Figure 3. Screenshot of the virtual environment.
At this stage, animats are able to extract regularities
from their sensors developing data structures which we
call “koncepts”. Then regularities in these koncepts
recursively form koncepts of a higher level. With a
simple reinforcement learning scheme, koncepts are
linked to actions, grounding a form of “meaning” of
the koncepts. Using these koncepts for select their
actions, animats are able to survive in their simple
environment.
We are currently developing more complex tasks, in
order to model how logic can emerge from the use of
abstract koncepts, in a similar way as the one proposed
by Gardenfors (1994). We are also interested in
studying the sharing of koncepts through a form of
communication, and how this affects the cognitive
development of the animats. An extensive description
of this work will be found in Gershenson (2002b).
6. Conclusions
We have proposed the development of behaviour-
based knowledge systems for explaining the transition
of from adaptive behaviour to high cognitive processes
in a synthetic fashion. This is, with our artificial systems
we are not only understanding the natural systems
which inspire us, but at the same time we become
capable of engineering systems with the potentialities
of the natural ones. We have stated broadly the steps
and requirements that BBKS should follow for
producing knowledge of their environment while still
exhibiting adaptive behaviour. We have also discussed
some limitations of BBKS and presented briefly our
current work.
An additional motivation for developing BBKS is
for doing philosophy of mind and philosophy of
cognitive science with the aid of synthetic systems:
synthetic philosophy. In this way, theories of mind,
concepts, meaning, representation, intentionality,
consciousness, etc. could be contrasted with our
synthetic BBKS, reducing a bit the space for rhetoric.
Acknowledgements
I appreciate thevaluablecommentsandsuggestions
received from Nadia Gershenson, Ezequiel Di Paolo,
Inman Harvey, Andy Clark, David Young, Douglas
Hofstadter, Peter Gardenfors, Christian Balkenius, the
cognitive science group at Lund University, and two
anonymous referees. The main ideas were derived
from the research carried out with Pedro Pablo
Gonzalez and Jose Negrete. This work was supported
in part by the Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y
Tecnolog^a (CONACYT) of Mexico and by the School
of Cognitive and Computer Sciences of the University
of Sussex.
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