When the Environment Becomes the Body: Architectural Body Intelligence and Inverted Embodiment

Abstract

Embodied artificial intelligence typically treats a local chassis moving through the world as the agent's body. This paper proposes Architectural Body Intelligence (ABI), which reverses this spatial relation. In ABI, sensory surfaces distributed across the floor, walls, and ceiling constitute an architectural body, while a small robot or manipulator moving within its cavity intervenes on objects as a mobile organ rather than an independent agent. The ABI body therefore encloses a local world and receives object loads, impacts, rolling motions, deformations, acoustics, and thermal effects as multisensory changes to itself. The central claim is that the boundary of an artificial body cannot be reduced either to the outline of a self-moving chassis or to the geometric distinction between bodily inside and outside. Bodily incorporation is constituted by relations in which sensory changes are predicted as consequences of self-generated action, update a shared world model and developmental history, and produce errors that alter subsequent action. Sensory topology further determines not only how much information is available but also which latent variables action-conditioned observations can identify separately from competing factors. ABI develops these claims in relation to the extended mind, sensorimotor theory, enactivism, and predictive world models, and distinguishes undergoing real material processes throughout a body from experience within an antecedently formalized simulation. ABI is not merely an engineering proposal to add sensors to a room. It is a constructive philosophical model for examining how morphology constitutes both the world available to an agent and the physical structure identifiable within it.