When people talk about embodiment, they are questioning if the body is a necessary part of the mind.
There are many hypotheses one could pose about that. Whether the abstractions used in our more obscure cognitive processes are constrained in a comprehensible way by the kind of experiences our bodies give us is… complicated to unpack. For an interesting (but infuriatingly overbearing) attempt to work this through, see Lakoff (1999). For a less ambitious and probably more defensible one, see Clark (1998). I don’t think Clark ultimately says anything that would surprise a control system engineer.
- Carl Zimmer in Human Thought Is Far Slower Than Your Internet Connection explains Zheng and Meister (2024), which estimates our output, in some sense, at 10 bits per second.
1 Strong embodiment
“No mind without a body can be sentient.” Looks like a ragged hypothesis in the era of foundation models, tbh.
2 Weak embodiment
“Cognition is distributed between mind and environment and only makes sense in that context.”