A Radical Notion of EmbeddednessA Logically Necessary Precondition for Agency and Self‐Awareness

Abstract

The aim of this essay is to establish the logically necessary preconditions for the existence of self‐awareness in an artificial or a natural agent. It examines the terms agent, situated, embodied, embedded, and representation as employed ubiquitously in cognitive science, attempting to clarify their meaning and the limits of their use. It discusses the minimal conditions for an agent’s environment constituting a ‘world’ and rejects most, though not all, types of virtual world. It argues that to qualify as genuinely situated an agent should function in real time within the dynamic world we inhabit, or some close simulacrum of it. It shows that embodied agents will possess or evolve local coordinate systems, or points of view, locating, identifying, and interacting with objects relative to their current position in space‐time, and it discusses various types of embodiment, arguing that most current situated and embodied systems are too limited to be candidates for even the most minimal claim to self‐identity. It argues that a truly autonomous agent has to be active in its participation with the world, able to synthesize and order its internal representations from its own point of view, and that to do this effectively the agent will have to be embedded. To this end it proposes a six‐point definition of embeddedness. Ultimately it argues for a philosophical‐cum‐cognitive‐science model of the self that satisfies essential elements of both sets of definitions of the term.