Understanding and Awareness

 

We do not offer definitions of understanding and awareness. Instead we discuss which abilities related to these phenomena robots will require.

Consider fish swimming. Fish do not understand swimming in the following senses.

• A fish cannot, while not swimming, review its previous swimming performance so as to swim better next time.
• A fish cannot take instruction from a more experienced fish in how to swim better.
• A fish cannot contemplate designing a fish better adapted to certain swimming conditions than it is.

A human swimmer may understand more or less about swimming.

We contend that intelligent robots will need understanding of how they do things in order to improve their behavior in ways that fish cannot. Aaron Sloman [Sloman, 1985] has also discussed understanding, making the point that understanding is not an all-or-nothing quality.

Consider a robot that swims. Besides having a program for swimming with which it can interact, a logic-based robot needs to use sentences about swimming in order to give instructions to the program and to improve it. This includes sentences about how fast or how long it can swim.

The understanding a logical robot needs then requires it to use appropriate sentences about the matter being understood. The understanding involves both getting the sentences from observation and inference and using them appropriately to decide what to do.

Awareness is similar. It is a process whereby appropriate sentences about the world and its own mental situation come into the robot's consciousness, usually without intentional actions. Both understanding and awareness may be present to varying degrees in natural and artificial systems. The swimming robot may understand some facts about swimming and not others, and it may be aware of some aspects of its current swimming state and not others.