Introducing Artificial Intelligence (Henry Brighton and Howard Selina) / quote 51 of 68
The retina catches the fly on its own
as Maturana and Varela went on to show, the fly-catching behaviour is solved by the retina itself, independent of the processes going on in the rest of the frog’s brain. This experiment illustrates how certain behaviours, such as foraging for food, are realized through a tight coupling between perception and action, independent of, and without the need for, any high-level cognitive processes.