Anticipation in cybernetic systems: a case against mindless anti-representationalism

Abstract

The developments in behavior-based robotics and in ecological psychology have had a strong effect on theoretical development in some research communities. A new belief has emerged under the name of anti-representationalism, which is strongly opposed to the notion of representations in cognition. This notion is spurred by the inarguably fruitful insight that behavioral complexity can be brought about by simple mechanisms at a low systemic level. Although there are many problems with constructed formal representations in the toy models of traditional artificial intelligence, there is a fundamental problem with extreme anti-representationalism, as well. Representations actually do exist in the biological neural-information processing system. In this paper, a review of neural representation mechanisms are given, looking at perception and motor control in biological systems. Subsequently, it is illustrated that already in simple animal behaviors, simple 'representation-less' reactivity does not suffice. Anticipation exists even in jumping spiders, requiring the existence of a representation as the computational basis for the prediction of future system states.