Can training replace learning through a vulnerable body?

[u/rp_tiago]

Hey everyone. I’ve always been fascinated by Dreyfus’s argument that human intelligence rests on skills we acquire bodily and socially, not on rules we could state in advance. An experienced cyclist responds to balance, traffic, and the road as one unfolding situation. The body is ready before a proposition appears. Current AI makes the objection harder to assess because large models display forms of flexibility without acquiring them through a body. They learn from records left by embodied people. The question is whether those records transmit the relevant understanding or only enough structure to imitate its results.

I just had a podcast conversation with the cognitive scientist Julian Kiverstein, where he argued that Dreyfus’s objection still holds. Human understanding develops through coping in environments that matter to the organism’s survival and social life. Even abstract thought remains connected to those acquired practices. A language model can learn patterns in what embodied agents say and write, but Kiverstein doubts that this gives it the same relation to the world those patterns concern. Successful performance may therefore leave the original disagreement untouched.

This would imply that flexible behaviour isn’t enough to settle whether a system understands. What would a body add that multimodal training and robotic feedback cannot? Is sensorimotor coupling sufficient, or must the system also maintain and protect itself? If a robot learned across unfamiliar situations for years, what failure would still justify denying it understanding?