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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 January 2024
What would need to be involved if we want our future robots to be anything more than quiz show champions, phenomenal chess players, and highly efficient killers? An influential answer from many corners of contemporary cognitive science is a body very much like ours, with our needs, desires, pleasures, pains, our kinds of habits, expertise, significance, care, and meaning, our cultural knowledge, practical know-how, and so on. In other words, nothing short of “real meat” embodiment will do. With his characteristic flair and mastery of a great diversity of philosophical traditions, in this conversation Peter Wolfendale clarifies the “real meat” hypothesis and defends the feasibility of isolated human brains animating androids from a distance and distributed artificial intellects inhabiting human bodies from the cloud – without sacrificing any of the cognitive capacities enabled by embodiment.
Peter Wolfendale is an independent philosopher living in the North East of England and the author of Object-Oriented Philosophy: The Noumenon's New Clothes (2019). His influential blog/website is: https://deontologistics.co.
ANTHONY MORGAN is, among other things, the editor of this book.
Anthony Morgan (AM): Please can you start by saying a few things about the rise of embodiment within contemporary philosophy? It seems to me to be mainly used as a corrective against: (1) the Cartesian notion of an immaterial mind, and (2) the materialist tendency to place the mind in the brain. But what are the main positive claims that defenders of embodiment are making?
Peter Wolfendale (PW): I think that the meaning of the term “embodiment” in philosophical circles is deceptively diverse, and that those who champion the concept are motivated by concerns that overlap less than is often appreciated. If they are unified by one thing, it is a rogues’ gallery of common enemies. Although Descartes is the most reviled of these, his errors are often traced back to some original sin perpetrated by Plato. However, in order to make sense of these conceptual crimes, it is worth first distinguishing the explanatory concerns of cognitive science and artificial intelligence from the normative concerns of political and social theory, while acknowledging that both of these are downstream from more general metaphysical concerns regarding the difference and/or relation between matter and mind.
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