Does a robot have an Umwelt? Reflections on the qualitative biosemiotics of Jakob von Uexküll

doi:10.1515/semi.2001.048

Cited by 40 publications

(16 citation statements)

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“…This conclusion is similar to that of Ziemke and Sharkey (2001) and Ziemke (2001aZiemke ( , 2001b, but these authors were content to point out the fact that there (still) are differences between AI-style 'autonomous systems' and real organisms, and only used this as a basis to question whether the first really can possess meaning. It is also similar to that of Emmeche (2001), who provides a negative answer to the question "Does a robot have an Umwelt"? But since an Umwelt is, at least according to Emmeche, always qualitative, i.e., involving phenomenal experience, this is also a weaker conclusion than the present one.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 60%

“…When compared to traditional AI with its preprogrammed 'rules and representations' , sometimes called GOFAI, i.e., 'Good Old Fashioned AI' (Haugeland, 1985) and criticized strongly by e.g., Dreyfus (1979) and Searle (1980) for laying false claims to concepts such as 'intelligence' and 'understanding' , such new trends may be regarded as a step in the right direction (Emmeche, 2001;Ziemke and Sharkey, 2001;Ziemke, 2002). Unlike the 'representations' of GOFAI, which had any meaning only for those who programmed them or else knew what they meant, the 'internal states' of robots with sensors and effectors can be rightly said to stand in a causal relation with the physical environment, and this relation can even be established developmentally through a process of 'robotogenesis' (Zlatev, 2001a;Kozima and Yano, 2001), i.e., a form of 'artificial ontogenesis' (Ziemke, 2002).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Notice that on the present account, and unlike that of von Uexküll (cf., Ziemke and Sharkey, 2001;Emmeche, 2001), the presence of meaning does not imply that such organisms have phenomenal (qualitative) experience. In the simplest of these organisms there is no learning in the individual creature, but only in the species as a whole, implemented through natural selection, i.e., they constitute what Dennett (1996) refers to as 'Darwinian creatures' .…”

Section: Cue-based Creaturesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Meaning = Life (+ Culture)

Zlatev

2001

EOC

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The article presents the outlines of an integrative theory of meaning based on the concept of value, understood both as a biological and as a sociocultural category, synthesizing ideas from evolutionary and developmental psychology, semiotics and cybernetics. The proposal distinguishes between four types of meaning systems, cue-based, associational, mimetic and symbolic, forming an evolutionary and epigenetic hierarchy. The theory is applied to phylogenetic and human ontogenetic development, pointing out significant parallels between the two processes, involving both continuity and discontinuity between the different levels. Since one of the basic tenets of the theory is that only living systems have intrinsic value, which is a necessary and sufficient condition for possessing the category meaning, negative implications are drawn for the meaning potential of (current) artificial systems.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 60%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Cue-based Creaturesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Meaning = Life (+ Culture)

Zlatev

2001

EOC

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“…So my view belongs to the "qualitative organicism" (Emmeche 2001(Emmeche , 2004, and is subsumed in Peirce's pansemiotics ("all this universe is perfused with signs") and panpsychism ("the matter is effete mind"). Imanishi (2002, p. 20) also considered life of nonliving things: "There is then no reason to confine 'life' only to living things, but we can say that there is nothing without life and wherever things exist, there is always life.…”

Section: Conclusion: What Is Life?mentioning

confidence: 99%

On the Nature of the Subjectivity of Living Things

Kawade¹

2009

Biosemiotics

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A biosemiotic view of living things is presented that supersedes the mechanistic view of life prevalent in biology today. Living things are active agents with autonomous subjectivity, whose structure is triadic, consisting of the individual organism, its Umwelt and the society. Sociality inheres in every living thing since the very origin of life on the earth. The temporality of living things is guided by the purpose to live, which works as the semantic boundary condition for the processes of embodiment of the subjectivity. Freedom at the molecular and cellular levels allows autonomy and spontaneity to emerge even in single cell organisms, and the presence of the dimension of mind in every living thing is deduced. Living things transcend their individualness, as they live in historically formed higher order structure consisting of the lineage-species and the society. They also transcend materiality, having the dimension of mind.

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“…This means that semiotics as a set of methods must include not only the construction of empirically testable models of dynamic and formal aspects of consciousness (as it is already done to a large extent within cognitive science) but also phenomenological approaches to the qualitative experiential processes connected to sign action. The situation calls for a qualitative organicism (Emmeche 2001), according to which complex systems are both emergent and capably of supporting phenomenal experience. They are considered as emergent patterns of movement with downward causality (in the sense mentioned above in which the emergent pattern of movement organizes the dynamics of the parts through new boundary conditions for their unfolding).…”

Section: Consciousness and Experiencementioning

confidence: 99%

Causal Processes, Semiosis, and Consciousness

Emmeche¹

2003

Process Theories

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The evolutionary emergence of biological processes in organisms with inner, qualitative aspects has not been explained in any sufficient way by neurobiology, nor by the traditional neo-Darwinian paradigm -natural selection would appear to work just as well on insentient zombies (with the right behavioral input-output relations) as on real sentient animals. In consciousness studies one talks about the 'hard problem' of qualia. In this paper I sketch a set of principles about sign action, causality and emergent evolution. On the basis of these principles, I characterize a concept of cause that would allow for a naturalistic explanation of the origin of consciousness. The suggested account of causation also turns the 'hard problem' of qualia into the easier problem of relating experimental biology to experiential biology. New approaches to life and consciousnessThe past 15 years have witnessed a considerable increase in scientific and philosophical consciousness studies, including research into the material processes related to phenomena of consciousness. This is well reflected in the recent development of cognitive science. Cognitive science studies information processing in the mind in a crossdisciplinary fashion, drawing on research in neuroscience, psychology, logic, and artificial intelligence (especially conceptual modelling based on neural networks). Even though researchers in cognitive science originally did not focus on the study of consciousness, they found they were unable to escape philosophical questions concerning conceptualization, the functioning of symbols, intentionality, reference, and knowledge. In brief, cognitive science found itself saddled with the problem of how to account for the aboutness aspect of consciousness-conscious processes (like the processing of symbols and similar intrinsically intentional phenomena) are about something, and usually refer to something other than itself. Semioticians have not hesitated to point out that these concepts pertain to significance, and thus are located within the sphere of interest of any theory of sign processes.Later on in the 1990s, 'consciousness studies' established itself as a field of research with separate journals and large conferences. Consciousness studies tries to 2 overcome the traditional sceptical position of the 'hard' // p. 314 / sciences that one could not deal in any serious theoretical fashion with subjective phenomena-i.e. with phenomena which hitherto were studied only phenomenologically 'from within' (or even by very naive forms of 'introspection'), or by relating data 'from without' of human brain activity (gained by various scanning methods) with the verbal reports of experimental subjects communicating their simultaneous experiences 'from within' of doing different tasks. In the same period, traditional philosophy of mind seemed to 'rediscover' its proper object (Searle 1992) and again became a flourishing area of research. Indeed, philosophy of mind was inspired by cognitive science to state (or reformulate) the so-c...

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Does a robot have an Umwelt? Reflections on the qualitative biosemiotics of Jakob von Uexküll

Cited by 40 publications

References 33 publications

Meaning = Life (+ Culture)

Meaning = Life (+ Culture)

On the Nature of the Subjectivity of Living Things

Causal Processes, Semiosis, and Consciousness

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