With their “bottom-up” approach, Holk Cruse and Malte Schilling present a
highly intriguing perspective on those mental phenomena that have fascinated humankind
since ancient times. Among them are those aspects of our inner lives that
are at the same time most salient and yet most elusive: we are conscious beings
with complex emotions, thinking and acting in pursuit of various goals. Starting
with, from a biological point of view, very basic abilities, such as the ability to
move and navigate in…
Read moreWith their “bottom-up” approach, Holk Cruse and Malte Schilling present a
highly intriguing perspective on those mental phenomena that have fascinated humankind
since ancient times. Among them are those aspects of our inner lives that
are at the same time most salient and yet most elusive: we are conscious beings
with complex emotions, thinking and acting in pursuit of various goals. Starting
with, from a biological point of view, very basic abilities, such as the ability to
move and navigate in an unpredictable environment, Cruse & Schilling have developed,
step-by-step, a robotic system with the ability to plan future actions and,
to a limited extent, to verbally report on its own internal states. The authors then
offer a compelling argument that their system exhibits aspects of various
higher-level mental phenomena such as emotion, attention, intention, volition, and
even consciousness.
The scientific investigation of the mind is faced with intricate problems at a
very fundamental, methodological level. Not only is there a good deal of conceptual
vagueness and uncertainty as to what the explananda precisely are, but it is
also unclear what the best strategy might be for addressing the phenomena of interest.
Cruse & Schilling’s bio-robotic “bottom-up” approach is designed to
provide answers to such questions. In this commentary, I begin, in the first section,
by presenting the main ideas behind this approach as I understand them. In the
second section, I turn to an examination of its scope and limits. Specifically, I will
suggest a set of constraints on good explanations based on the bottom-up approach.
What criteria do such explanations have to meet in order to be of real scientific
value? I maintain that there are essentially three such criteria: biological
plausibility, adequate matching criteria, and transparency. Finally, in the third section, I offer directions for future research, as Cruse & Schilling’s bottom-up approach
is well suited to provide new insights in the domain of social cognition and
to explain its relation to phenomena such as language, emotion, and self.