The Emergence of Autonomous Representations in Artificial Agents

Abstract

Representational autonomy is a key property of an artificial agent. The type of representational structures and the role they play in the preservation of an agent’s autonomy are pointed out. The limitations of the traditional cognitivist approach and of the embodied intelligent approach to support such representational structures are described and indicated. A framework of self-organising Peircean semiotic processes is introduced and it is then applied to demonstrate the emergence of autonomous representations in an artificial agent interacting with the environment.