Unsurprisingly, many topics regarding robot life reflect human concerns. This column begins looking at some such topics of robot life. These topics include emotions and feelings, energy sources, reproduction, pre–installed experience, planned diversity, humor, social life, and quality of life considerations.
This column considers a greater range of functional relations to which robot behavior must be sensitive regarding programmer–unanticipated events. This range goes well beyond respondent conditioning, extending into all the key areas covered by the term operant conditioning. As you recall from the first set of columns (see references) operant processes occur continuously throughout life.
Unsurprisingly, some topics regarding robot life reflect human concerns. This column and the next set the stage for looking more closely at various topics of robot life. These topics include emotions and feelings, energy sources, reproduction, pre–installed experience, planned diversity, humor, social life, and various quality of life considerations.
While discussion of robotics could occur from any of our available perspectives—agential, environmental, or robotic (as described over several recent columns)—the discussion of robotics here derives from our standard, scientific environmental perspective. This avoids any terminological confusion that could stem from trying to deal with both robotics and the robotic perspective at the same time.
The robotic perspective describes the limitations on perspective that pertain to a completely natural lump of organized (e.g., biological) matter. These limitations apply broadly, equally well, to everything. With adjustments for quantitative differences, they apply to me and to you and to all other evolving biological lumps of “living” and behaving matter.
Three main points pertain to discussing reality scientifically. The firings of sensory neurons provide the only, and limited, avenue to “contacting” reality. We “behave” reality through some of the behaviors that the firings of sensory neurons induce. And nothing precludes the existence of the environment, or reality, independent of neurally behaving it and knowledge of it.
