From "Baby Stuff" to the World of Adult Science: Developmental AI from a Kantian viewpoint.
Aaron Sloman · 2009
Abstract. In contrast with ontology developers concerned with a symbolic or digital environment (e.g. the internet), I draw attention to some features of our 3-D spatio-temporal environment that challenge young humans and other intelligent animals and will also challenge future robots. Evolution provides most animals with an ontology that suffices for life, whereas some animals, including humans also have mechanisms for substantive ontology extension based on results of interacting with the environment. Future human-like robots will also need this. Since pre-verbal human children and many intelligent non-human animals, including hunting mammals, nest-building birds and primates can interact, often creatively, with complex structures and processes in a 3-D environment, that suggests (a) that they use ontologies that include kinds of material (stuff), kinds of structure, kinds of relationship, kinds of process and kinds of causal interaction and (b) since they don’t use a human communicative language