“Body Awareness”?

Body Awareness: Scientists: Give Robots a Basic Sense of ‘Proprioception’

Giving a robot a body with the sensorimotor capacities needed to ground its words in its sensorimotor capacity to pick out and interact with the referents of its words in the world is grounding.

But that is completely (completely) trivial at toy-scale. 

No “grounds” whatsoever to talk about “body awareness” there. 

That would only kick in – (if dopamine etc. is not needed too) — at Turing-scale for robotic capacities. 

And if those include human language-learning capacity, that would pretty much have to be at LLM-scale too (not Siri-scale).

Now here’s the rub (and if you miss it, or dismiss it, we are talking past one another):

There is no way to ground an LLM top-down, dropping connections from individual words to their sensorimotor referents (like a man-o-war jelly-fish).

The only way to “align” sensorimotor grounding with the referents of words is bottom-up, from the ground)

That does not mean every word has to be robotically grounded directly.

Once at least one Minimal Grounding Set (Minset) has been grounded directly (i.e., robotically) then (assuming the robot has the capacity for propositions too — not just for directly naming everything) all the rest of LLM-space can be grounded indirectly by verbal definition or description.

Everything is reachable indirectly by words, once you have a grounded Minset.

But that all has to be done bottom-up too.