The what, why and how of the BI in BICA

The core ideas of BICA have already generated great interest, with a wide variety of work being submitted and discussed. However, it is certainly not too soon to look around, back, and forward to see if there are any considerations of scope, direction, or focus that might require modification or clarification in the future in order to assist the developmental process of the new discipline. This brief position paper offers some comments and suggestions on the purpose and nature of biological inspiration in the design of cognitive architectures, on ways in which biological characteristics can appear in such architectures other than by design, and on the significance of characterizing performance as human-level or human-like. Some of the comments are illustrated with reference to an ongoing project dealing with a human-like embodiment.