Embodiment and the inner life

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1. etangentJan 2016
   Also Shanahan's "Embodiment and the Inner Life" is well-written http://www.amazon.com/Embodiment-inner-life-Cognition-Consci...
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2. sunrunnerJun 2026
   I always liked the code Easter egg in Ex Machina. A scene with Caleb has a Python script visible on screen that, when run, prints:

     ISBN = 9780199226559
   

   This is Murray Shanahan’s Embodiment and the inner life: Cognition and Consciousness in the Space of Possible Minds, quite relevant to the film.
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3. superb-owlJun 2022
   This is kind of a weird discussion.

   "Embodiment" here seems to mean "having a body," i.e. being able to perform motor tasks in the external world (as opposed to the way it's used in "Embodiment and the Inner Life" [1]).

   In that case, I don't think embodiment could ever be considered a necessary condition for AGI. But AGI would need to be able to learn motor tasks if given a body (in order to be called "general").

   A deeper question, and one I don't see enough discussion of, is whether a certain kind of embodiment is necessary for AGI to "feel something." I don't think this question is definitively answerable, but it's super important. Can a CPU experience qualia? Or do you need something more "meaty" and analog? Does the material matter at all, or is consciousness (in the hard-problem sense) just a pattern of information?

   An even more interesting and relevant question might be - is "feeling" (i.e. having qualia) a necessary condition for AGI?

   [1] https://www.alibris.com/search/books/isbn/9780199226559

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