Abstract

We argue against the view that human behavior is the benchmark of robotic performance for every kind of social interaction. To the contrary, it is rather human agents who, in what we call ‘functional social interactions,’ aim at simulating social automatons. An important aspect of this simulation is the agent’s attempt to suppress every indication of the existence of a difference between what she experiences from the “‘I’-perspective” and what is perceived by other agents, the “‘me’-perspective”. Although experiencing this difference is not needed for realizing functional interaction it is, however, needed for what we call “close interhuman relationships”.