Where brain, body, and world collide☆
Section snippets
Software
Humans, dogs, ferrets; these are, we would like to say, mindful things. Rocks, rivers and volcanoes are not. And no doubt there are plenty of cases in between (insects, bacteria, etc.). In the natural order, clear cases of mindfulness always involve creatures with brains. Hence, in part, the fascination of the brain: understanding the brain looks crucial to the project of understanding the mind, but how should such an understanding proceed?
An early sentiment — circa 1970 and no longer much in
Wetware, and some robots
Recent work in cognitive neuroscience underlines the distance separating biological and ‘engineered’ problem solutions, and displays an increasing awareness of the important interpenetration — in biological systems — of perception, thought and action. Some brief examples should help fix the flavor.
As a gentle entry point, consider some recent work on the neural control of monkey finger motions. Traditional wisdom depicted the monkey’s fingers as individually controlled by neighboring groups of
Wideware
Let us coin a term, ‘wideware’, to refer to states, structures or processes that satisfy two conditions. First, the item in question must be in some intuitive sense environmental: it must not, at any rate, be realized within the biological brain or the central nervous system. Bodily aspects and motions, as well as truly external items such as notebooks and calculators, thus fit the bill. Second, the item (state, structure, process) must play a functional role as part of an extended cognitive
Implications
Software, wetware and wideware, if our story is to be believed, form a deeply interanimated triad. The computational activities of the brain will be heavily sculpted by its biological ‘implementation’. And there will be dense complementarity and cooperation between neural, bodily and environmental forces and factors. What the brain does will thus be precisely fitted to the range of complementary operations and opportunities provided by bodily structure, motion and the local environment. In the
Acknowledgements
I am very grateful to Stephen Graubard and the participants at the Daedalus Authors Meeting (Paris, October 1997) for a wealth of useful advice, good criticism and wise counsel. Special thanks to Jean Pierre Changeux, Marcel Kinsbourne, Vernon Mountcastle, Guilio Tonini, Steven Quartz, and Semir Zeki. As usual, any remaining errors are all my own.
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‘Where Brain, Body, and World Collide’ reprinted by permission of Daedalus, Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, from the issue entitled, ‘The Brain,’ Spring 1998, Vol. 127, No. 2.