Go ahead and place it right at the top of the article, or make a section titled "history" or do whatever you feel is appropriate. I agree that this entire article can flow from the Turing quote. paros 02:52, 21 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Message to Wikivangelist

message: I added a reference link to the turing quote, and moved some things around and fixed some grammatical errors.  The top of the article use to read "The building of robotic agents capable of engaging in realtime adaptive behavior". On deeper reflection, this is a wildly innaccurate description of what researchers are actually doing!  The old version made it seem as if these scientists literally BUILD robots like this in factories who are then sold to the military. Obviously this is not going on at all anywhere in the world. If you really look at what they do with robotic agents, is that they study how they develop in very controlled lab environments.  Robots are used by researchers to see how the mind and brain interact with an environment.  (Has anyone ever really built a robot capable of engaging in realtime adaptive behavior?  Even the DARPA vehicles are not adaptive!) Anyway. Just some thoughts. paros 02:52, 21 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Edits March 20, 2007

message: There are proposals to reorganize these. Please discuss at Talk:Embodied philosophy ---- CharlesGillingham (talk) 10:52, 5 December 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  embodiment family of articles 

message: I have begun to rebuild embodied philosophy so that it accurately describes the interdisciplinary movement that argues that "the kind of mind we have depends on the kind of body we have". I have largely left this article alone, since paros strongly believes it should remain focussed on the robotics side of things. I've removed a few things from this article that are more appropriate for the article I'm working on, and made a clearer link to it at the top. ---- CharlesGillingham (talk) 09:40, 18 May 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Some changes 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: i cant help after reading this paragraph but ask myself:
-dont we need some more visible signing that this is a citation, like "" marks, or something? (yes it is said in the last sentence of the previous paragraph - but italization, or some other visual clue would be more helpful to realize that the whole subparagraph is someones cited words.
-what does the tunafish's "utilization of its own physical body" in using its environment (eg the water it swims in) to reach its speed of locomotion have to do with looking on the functioning of a brain/mind within the scope of its extended environmental phlebotinium?
- is this whole article about one person, thinly disguised as a field of interest of the scientific community?
-is this whole article just a citation of Andy Clarks views?
-is it worth of citation in an encyclopedia that tunafish "should not be able" to swim as fast as it does and that theres a mysterious way of the fish utilizing its own body to interact with the water that makes it move?  would it not be just as true of a man walking, or a bird flying? is it a bunch of truisms disguised in scientific sounding language?
-is this field of study defined anyhow but in negative statements, eg what it is not? does it indeed exist beyond the personal works of the sole author cited throughout the article?
-it somewhere says (i think in one of the citations) that "the mind (or brain) should not be the sole exclusive one thing studied by science". i belive that it is not, so the cited opinion might be a bit lunatic. which leads back to the question: is this article really representing more than a mirroring of the one guys views who is cited throughout the whole article?
etc, etc. 89.134.199.32 (talk) 17:14, 4 February 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  subsection 3.1 Bluefin tuna 

message: This appears to be a carefully curated narrative of an offshoot far from mainstream in cognitive science, cognition, and robotics fields.  Given the bibliography and current state of the art in both the science and engineering associated with these important fields, this appears to be an offshoot formed upon the views/philosophy of one or a few individuals.  VERY STRONGLY RECOMMEND THIS GETS REVIEWED BY OTHER EXPERTS.  I suspect if it persists at all, it should be folded into a new section in those main articles and ACKNOWLEDGED as an offshoot that most scientists and practitioners don't really agree with in detail.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2602:306:C433:5F90:59D5:B7B0:B76F:284E (talk) 21:51, 20 May 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Strongly suggest review and reconsideration of appropriateness of this page!  (Offshoot)