Towards a “Brain-Guided” Cognitive Architecture - Bioinspired Approaches for Human-Centric Technologies - page 213

7.3 Beyond Embodiment: Building a Brain to Understand
the Brain
In the first part of this chapter, we summarized some concepts about the necessity
and usefulness of embodiment and body schema as basic building blocks in the
process of building a cognitive architecture of a humanoid robot like iCub. How-
ever this is only a kind of preliminary groundwork, and the actual construction is an
exciting work in progress. As a matter of fact, our ongoing adventure to build a
cognitive architecture for iCub in many ways is linked to the three apparently
disparate citations above, namely, the power of understanding fundamental princi-
ples through a model building approach, which is essentially decentralized, local to
global, nonlinear, non-digital: smooth flow through time and space. All of this
relates to cumulative learning and organization of memories in our brain as well as
in iCub cognitive system. Indeed our own individual experiences play a fundamen-
tal role in leading us to exhibit numerous instances of creativity, rationality, and
irrationality in our behaviors. Use of “experience” to go “beyond experience” is
important simply because we all inhabit a continuously changing world where
neither everything can be known nor can everything be experienced. In order to
succeed and ultimately survive, diverse “chunks of knowledge” emerging from
one's past experiences have to be integrated and exploited flexibly in the context of
the present state of affairs to ensure smooth realization of goals. How the brain
achieves such diversity in control is a central challenge facing both neuroscience
and cognitive robotics today.
Simply put, beyond a point a software programmer cannot travel the journey of a
cognitive robot. Instead, like natural cognitive agents, cognitive robots must also be
endowed with mechanisms that enable them to efficiently organize their sensori-
motor experiences into their memories, remember and exploit them effectively
when needed to realize their goals, and, at the same time, keep learning new things.
Enabling them to do so presents a unique opportunity to emulate the gradual
process of infant development and investigate the underlying interplay between
multiple sensory, motor, and cognitive processes from the perspective of an inte-
grated system that perceives, acts, learns, remembers, forgets, reasons, makes
mistakes, introspects, etc. To this effect, even simple experiments with a humanoid
like iCub offer us an exciting medium to “build a brain to understand the brain” and
contemplate numerous open questions related to the emergence of embodied
cognition: how do structures of bodily experience gradually “work their way up”
to form abstract patterns of inferences? How do playful interactions between the
body and the world sculpt the memories of a cumulative learning robot? When and
how do mechanisms related to abstraction, consolidation, and forgetting play a role
in shaping cumulative learning and sensorimotor development? What is the role of
the teacher in minimizing “blind” trial and error exploration and motivating and
influencing the developmental curve? How do all these questions, phrased in the
context of a gradually learning and developing humanoid, relate to emerging trends
in neuroscience? And finally, to which extent this kind of “cognitive biomimetism”