Can a Robot Hear Music? Can a Robot Dance? Can a Robot Tell What it Knows or Intends to Do? Can it Feel Pride or Shame in Company?



colour that will capture light energy effectively. Plants
socialise by hiding in one another’s shade, by climbing or
perching on one another, by joining in canopy layers to meet
light and withstand storms, by poisoning one another’s
growth if the competition is intense. Some branches become
leaves that grow across the life-giving light and against
gravitation, channelling off excessive water to the roots;
others aggregate into flowers that seduce insects or birds and
make sugary fruits, coloured to signal ripeness, that birds or
mammals eat to carry off seeds, or dry seeds that are lifted
away by wind or water. The ‘purposefulness’ of their growth
forms is obvious, and well-defended to exploit the vagaries
of the physical ‘context’, relying on the sufficient
consistencies of the matter and energy around them.

Animals move to live. Their bodies are formed to allow
intricately timed pulses of muscular energy in harmonious
complexes of plastic transformation that push against the
environment, to drive displacements of the whole body in
the gravitational field -- through water or on air, by stepping
over solid surfaces or by climbing in 3-D mazes. Every
animal embryo has genetic symmetry and polarity that
defines a locomotive self, and in the process the
‘prefunctional morphogenesis’, anatomy elaborated before
any muscle moves, specifies a mobile future and maps out
the principle of a geographical territory for action. Time and
space made in the body become the condition and context
for the individual animal’s activity, as well as for the social
life and ecological specialisation of the family and social
group.

Animal bodies have muscles that can attack things in the
environment (including other animals or plants) to
assimilate nourishment, as well as muscles that distribute
vital fluids, gases and chemical products around the organs
inside their bodies. Brains give the muscle masses and
skeletal mechanisms unified purpose and calculate the future
economy of effort. The socially sophisticated forms grow
extra muscles and neural motor nuclei that elaborate states of
inner self-regulation into signals of motivation - of interest,
intended effort, investigative strategy and state of well-
being. Eventually, in response to socially aware others, these
self-revealing expressions become social-devices regulating
companionship with selected others. Signals of the visible
surface of mobile bodies, or thrown from the interior of the
body by vocal or chemical means, condition and guide
affective relationships, giving rise to the ‘ethical’
implications Whiting referred to - of affiliation, enmity,
loyalty and betrayal.

I will outline what we know of the early life of a human
individual to demonstrate how far from robotic we are
already, when innocent of language or ‘logical discernment’,
why we cannot possibly, ever, live as robots, and why I am
sure robots will never live as we do. I believe that the idea
of simulating psychology with computational machines is
thinkable for our culture only because of a tautology. We
have created a mechanistic cognitive psychology that forgets,
or misrepresents, the natural intentionality and emotionality
that makes cognition useful. In consequence of this
reduction of our particular cultural view of mentality, our
psychology hasn’t a clue about the nature of our emotional
concerns, either in our relations of collaborative
companionship together, or as we may find ourselves when
alone with our conscience. Just as the ancients were inspired
and befuddled by beliefs in wild, seductive, vicious,
pleasure-loving spirits and gods, we are confused by
notions of ourselves as mechanisms.

First the nature of animal motives needs clarifying,
because muscular action, with its prospective guidance
by intelligent perception and learning, has peculiar
features of rhythm and grace that machines may never
reproduce, except by slavish copying of effects without
cause. Mathematical analysis of the dynamics of
movement in animals, all animals, appears to reveal
conservation of principles of prospective control in
time and space that are unique in the universe. The
same principles have been found in the activity of large
populations of neurons in the motor cortex, and
elsewhere in the brain, some moments
before a given
movement is exercised. This kind of collective nerve
activity is also indicative of a capacity to imitate or
'mirror' agency, enabling one animal to take up the
motives of another, and execute a matching act. The
society of animals is possible because the minds that
motivate animal bodies have evolved ways of detecting
and engaging with the purposes and concerns of other
embodied and animated minds. The 'motor images'
that make vital action coherent, efficient and purposeful
in relation to the world can be exchanged between
individuals and elaborated cooperatively.

Then, we have to think about how an infant comes
about as a trapped and parasitic embryo and foetus,
how it is prepared for free living before entering the
uniquely emotional epigenetic world of human society.
In the earliest stages of a form that will have an
elongated locomotile body, the body is mapped with
polarity, dorso-ventral asymmetry, and bilateral
symmetry, and this same map is impregnated in a
prototype CNS while it is still a sheet of
undifferentiated cells interconnected by tight junctions.
There is a somatic rind to the body, destined to be
muscular and furnished with sense organs, and internal
viscera adapted to internal metabolic and reproductive
concerns, and the embryo CNS maps these regions,
too. In the late embryo (the second month of human
gestation) the first cell aggregates and axons of a neural
net appear in the core of the brain and spinal chord as
the head is elaborated with potentialities for forward
looking special exteroceptors, but at this stage there is
no movement and no sensation. When the first motor
axons grow to the muscles, and even when the first
movements occur, there is no sensory input to the
brain to advise on how circuits should form. The first
elaborated systems are the core motivating ones, and
those later to be identified with the neurohumoral
systems of emotion. The emotional mechanisms serve
as morphogenesis regulators of the neocortex, which is
in a rudimentary condition, just sheets of neuroblasts,
well into the foetal stage. Indeed the emotional and
communicative mechanisms serve as controllers of the
cognitive machinery of the cortex at all subsequent
stages of development. Those attempting robotic
modelling should remember this. Emotions, generated
and regulated in the brain stem first, are
causal in both
mind development and mind functioning, not just self-
regulatory responses or outputs. The whole process has
an astonishing plannedness or what Sherrington,



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