"Building bridges between spirit and matter"
In his "Legend of the Origin of the Book of Taoteking on Lao Tzu's Way to Emigration", Bertolt Brecht has the traveling sage meet a customs officer who asks what the scholar has been thinking about and what he has discovered. The boy accompanying Lao Tzu replies with the famous sentence: "That the soft water in motion defeats the mighty stone over time. You understand, the hard is defeated." This fits in with an interview with computer scientist Josh Bongard (New Scientist, 9.12.23, p. 41), who pursues "evolutionary robotics" and wants to replace the hard material of machines with their "artificial intelligence" with soft components. In "soft robotics", the aim is to replace the ceramic and metal used up to now with rubber and other soft parts in order to make artificial intelligence, which has so far been operated using linguistic means, sensual and allow it to make contact with the real world. The idea of this embodiment has been pursued for some time and has now reached cognition, i.e. the ability of people to perceive and recognize. Whatever develops in a person as consciousness, understanding of the world or knowledge of human nature requires a body in which the spiritual (mental) arises and with which the imagination is expressed. When psychologists research this analyzable "embodied cognition", they explore in detail how physical states influence thinking and how the respective actions and behaviour are affected and influenced by them. The aim is to build a bridge between the two spheres, which are distinguished as mind and matter - or as body and soul - and have been regarded and treated as separate in the West since René Descartes separated the "res cogitans" (mind) from the "res extensa" (matter) in the 17th century and, despite all their comprehensibility, did not attribute any mind to the things spread out before people, even if they were alive. It is also worth trying the opposite of Descartes and using "soft machines" to allow artificial intelligence to appear as embodied cognition. Josh Bongard assumes that this ability of soft robots will be found in the components of the design and that no programming is required for their use. Humans don't need that either. That's why we are not machines, but the opposite. Namely nice people. Or does someone think differently?
