Berkeley and Heiserman as an Unexhausted Architecture for Embodied Machine Intelligence

Abstract

Edmund C. Berkeley is usually remembered as a mediator between symbolic logic and early computing, yet that standard description understates the scope of his work. This paper argues for a stronger reading: Berkeley should also be understood as an early theorist of embodied machine intelligence. Across Berkeley's major writings on symbolic logic, machine intelligence, living robots, and Squee, intelligence appears not as disembodied symbol manipulation alone but as the organized coordination of sensing, storage, calculation, control, state, and action in physically realized machines. The paper's first contribution is interpretive: it reconstructs Berkeley as a thinker of machine architecture, temporally extended behavior, and environment-coupled control. Its second contribution is comparative: it reads Berkeley alongside David L. Heiserman to recover a shared descriptive scheme centered on sensing, state or memory, control, action, and adaptation. Its third contribution is critical: it uses that scheme to assess current embodied-AI discourse. The broader claim is that contemporary LLM-centered robotics often demonstrates impressive capability without an equally explicit account of persistence, recoverability, maintenance, and structured modification of conduct through experience.