  Embodiment has recently enjoyed renewed consideration as a means to amplify
the faculties of smart machines. Proponents of embodiment seem to imply that
optimizing for movement in physical space promotes something more than the
acquisition of niche capabilities for solving problems in physical space.
However, there is nothing in principle which should so distinguish the problem
of action selection in physical space from the problem of action selection in
more abstract spaces, like that of language. Rather, what makes embodiment
persuasive as a means toward higher intelligence is that it promises to
capture, but does not actually realize, contingent facts about certain bodies
(living intelligence) and the patterns of activity associated with them. These
include an active resistance to annihilation and revisable constraints on the
processes that make the world intelligible. To be theoretically or practically
useful beyond the creation of niche tools, we argue that "embodiment" cannot be
the trivial fact of a body, nor its movement through space, but the perpetual
negotiation of the function, design, and integrity of that
body$\unicode{x2013}$that is, to participate in what it means to
$\textit{constitute}$ a given body. It follows that computer programs which are
strictly incapable of traversing physical space might, under the right
conditions, be more embodied than a walking, talking robot.
