Name: Vehicles, experiments in synthetic psychology
ISBN: 9780262521123

Vehicles, experiments in synthetic psychology

These imaginative thought experiments are the inventions of one of the world's eminent brain researchers. These imaginative thought experiments are the inventions of one of the world's eminent brain researchers. They are "vehicles," a series of hypothetical, self-operating machines that exhibit increasingly intricate if not always successful or civilized "behavior." Each of the vehicles in the series incorporates the essential features of all the earlier models and along the way they come to embody aggression, love, logic, manifestations of foresight, concept formation, creative thinking, personality, and free will. In a section of extensive biological notes, Braitenberg locates many elements of his fantasy in current brain research.

What Hacker News says

senthil_rajasekOct 2026

The article mentions the book by Valentino Braitenberg as the source of inspiration.

" The sparks that we assembled in this article are based on a series of thought experiments by the neuroscientist Valentino Braitenberg described in his delightfully quirky 1984 book Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology."

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lioetersSep 2026

Ooh boids, yes! One of my favorite books is Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology. I learned about it from another favorite, Nature of Code, which has a great list of related books. https://natureofcode.com/resources/#further-reading

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myrmidonDec 2025

I do agree with this and think it is an important point to stress.

But we don't know how much different/better human (or animal) learning/understanding is, compared to current LLMs; dismissing it as meaningless token prediction might be premature, and underlying mechanisms might be much more similar than we'd like to believe.

If anyone wants to challenge their preconceptions along those lines I can really recommend reading Valentino Braitenbergs "Vehicles: Experiments in synthetic psychology (1984)".

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myrmidonOct 2025

Gonna grab those, thanks for the recommendation.

If you are interested in the opposite point of view, I can really recommend "Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology" by V. Braitenberg.

Basically builds up to "consciousness as emergent property" in small steps.

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myrmidonOct 2024

"Vehicles: Experiments in synthetic psychology" by Valentino Braitenberg.

Has shaped my outlook on artificial intelligence more than anything else, and this was written in 1984, long before GPT-3 was a thing. Absolutely "mind-blowing" in that it deconstructs and then reassembles your understanding of what a mind is.

Best short story: "The Egg" (by Andy Weir); just read it, is very short, no spoilers.

Best entertainment/fiction: "Murderbot Diaries"

Is highly entertaining, very unique protagonist, raises some very interesting ethical/philosophical questions and does far-future sci-fi worldbuilding insanely well.

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lioetersJun 2024

> all of these "blocks" editors sprouted from the original one I designed for Etoys more than 20 years ago now -- most of the followup was by way of Jens Moenig -- who did SNAP. You can see Etoys demoed on the OLPC in my 2007 TED talk.

I was curious about this TED talk, and found the part where he demonstrates Etoys in the section called "Personal Computing & Children Today".

Alan Kay: A powerful idea about teaching ideas

https://youtu.be/Eg_ToU7m1MI?feature=shared&t=740

The way he interacts with a running program, moving statements around and editing them, observing the values of variables as they change.. It's really an ancestor of Snap, and I can see its influence on Bret Victor's talks like Inventing on Principle.

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Mike Travers' thesis, "Agar: An Animal Construction Kit" is an entertaining and thought-provoking read.

> An animal construction kit is an interactive computer system that allows novice programmers to assemble artificial animals from simple components. These components include sensors, muscles or other effectors, and computational elements. They can also include body parts such as limbs, bones, and joints. A complete animal construction kit must also provide a world for the animal to live in, and must support the co-existence of multiple animals of different species.

It reminds me of the book, Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology. It's about modelling a world of autonomous agents with sensors and actuators, motivations and behaviors.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braitenberg_vehicle

(EDIT: This book is listed in the bibliography of the thesis, so it is a kind of precursor.)

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> ..in SimCity, the first and most useful breakout for children would be to allow various UIs to be made that would let children find out about and try experiments with the "city dynamics rules".

> ..I'd advise coming up with a special kid's oriented language for your SimCity/Metropolis system and then render it in "blocks".

This is an intriguing idea, especially now that SimCity's world dynamics engine has been separated and compiled to WebAssembly. It will allow different views and interfaces with the underlying data, events, actions.

> it’s dawning on me that [Snap] is a full blown undiluted Scheme with continuations and visual macros plus the best ideas of Squeak!

That's lovely too, it makes sense that a visual programming language that evaluates tree-structured blocks will naturally correspond to a Lisp.

So it seems these ideas are pointing toward a visual Lisp environment that allows programming robots and interacting with a living model of a city/world.

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