The hard problem of content and why we should solve it
The hard problem of content and why we should solve it

Summary/Abstract: The world is its own best model (Brooks, 1989)! Or at least it is for Brooks’ behavior-based robots. Robots such as Herbert, whose task consisted in stealing empty soda cans from offices and Baxter, whose task was to interact with human beings in a factory environment, prove that complex behavior can be achieved without any inner representation of the world. If we believe Hutto and Myin (2013), we human beings are not too different from Herbert or Baxter. Our behavior can be explained without assuming that we mentally represent our world. In this paper, I want to show evidence against this claim based on empirical data. Although certain aspects of our behavior can be understood without assuming internal representation of the world, most of our actions and how we store interactions with the world strongly suggest internal representation. This claim will be based on the following empirical evidence: non-linguistically based spreading activation (Barr et al., 2014), object recognition (Banich & Compton, 2018), agnosia (Banich & Compton, 2018) and visual reconstruction (UC Berkeley, 2011). I will, furthermore, extend this theory and argue for human beings being different in knowledge acquisition to behavior-based robots due to the nature of our memory. While behavior-based robots do not need to represent the world, we human beings have to represent the world in a specific manner to be able to interact with the world. The knowledge we acquire is mainly based on our inner representation of the world.

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