Key Arguments

• Dreyfus enumerates three bodily capacities that current digital computer programs lack: (1) 'the inner horizon, that is, the partially indeterminate, predelineated anticipation of partially indeterminate data,' (2) 'the global character of this anticipation which determines the meaning of the details it assimilates and is determined by them,' and (3) 'the transferability of this anticipation from one sense modality and one organ of action to another.'
• He emphasizes that the human inner horizon is neither an anticipation of fully determinate alternatives nor of totally unspecified alternatives, noting that those two extremes are 'the only possible digital implementation,' thus marking the specifically non-digital character of human anticipation.
• He claims that 'All these are included in the general human ability to acquire bodily skills,' directly tying these anticipatory structures to the basic capacity for learning embodied skills.
• He argues that 'Thanks to this fundamental ability an embodied agent can dwell in the world in such a way as to avoid the infinite task of formalizing everything,' suggesting that bodily anticipation lets humans circumvent the combinatorial explosion inherent in explicit formalization.
• He describes this as 'embodied sort of "information processing," in which the meaning of the whole is prior to the elements,' thereby inverting the standard AI picture where elements must be specified first and then composed into wholes.
• He connects this whole-prior-to-parts structure to 'complex pattern recognition such as speech recognition with which we began our discussion,' implying that the same anticipatory mechanism that grounds bodily skill also underlies difficult perceptual tasks.
• He further generalizes that 'sensory motor skills underlie perception whose basic figure/ground structure seems to underlie all "higher" rational functions; even logic and mathematics have an horizontal character,' arguing that this gestalt, horizon-based structure runs from basic perception up through formal reasoning.
• He concludes that 'In all these cases individual features get their significance in terms of an underdetermined anticipation of the whole,' reinforcing the thesis that meaning flows from a global, underdetermined horizon to the particulars, not vice versa.

Source Quotes

present, and not as yet conceived in digital computer programs: (1) the inner horizon, that is, the partially indeterminate, predelineated anticipation of partially indeterminate data (this does not mean the anticipation of some completely determinate alternatives, or the anticipation of completely unspecified alternatives, which would be the only possible digital implementation); (2) the global character of this anticipation which determines the meaning of the details it assimilates and is determined by them; (3) the transferability of this anticipation from one sense modality and one organ of action to another. All these are included in the general human ability to acquire bodily skills.

present, and not as yet conceived in digital computer programs: (1) the inner horizon, that is, the partially indeterminate, predelineated anticipation of partially indeterminate data (this does not mean the anticipation of some completely determinate alternatives, or the anticipation of completely unspecified alternatives, which would be the only possible digital implementation); (2) the global character of this anticipation which determines the meaning of the details it assimilates and is determined by them; (3) the transferability of this anticipation from one sense modality and one organ of action to another. All these are included in the general human ability to acquire bodily skills. Thanks to this fundamental ability an embodied agent can dwell in the world in such a way as to avoid the infinite task of formalizing everything.

All these are included in the general human ability to acquire bodily skills. Thanks to this fundamental ability an embodied agent can dwell in the world in such a way as to avoid the infinite task of formalizing everything. This embodied sort of "information processing," in which the meaning of the whole is prior to the elements, would seem to be at work in the sort of complex pattern recognition such as speech recognition with which we began our discussion.

Thanks to this fundamental ability an embodied agent can dwell in the world in such a way as to avoid the infinite task of formalizing everything. This embodied sort of "information processing," in which the meaning of the whole is prior to the elements, would seem to be at work in the sort of complex pattern recognition such as speech recognition with which we began our discussion. Indeed, sensory motor skills underlie perception whose basic figure/ground structure seems to underlie all "higher" rational functions; even logic and mathematics have an horizontal character.

Indeed, sensory motor skills underlie perception whose basic figure/ground structure seems to underlie all "higher" rational functions; even logic and mathematics have an horizontal character. In all these cases individual features get their significance in terms of an underdetermined anticipation of the whole. If these global forms of pattern recognition are not open to the digital computer, which, lacking a body, cannot respond as a whole, but must build up its recognition starting with determinate details, then Oettinger is justified in concluding his speech recognition paper on a pessimistic note: "If indeed we have an ability to use a global context without recourse

Key Concepts

• present, and not as yet conceived in digital computer programs: (1) the inner horizon, that is, the partially indeterminate, predelineated anticipation of partially indeterminate data (this does not mean the anticipation of some completely determinate alternatives, or the anticipation of completely unspecified alternatives, which would be the only possible digital implementation); (2) the global character of this anticipation which determines the meaning of the details it assimilates and is determined by them; (3) the transferability of this anticipation from one sense modality and one organ of action to another.
• All these are included in the general human ability to acquire bodily skills.
• Thanks to this fundamental ability an embodied agent can dwell in the world in such a way as to avoid the infinite task of formalizing everything.
• This embodied sort of "information processing," in which the meaning of the whole is prior to the elements, would seem to be at work in the sort of complex pattern recognition such as speech recognition with which we began our discussion.
• In all these cases individual features get their significance in terms of an underdetermined anticipation of the whole.

Context

Closing sentences of Dreyfus’s discussion of the role of the body in intelligent behavior, where he synthesizes earlier analyses of horizons, gestalt perception, and skill learning into a general account of embodied information processing that contrasts with digital computation.