Embodiment as metaphor: metaphorizing- in the environment

• Authors: Georgi Stojanov
• Venue: Computation for metaphors, analogy, and agents
• Year: 1999

The paper describes a general mechanism for internalization of environment in autonomous agents. After reviewing the role of representation in behavior-based autonomous agents, we propose metaphor framework that unifies various research threads in the domain. We start from a variant of the so-called similarity creating metaphors for the case of implicit target domain (the environment of the agent). The mechanism is based on a fairly simple idea of assimilation via inborn schemas as understood in Piaget's developmental psychology. These schemas represent the source domain for the metaphor. They are ordered sequences of elementary actions that the agent is capable of performing. Because of the environmental constraints, when the agent tries to execute some schema, only certain subsequences from the original schema will actually be performed. These subsequences are called enabled schema instances. Thus, environment unfolds its structure to the agent via the subset of the enabled schema instances. Another way to look at this is to say that what the agent gets is a metaphorical description of its environmental niche (the implicit target domain) in terms of instances of its inborn schemas (the source domain). After describing the basic idea by means of an example, we present some simulation results that show the plausibility of the model. The simulated agent solves the navigational problem in an initially unknown environment. The paper closes with a discussion section where we compare our model with some related works and make the case for the metaphor framework as a proper unifier of diverse research work in embodied and situated cognition.