Braitenberg vehicles were introduced in the wonderful book (here is an excerpt which contains enough information for understanding this post):
Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology [update: link no longer available]
In the introduction of the book we find the following:
At times, though, in the back of my mind, while I was counting fibers in the visual ganglia of the fly or synapses in the cerebral cortex of the mouse, I felt knots untie, distinctions dissolve, difficulties disappear, difficulties I had experienced much earlier when I still held my first naive philosophical approach to the problem of the mind.
This is not the first appearance of knots (and related weaving craft) as a metaphor for things related to the brain. A famous paragraph, by Charles Scott Sherrington compares the brain waking from sleep with an enchanted loom
The great topmost sheet of the mass, that where hardly a light had twinkled or moved, becomes now a sparkling field of rhythmic flashing points with trains of traveling sparks hurrying hither and thither. The brain is waking and with it the mind is returning. It is as if the Milky Way entered upon some cosmic dance. Swiftly the head mass becomes an enchanted loom where millions of flashing shuttles weave a dissolving pattern, always a meaningful pattern though never an abiding one; a shifting harmony of subpatterns.
Compare with the following passage (Timaeus 52d and following) from Plato:
…the nurse of generation [i.e. space, chora] … presented a strange variety of appearances; and being full of powers which were neither similar nor equally balanced, was never in any part in a state of equipoise, but swaying unevenly hither and thither, was shaken by them, and by its motion again shook them; and the elements when moved were separated and carried continually, some one way, some another; as, when grain is shaken and winnowed by fans and other instruments used in the threshing of corn, the close and heavy particles are borne away and settle in one direction, and the loose and light particles in another.
The winnowing-fan (liknon) is important in the Greek mythology, it means also cradle and Plato uses this term with both meanings.
For a mathematician at least, winnowing and weaving are both metaphors of computing with braids: the fundamental group of the configuration space of the grains is the braid group and moreover the grains (trajectories) are the weft, the winnowing-fan is the warp of a loom.
All part of the reason of proposing a tangle formalism for chora and computing with space.
Back to Braitenberg vehicles. Vehicles 2,3,4 and arguably 5 are doing computations with space, not logical computations, by using sensors, motors and connections (that is map-making operations). I cite from the end of Vehicle 3 section:
But, you will say, this is ridiculous: knowledge implies a flow of information from the environment into a living being ar at least into something like a living being. There was no such transmission of information here. We were just playing with sensors, motors and connections: the properties that happened to emerge may look like knowledge but really are not. We should be careful with such words. […]
Meanwhile I invite you to consider the enormous wealth of different properties that we may give Vehicle 3c by choosing various sensors and various combinations of crossed and uncrossed, excitatory and inhibitory, connections.