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Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology

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These imaginative thought experiments are the inventions of one of the world's eminent brain researchers. These imaginative thought experiments are the inventions of one of the world's eminent brain researchers. They are "vehicles," a series of hypothetical, self-operating machines that exhibit increasingly intricate if not always successful or civilized "behavior." Each of the vehicles in the series incorporates the essential features of all the earlier models and along the way they come to embody aggression, love, logic, manifestations of foresight, concept formation, creative thinking, personality, and free will. In a section of extensive biological notes, Braitenberg locates many elements of his fantasy in current brain research.

168 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1984

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Valentino Braitenberg

13 books8 followers

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Displaying 1 - 30 of 59 reviews
Profile Image for Morgan Blackledge.
680 reviews2,246 followers
July 4, 2013
This book is a magic treasure chest of deep insights. Pure joy. If you are interested in the mind, behavior and evolution, you just found a secret classic. READ THIS BOOK!
Profile Image for Kevin.
176 reviews16 followers
September 7, 2014
i am rereading for the third time, and now i understand this is the most provocative book about the human brain (all mammalian brains actually) and the mirror/godhead/mystery of consciousness is totally a function of afference and structure, making us the only post structural organizer on earth, on our side of the milky way. if every human read this, we might end up saving our biome and thriving as conscious creatures able to build paradises.

A MUST READ
Profile Image for Dinesh.
10 reviews
July 10, 2016
This is a brilliant book. The title seems vague (and weird) at the first glance, but once you read the book, the title makes perfect sense. In this very well written book the author, Valentino Braitenberg, begins with thought experiments imagining the behaviour of simple "vehicles" - automatons with sensors and motors. By sequentially adding extra connections (wires with special properties), he obtains "vehicles" with complicated mammalian-like behaviours. Each of the addition is followed by a though experiment to imagine how the effect causes a chance in the vehicle's behaviour, hence the name of the book.

The book gives remarkable insights on the nature of the brain. Do read this if you are interested in how the brain works (and try to re-read it again).
Profile Image for zynphull.
41 reviews22 followers
January 1, 2017
How can complex behavior, such as that observed in vertebrates and, of course, humans, arise from "simple", inanimate objects such as electrons, atoms, molecules and cells? How is it that evolution gave birth to conscience? Those are (to me) some of the most puzzling and interesting questions that cognitive science, from Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid to Humberto Maturana's and Francisco Varela G.'s Tree of Knowledge, try to answer.

Braitenberg's approach to this issue consists in imagining what he calls 'vehicles', initially simple objects consisting of sensors (for external input such as light, chemicals, etc.) connected to motors that compel it to move faster or slower, towards something or away from something. Unambitiously, he begins to show how some relatively simple changes to the internal wiring of these vehicles lead to apparently unpredictable, complex, and even 'human-like' behavior. For example, a sensor (located at the vehicle's right-hand side) that is strongly activated by light, if connected to its left-side motor (and vice-versa) makes its left side 'run faster', thus turning the vehicle toward the light. A naïve observer could conclude such a vehicle 'likes' light. But what does it mean to say that an *object* (and a very clearly 'inanimate' one at that) 'likes' something?

One key concept here is the difference between a 'top-down' and a 'bottom-up' approach in understanding animal/complex behavior. It is substantially more difficult, he says, to understand what goes on behind the apparent behavior of an animal by watching it behave (through induction) than, as is the entire book's proposal, to deduce it from its internal, simpler workings, and play with its structure, watching how changes within it affect its outer behavior.

Eventually, Valentino goes as far as introducing Darwinian evolution to its vehicles, which inevitably brings to mind today's genetic algorithms. The second part of the book is dedicated to a biological analysis of these vehicles, effectively showing whence Valentino (a neuroscientist himself) got his ideas from. Animal's complex neurological structure, he shows, arises from learning, from sensory input, and, eventually, from internal "thoughts" (or neuronal activations). This second half is a tad biology-heavy, but reasonably readable for a layman like myself.

Conscience (he suggests, implicitly), then, arises not from God, not from magic, but from biological necessity - from neuronal cross-wiring.

How could it be any different?
Profile Image for Mangoo.
236 reviews29 followers
January 11, 2011
This is a brilliant work. Inventive, creative, light-written, clearly exposed to laymen, and proposing a very stimulating plan: demonstrating how, by means of the accumulation of well-defined and feasible (though not always as literally presented) mechanisms, initially trivial "vehicles" can develop emergent properties that can be defined by psychological jargon and assume the appearance of purposeful, thinking brains. A central tenet of this ascending spiral of thought experiments - which is later followed by an attempt to give physical or physiological bases to the proposals according to the (at the time of writing) up-to-date neurological and physiological knowledge - is what the author calls the "law of uphill analysis and downhill synthesis". By this, it is meant that we tend to overestimate the complexity of the underlying structures giving rise to the phenomena we observe. That is, it is much more difficult to divine the supposed structure(s) by analysis than by a synthetic approach. The book is leaving proof of this. It embodies a sort of creative reductionism akin to Schweitzer's brownian agents framework - where cumulative features give way to emergent affirmations which, in absence of such constructive proof, would tempt to be justified by much trickier assumptions.
Imaginative pictures finish this little gem of a book, recommended to all curious and disillusioned people.
Profile Image for Jo.
37 reviews9 followers
February 16, 2018
Amazing little book that left me torn, just as the book is split into two distinct parts. The first one I loved. The second half left me a bit puzzled.

The first half is amazing, discussing little thought experiments (or "vehicles") that start of dead easy (one sensor + one motor that is triggered by this sensor) but gradually get more complex. These vehicles gradually start to act more and more like sentient beings. After a couple of iterations, theystart to exhibit things like "memory", "trains of thought", "goal-directed behaviour.

The main take-away for me is the "law of uphill analysis, downhill synthesis". From the outside, complex system may look waaay more complex than they actually are. If you take an inside-out approach, like we do here by inventing the "vehicles" step-by-step, the actual internals of complex systems might in reality be less complicated than outside behaviour would indicate.

The second half of the book translates some of these findings to actual neuroscience, but I found this chapter difficult to follow without any background in the field.

All in all, if you are interested in topics like automata theory, complexity theory (non-linear & chaotic systems) or systems thinking this book might be a hidden gem just waiting for you to pick up. The content has a lot of analogies to the fields of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. The internals of the later vehicles represent much of what we know as "Artificial Neural Networks".

Definitely one I will be re-reading soon!
Profile Image for Tamimi Emran.
6 reviews16 followers
May 7, 2021
This book is genius, the book starts with a claim that even if you believe is possible you'd still have a hard time imagining.
The claim is that psychology can be explained with simple materialistic processes, and after each vehicle there's a quick "philosophical" discussions.
I honestly don't think this book can necessarily persuade you, its "thought experiments" are not based on any biases or unproven claims, they simply are experiments that you can come to your own conclusions from.
A must read for anyone interested on the nature of consciousness
Profile Image for Oktawian Chojnacki.
79 reviews8 followers
December 28, 2019
This book is not a simple read. It’s work.

But man, the way it exposed the brain and neural structures is just brilliant!
28 reviews
August 25, 2017
Recommended for anyone interested in the emergence of what we call consciousness and free will. The author takes you through journey following his axiom that it is much more difficult to try to guess internal structure just from the observation of behavior than it is to create the structure that gives the behavior. This he calls the 'law of uphill analysis and downhill invention'. With this in mind, he adds simple rules to the design as he proceeds from Vehicle 1 to 14 that he proposes can result in the emergence of concepts of affinity,association, concepts/abstractions and thought.

Something that blew my mind was how he introduces a possibility to the vehicles to have trains of thought, by adding a negative feedback system to prevent runaway activations and add stability. The proposed emergent behavior is the ability for the vehicle's logical system to drift through concepts and associations that it has derived from the environment.

People who are familiar with the ideas used in modern day reinforcement learning and artificial neural networks will probably find analogues in the kind of design that goes into the vehicles and such discoveries can be very enjoyable as well.
Profile Image for Anirudh.
1 review
July 12, 2021
"We can no longer fondle our ideas about the brain with the secure feeling that their falsification is beyond technical feasibility." This is an interesting book written at a time where a statement like that was beginning to stir scientists awake to a future of rapid progress in computation.

You are introduced to some of the pre-deep-learning era ideas about artificial intelligence that have eventually led to the present day deep networks.

This book introduces and exemplifies the 'law of uphill analysis and downhill invention' - "in the uphill process of analysis, a given degree of complexity offers more resistance to the workings of our mind than it would if we encountered it downhill, in the process of invention."
Profile Image for Jayati Deshmukh.
23 reviews23 followers
June 21, 2020
I have never read a book similar to this one! It's amazing and will make you think and wonder at each step.

The book consists of following two parts:

In the first part the author shows how to build autonomous bots using plausible electrical / mechanical design. These bots resemble to small robotic vehicles. The initial designs are simple and give the basic idea to the reader. And every new vehicle builds on a previous one and adds more features and complexity. The most curious feature of these vehicles is that although they are purely mechanical, their resultant behaviour is similar to human emotions like love, fear, aggression etc. At one point the author even argues that these vehicles can 'get' new ideas or even follow a sequence of thought but sometimes it is not very convincing.

Many parts of the book throw light on current day artificial intelligence and machine learning concepts like Turing machine, prediction, classification, concepts similar to gradient descent, correlation vs causation etc.

One of the main lesson of this book is "the law of uphill analysis and downhill invention" which is highlighted multiple times. It means that it is comparatively easy to design a system having some desired characteristics (downhill invention), on the other hand given a system as a black box it is very difficult to come up with its exact design details (uphill analysis). This becomes evident in numerous vehicle designs in the book.

In the second part of the book, the author links back to research in biology which is aligned to the concepts discussed in the first part of the book. This part might be tricky to understand specially for people with non-bio background. Even I just skimmed through this part.

Overall, it's a very intriguing read! However, it is a bit difficult to understand and might require multiple reads through some sections to get it.

This book also makes me wonder that if these simple designs can lead to such complex behaviour in these vehicles then our brain and associated system is way more complex than than and it is hard to even imagine the kind of resultant complex behaviour it leads to in humans (which it actually does)! Also based on uphill analysis, given a specific human behaviour, it is hard to find how exactly it pans out in the backend system of our body.
Profile Image for Arkapravo Bhaumik.
44 reviews24 followers
February 22, 2018
(Republishing my answer at quora for the question, 'What are some great mind-blowing books? Why?' with some minor edits)

If I were to nominate a single book, it would have to be (1) most original succinct - so it can present the novel idea easily, (2) ensure reader's attention and enthusiasm, (3) should have changed my viewpoint - after all it is my opinion. All of these facets are met by this little book which spans 152 pages, written by neuroscientist Valentino Braitenberg.

The book deals with artificial intelligence and cognitive science and reads more like a fable if not myth. The book sets out to model vehicles which can elicit human like behaviour and emotions using pretty bare mechanisms, and within the first few chapters Braitenberg develops vehicles which can express human like behaviour and tendencies as anger, dislike, love, attachment, desire to explore etc. However radical it may seem, each single seemingly crazy idea is strongly cemented with arguments from cognitive science.

In later sections, Braitenberg models into the vehicles; machine learning methods, Darwinian evolution, principles of association, rudiments of Turing machine, decision making, apriori knowledge and also free will.

The greatest achievement of this book is that it uses jargon to a minimum and builds on to some very advanced ideas structured on trivial arguments. If somewhere in the middle of the book - lets say after the first 40 pages, if you reflect back on everything which you have read and realise that Braitenberg has been turning unimaginative matter into life with the least of effort and oodles of conjuring, then that confirms that you are truly enjoying the book.

Written in 1986, many of these gedanken experiments have been realised with real hardware and is often part of a graduate robotics course.
Profile Image for John Shillington.
52 reviews5 followers
October 25, 2017
A friend who teaches a class in robotics gave this to me with the admonition that I read it slowly, just a few pages at a time. That was excellent advice: the thought experiments in this little book start off simply, but quickly gain complexity and require the reader to actively engage in the mental construction of each of the fourteen vehicles that Braitenberg imagines. It's a nice way to see, concretely, how simple components (sensors, effectors) and rule-sets can generate surprisingly complex behaviour--a valuable insight not only for roboticists but also for anyone interested in AI, machine learning, or neuropsychology.
23 reviews
August 4, 2021
Short and illuminating, Vehicles is a must-read for any young neuroscientist. Working through 15 or so thought experiments on increasingly complex forms of elementary life, Vehicles reveals the building blocks of our consciousness. While the thought experiments alone are exciting to ponder, the book also provides a thoughtful (albeit dated) section explaining the basic neuroscience that inspired the experiments. When read together, this book is a simple yet compelling introduction to systems neuroscience that will definitely get a young scientist thinking about some of the biggest questions in the field with little background necessary.
Profile Image for Yasir Sultani.
83 reviews2 followers
August 30, 2021
My robotics lecturer shared an article with her students when we were learning about navigation. It was included in the extra readings section and I only checked it out on a whim. The article was just a summary of the robots concocted in this book and for some reason I found it fascinating after which I decided to give the book a read.

It turned out that this book is an absolute hidden gem. There is so much insight in it , just tiny things on evolution , brains and computing. All things that I love to learn about are explained here so simply with measly robots that are just motors and sensors.
Profile Image for Andrew Richardson.
35 reviews3 followers
March 3, 2023
This book is actually commentary on simple organisms. It discusses how simple organisms are able to navigate the world with a small number of sensors, actuators, and internal connections.

It shows how simple approach and avoid behavior can emerge from simple responses. For example, it suggests that the optic chiasm evolved because motor actuators on the right side of the body needed to respond to sensors on the left side, and vice versa.

After I read this book, I thought differently about the flight of bugs, who must navigate a world they cannot comprehend.

Each person is a Vehicle, navigating the world as best we can.
25 reviews63 followers
March 19, 2021
This is the kind of book that would have been life-changing had I read it at 12, and even now, having spent the first couple decades of my life arriving at the same intuitions, I find myself exclaiming, “Holy ****,” did attention emerge just FROM THAT?

His writing style is hilarious and laconic, and if you search for the book title + type:pdf in Google, you will find the first chapter, and if you start reading this first chapter, you may not stop till the end.

God bless the European cyberneticists.
Profile Image for Ogi Ogas.
Author 10 books104 followers
February 9, 2020
My ratings of books on Goodreads are solely a crude ranking of their utility to me, and not an evaluation of literary merit, entertainment value, social importance, humor, insightfulness, scientific accuracy, creative vigor, suspensefulness of plot, depth of characters, vitality of theme, excitement of climax, satisfaction of ending, or any other combination of dimensions of value which we are expected to boil down through some fabulous alchemy into a single digit.
Profile Image for Alb85.
294 reviews9 followers
July 24, 2020
L'autore parte descrivendo un semplice veicolo, che è in grado solo di avanzare a diverse velocità. Ad ogni capitolo il veicolo viene arricchito con nuovi componenti hardware (il software non è menzionato anche perché il libro risale al lontano 1984) fino ad arrivare ad un veicolo "pensante".

Il libro è pieno di stimoli con idee molto originali anche se molti aspetti sono considerati datati.
Sarebbe interessante aggiornare il libro includendo le recenti scoperte fatte in neuroscienza e partendo dalla tecnologia di oggi.
Profile Image for Rada.
Author 6 books60 followers
August 28, 2020
I always thought that maybe human beings are like fractals — something that looks very complicated from the outside, but has a very simple “function” underneath. This book is the closest answer I got to that thought: imagined “vehicles” with very simple mechanisms, but complicated human-like behavior. A super interesting book!
Profile Image for Siddharth.
85 reviews3 followers
October 19, 2020
Absolutely brilliant book about how to build machines that can think. What I found great about this was that since the book is about cybernetics, he actually describes *how to realize* these machines in hardware, which I'd never seen before. For example, he provides an electrical circuit based description of how a machine could know where it was in the world, and explicit electrical models for how to realize things like convolutional filters.
Profile Image for Giorgio.
94 reviews1 follower
Read
May 12, 2020
Non ho la preparazione per giudicare questo saggio. Mi piacerebbe leggere invece cosa ci ha insegnato e cosa è stato possibile costatare dopo trent'anni da quelle premesse.
Personalmente credo d'avere le più improbabili fantasie con saggi come questo che leggendo fantascienza, a valvole e non.
Profile Image for Joseph Campagna.
25 reviews1 follower
April 24, 2021
I enjoyed this book by one of the great cyberneticists, which conceptualized neuroscience from an engineering perspective. If you're interested in neuroscience or psychology but want to transition into the world of robotics and/or AI, this short book is perfect for you and worth a few re-reads.
Profile Image for Justin.
199 reviews45 followers
June 7, 2017
A really fun book on though experiments.
Profile Image for Chris.
142 reviews31 followers
January 1, 2019
proves that thought experiments can indeed have value and not everything written about AI is poppycock.
Profile Image for Xavier Shay.
651 reviews90 followers
January 26, 2020
Maybe this would have been more interesting when it was written, if I wasn't already familiar with neural nets and Turing machines.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 59 reviews

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