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Comment by abeppu | Hacker News Reader

At multiple points in the paper, they describe the agent as "embodied", but it seems like they don't really justify their use of that term. Embodiment is a loaded word with a lot of associations in neighboring fields. I think it's a little wild that they're claiming this aspect in their abstract and conclusion and not really touching on it substantively in the body of the paper.

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Off the cuff, I think any system that has a perceptual connection to an "environment" separate from itself and can induce changes in that environment can be generally considered "embodied". This ability to cognitively distinguish self from environment and to understand one's effect on that environment are the crucial elements. I think an explicitly spatial notion of embodiment typical of humans, is insufficiently general.

As someone in CV/ML with a background in cognitive science, and partial to the work of Lakoff and others in regards to the role of embodiment, it does irk me how loose papers in vision can be with the term. In this case specifically, it's rather hard to justify. I'm guessing it may be influenced by other papers in vision that use agents in a simulated 3D environment. In those papers saying that there is some kind of embodiment is iffy, but depending on the quality of the simulation, maybe defensible.

What fields do you think use the term relatively clearly?

Cognitive science. “The Embodied Mind”[1] defines embodiment quite clearly and argues for its centrality to consciousness.

https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262220422/

But not just "consciousness" which has a bunch of problems of poor definition and epistemic inaccessibility, but "cognition" more broadly.

In this "OS" situation, aside from not even simulating a virtual body, it's not clear that the inputs available to the agent are especially tied to the agent's ongoing actions. By comparison, what you see is a function of how you move your body, head, eyes and eyelids, and "seeing" involves saccades that let you take in the multiple important parts of a scene. So I think this doesn't even have an instantiation which acts _analogously_ to being embodied.

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