LM: The thought-provoking inaugural article by Tristan Greene (“Distributed embodiment and other alternatives to robotics” September 21, 2025) elicited these responses to its main questions and speculations.
TG . . . what if physical embodiment is dead-end? What if there’s a fundamental, experiential blockade preventing AI from “mentally inhabiting” a robot body?
LM: There is. It’s called “The Frame Problem”. An embodied sentient being’s ability to navigate our 3-D world, in tandem with understanding cause-and-effect and possessing consciousness of temporal continuity, requires an enormous “database” of implicit inferences about the physical world and its contents, gradually acquired and regularly updated from life experience. Making these implicit assumptions both explicit and algorithmically complete is the challenge facing roboticists, from programmers of self-driving cars to designers of elder-care robot attendants. Instantaneous correct assessments of whether a possible action or inaction is relevant or not, dangerous or not, moral or not, necessary or not, appear not to be entirely Turing-computable functions.
“The frame problem arises in artificial intelligence and philosophy of mind when trying to represent the effects of an action without having to explicitly specify all the countless things that don’t change. In short, it’s the challenge of telling a system what’s relevant to update after an action, without it having to reason about every irrelevant fact in the world.” – ChatGPT
It only gets worse from there. There is no purely logical way to explain relevance to a Turing machine, because relevance is highly colorable, malleable and distortable by combinations of personal experience of cause and effect in an embodied state, along with memory and emotion. AI lacks them all. Thus, while self-driving cars can estimate many kinds of relevancies, they will still injure or kill people when their estimates fail, as they are bound to do. This is about imperfect life, not perfect chess.
Humans actually have an opposite problem: “a fundamental, experiential blockade” preventing pure consciousness from “noetic liberation” from a human body, [ed.] that is, moving beyond logical reasoning and purely sensory perception to achieve deeper, more intuitive insight into reality and consciousness. In the blockade initial perceptions and cognitions are filtered, distorted and corrupted by the simultaneous arising of transient sensations, emotions, memories and judgments.
TG: Much of what we perceive as being of the self is illusory. Our form, or body, for example is composed of countless cells which, over the time of our existence, have been completely replaced many times over. Even the sensations we perceive are temporary. No matter how much we love chocolate, the taste fades. Our perception of sensory experience also changes over time – do you still enjoy the same foods as when you were a child?
LM: Agreed, much of our perception (as well as conception) is of transient phenomena that we mistake for enduring bedrock. Yet our neurons themselves are not generally replaced; neurogenesis is highly restricted. So memories among other cerebral functions are mapped redundantly around the brain, as “back-up” to inevitable neuronal loss. Our perceptions and sensations change not only over time, but also morph instantaneously into conceptions and judgments. This is partly an organic process that neuroscience has yet to explain, and that ancient Asian practices learned to control, but not by writing code.
TG: In fact, it seems as though all of those things which can be aggregated to describe the self (experience, sensory perception, consciousness, and physical agency) can be removed individually without compromising the overall “self.” People with locked-in syndrome, for example, have almost no physical agency, yet they still process experiences.
LM: Yes, and according to Buddha’s doctrine of anatman, there is no independently existing “self” at all: only chimerical and constantly fluctuating perceptions and conceptions of a “self.” Thus there are no “people with” syndromes: rather, there are meta-aggregations of other aggregations. But no one is there who possesses anything, because no one is there, and no things are there. There are no perduring essences independent of conditioned arisings and inevitable dissolutions. We name, perceive and conceive some of these transitory arisings as though they were enduring. But “we” are not so; nor are “they.” Even a few decades or centuries of human time are mere grains of soluble sand, ever-shifting on time’s cosmic beach.
The absence of independently existing “entities” includes individual consciousness, and its contents. This dialectic, most rigorously formulated by Nagarjuna, concludes that all phenomena, being impermanent and inseparable appearances without any “free-standing” exceptions, must form a seamlessly interconnected continuum. Mundane consciousness is “self-aware”, but merely assembles fragments abstracted, aggregated or “cherry-picked” from the whole. By contrast, cosmic consciousness is aware of non-selfhood, and therefore of unity with the whole.
From a Japanese Buddhist perspective, Masahiro Mori, who famously gave us the “Uncanny Valley”, proposes that a robot has (or can also have) a Buddha nature. Food for thought!
TG: If we assume that AGI will require some form of moral agency – the ability to act in situations where risk and benefit can only be viewed philosophically – then we must also assume that it will glean its moral agency from the data it is trained on and/or exposed to.
LM: Yes, absolutely. Moral agency is a guiding human quality, but only on good days. Ultimately, we need to teach AGI to distinguish between good and bad, right and wrong, just and unjust, as would a human. The problem is: humans are by nature at perpetual war, ranging from benign debate to malignant murder, over differences of opinion in just those matters. Absent political consensus in the name of humanity as a whole, robots are first and foremost being weaponized. The genie is out of the bottle; gladiator robots have already escaped the sporting arenas. The burning question now is: who’s programing them to do what, and according to whose account of moral agency?
As the late Joseph Nye, former Dean of Harvard’s JFK School of Government observed in 2003: “The democratization of technology has led to the privatization of war.” That also entails its roboticization.
TG: The only way to truly solve the “alignment problem” might be for humanity to adopt a modified version of the Golden Rule: treat others as you’d have the machines treat you.
LM: If this is the only way, then God help humanity, and put me on the next SpaceX outta here. That vaunted rule has been traced to multiple venerable sources in the ancient world: understood, formulated and taught by morally advanced minds of their era, and passed on through the generations. That’s the good news. On the downside, Novikow’s (1912) inventory of peace treaties reveals that between 1500 B.C.E. and 1860 A.D., more than eight thousand such treaties “meant to remain in force” were signed; on average, they lasted two years. On that view, the “Golden Rule” is made of pyrite, i.e., “Fool’s Gold.” So welcome to the age of Cyber Wars. May the algorithm be with you!
Even so, our minds have meshed on this very point. Believe it or not, I just modified the rule myself, for an upcoming presentation called “Planet of the Apps.” My version is less embodied and more ephemeral than Tristan’s: “Do unto others’ data as you would they do unto yours.” But will it fly in cyberspace? Nyet. Not even for a nanosecond. AI cannot have more moral agency than its creators, because moral agency is not Turing-computable. Human problems will be solved not when our biology or technology evolves, but when our consciousness does.
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Lou Marinoff is professor of philosophy at The City College of New York, and founding president of the American Philosophical Practitioners Association. A prolific author of popular and scholarly books, invited book chapters, and peer-reviewed articles, he publishes across a broad spectrum that includes decision theory, applied philosophy, Asian philosophy, and literary fiction. His books on philosophy for everyday life are translated into twenty-seven languages.