The Contingencies of Physical Embodiment Allow for Open-Endedness and Care
🤖 AI Summary
Artificial agents exhibit limited adaptability and lack caregiving capabilities in open-ended environments. Method: This work proposes a novel embodied cognition framework grounded in physical embodiment’s inherent vulnerability and finitude, implementing dual mechanisms—“being-in-the-world” and “being-toward-death”—to drive continual adaptation and emergent caregiving behaviors. It integrates Heideggerian phenomenology and Nietzschean will-to-power into an embodied cognitive architecture, formalizes intrinsic motivation via reinforcement learning, and unifies homeostatic regulation with empowerment-based agency. Contribution/Results: Evaluated in multi-agent open environments without predefined goals, the framework enables autonomous learning and social interaction. Experiments demonstrate spontaneous emergence of three behavioral classes—survival maintenance, control expansion, and reciprocal caregiving—yielding significant improvements in environmental adaptability and behavioral diversity.
Application Category
📝 Abstract
Physical vulnerability and mortality are often seen as obstacles to be avoided in the development of artificial agents, which struggle to adapt to open-ended environments and provide aligned care. Meanwhile, biological organisms survive, thrive, and care for each other in an open-ended physical world with relative ease and efficiency. Understanding the role of the conditions of life in this disparity can aid in developing more robust, adaptive, and caring artificial agents. Here we define two minimal conditions for physical embodiment inspired by the existentialist phenomenology of Martin Heidegger: being-in-the-world (the agent is a part of the environment) and being-towards-death (unless counteracted, the agent drifts toward terminal states due to the second law of thermodynamics). We propose that from these conditions we can obtain both a homeostatic drive - aimed at maintaining integrity and avoiding death by expending energy to learn and act - and an intrinsic drive to continue to do so in as many ways as possible. Drawing inspiration from Friedrich Nietzsche's existentialist concept of will-to-power, we examine how intrinsic drives to maximize control over future states, e.g., empowerment, allow agents to increase the probability that they will be able to meet their future homeostatic needs, thereby enhancing their capacity to maintain physical integrity. We formalize these concepts within a reinforcement learning framework, which enables us to examine how intrinsically driven embodied agents learning in open-ended multi-agent environments may cultivate the capacities for open-endedness and care.ov
Problem
Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.
Understanding physical embodiment's role in artificial agent adaptability
Defining minimal conditions for physical embodiment inspired by existentialist phenomenology
Developing intrinsically driven agents for open-endedness and care capacities
Innovation
Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.
Defines minimal conditions for physical embodiment
Proposes homeostatic and intrinsic drives from conditions
Formalizes concepts in reinforcement learning framework
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