seymour_results comments on Welcome to Less Wrong! (6th thread, July 2013) - Less Wrong
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An emulated body in an emulated environment is a disembodied algorithmic system in my terminology. The classic example is Terry Winograd's SHRDLU, which made significant advances in machine language understanding by adding an emulated body (arm) and an emulated world (a cartoon blocks world, but nevertheless a world that could be manipulated) to text-oriented language processing algorithms. However, Winograd himself concluded that language understanding algorithms plus emulated bodies plus emulated worlds aren't sufficient to achieve natural language understanding.
Every emulation necessarily makes simplifying assumptions about both the world and the body that are subject to errors, bugs, and munchkin effects. A physical robot body, on the other hand, is constrained by real-world physics to that which can be built. And the interaction of a physical body with a physical environment necessarily complies with that which can actually happen in the real world. You don't have to know everything about the world in advance, as you would for a realistic world emulation. With a robot body in a physical environment, the world acts as its own model and constrains the universe of computation to a tractable size.
The other thing you get from a physical robot body is the implicit analog computation tools that come with it. A robot arm can be used as a ruler, for example. The torque on a motor can be used as a analog for effort. On these analog systems, world-grounded metaphors can be created using symbolic labels that point to (among other things) the arm-ruler or torque-effort systems. These metaphors can serve as the terminal point of a recursive meaning builder -- and the physics of the world ensures that the results are good enough models of reality for communication to succeed or for thinking to be assessed for truth-with-a-small-t.