Like those famous nations divided by a single tongue, my paper (this volume) and Professor P.M. Churchland's deep and engaging reply offer different spins on a common heritage. The common heritage is, of course, a connectionist vision of the inner neural economy- a vision which depicts that economy in terms of supra-sentential state spaces, vector-to-vector transformations, and the kinds of skillful pattern-recognition routine we share with the bulk of terrestrial intelligent life-forms. That which divides us is, as ever, much harder (...) to isolate and name. Clearly, it has something to do with the role of moral talk and exchange, and something to do with the conception of morality itself (and, correlatively, with the conception of moral progress). Most of this Reply will be devoted to clarifying the nature of the disputed territory. First, though (as a prophylactic against misunderstanding) I shall rehearse some points of agreement concerning moral talk and progress. (shrink)
Thought happens. Here I sit, sipping coffee, scribbling on paper, accessing files, reading and re-reading those four wonderful, challenging, yet immaculately constructive reviews. And somewhere, and to my eternal surprise, thought happens. But where, amidst the whirl of organization, should we locate the cognitive process? One possibility is that everything worth counting as (all or part) of any genuinely cognitive process hereabouts is firmly located inside the head, safe behind the ancient fortress of skin and skull. All the rest, according (...) to this surgically neat view, is scene setting: preparing and maintaining the pitch upon which the great thinking organ performs. (shrink)
Markets, companies and various forms of business organizations may all (we have argued) be usefully viewed through the lens of CAS -- the theory of complex adaptive systems. In this chapter, I address one fundamental issue that confronts both the theoretician and the business manager: the nature and opportunities for control and intervention in complex adaptive regimes. The problem is obvious enough. A complex adaptive system, as we have defined it, is soft assembled and largely self-organizing. This means that it (...) is the emergent product of multiple, and often very heterogeneous, interacting factors and forces, and that the crucial interactions are not controlled and orchestrated by an overseeing executive, detailed program, or any other source of strict hierarchical control. There is thus a pressing problem -- are such systems strictly out of control and beyond the reach of useful governance? I shall argue that they are not. Such systems, though initially unfamiliar, can nonetheless be led, influenced and enabled in a variety of ways. (shrink)
1. Throughout the paper, and especially in the section called "LISP vs. DST", I worried that there was not enough focus on EXPLANATION. For the real question, it seems to me, is not whether some dynamical system can implement human cognition, but whether the dynamical description of the system is more explanatorily potent than a computational/representational one. Thus we know, for example, that a purely physical specification can fix a system capable of computing any LISP function. But from this it (...) doesn't follow that the physical description is the one we need to understand the power of the system considered as an information processing device. In the same way, I don't think your demonstration that bifurcating attractor sets can yield the same behavior as a LISP program goes any way towards showing that we should not PREFER the LISP description. To reduce symbolic stories to a subset of DST (as hinted in that section) requires MORE than showing this kind of equivalence: it requires showing that there is explanatory gain, or at the very least, no explanatory loss, at that level. I append an extract from a recent paper of mine that touches on these issues, in case it helps clarify what I am after here. (shrink)
Much work in economics, the social sciences, and elsewhere takes as its starting point a somewhat unrealistic conception of rationality ââ¬â a conception that ignores or downplays both the temporal and the situated aspects of human reason. Biological reason, I shall argue, is better conceived as an iterated process of adaptive response made under extreme time pressure and exquisitely keyed to a variety of external structures and circumstances. These external structures and circumstances act as filters and constraints on the spaces (...) of possible real-time responses. Paramount among such structures and circumstances, in the case of human reason, are the cultural artifacts of language and of social and economic institutions. Models of rational decision making need to situate the reasoning agent as just one element in a complex and time-sensitive feedback system in which such external structures play a major role. It is therefore crucial that we understand the complex and mutually modulatory interplay between individual cognition and the extended environmental loops in which it participates. I shall explore a few potential avenues for developing such an understanding including neural network research and multiple time scale.. (shrink)
We seem, or so it seems to some theorists, to experience a rich stream of highly detailed information concerning an extensive part of our current visual surroundings. But this appearance, it has been suggested, is in some way illusory. Our brains do not command richly detailed internal models of the current scene. Our seeings, it seems, are not all that they seem. This, then, is the Grand Illusion. We think we see much more than we actually do. In this paper (...) I shall (briefly) rehearse the empirical evidence for this rather startling claim, and then critically examine a variety of responses. One especially interesting response is a development of the so-called ‘skill theory’, according to which there is no illusion after all. Instead, so the theory goes, we establish the required visual contact with our world by an ongoing process of active exploration, in which the world acts as a kind of reliable, interrogable, external memory (Noe, Pessoa and Thompson (2000), Noe (2001). The most fully worked-out versions of this response ( Noe and O’Regan (2000), O’Regan and Noe 2001) tend, however, to tie the contents of conscious visual experience rather too tightly to quite low-level features of this ongoing sensorimotor engagement. This (I shall argue) undervalues the crucial links between perceptual experience, reason and intentional action, and opens the door to a problem that I will call ‘sensorimotor chauvinism’: the premature welding of experiential contents to very specific details of our embodiment and sensory apparatus. Drawing on the dual visual systems hypothesis of Milner and Goodale (1995), I sketch an alternative version of the skill theory, in which the relation between conscious visual experience and the low-level details of sensorimotor engagement is indirect and non-constitutive. The hope is thus to embrace the genuine insights of the skill theory response, while depicting conscious visual experience as most tightly geared to knowing and reasoning about our world.. (shrink)
The last ten years have seen an increasing interest, within cognitive science, in issues concerning the physical body, the local environment, and the complex interplay between neural systems and the wider world in which they function. “Physically embodied, environmentally embedded” approaches thus loom large on the contemporary cognitive scientific scene. Yet many unanswered questions remain, and the shape of a genuinely embodied, embedded science of the mind is still unclear. I begin by sketching a few examples of the approach, and (...) then raise a variety of critical questions concerning its nature and scope. A distinction is drawn between two kinds of appeal to embodiment: ‘simple’ cases, in which bodily and environmental properties merely constrain accounts that retain the focus on inner organization and processing, and more radical appeals, in which attention to bodily and environmental features is meant to transform both the subject matter and the theoretical framework of cognitive science. (shrink)
The first question concerns a fundamental assumption of most researchers who theorize about the brain. Do neural systems exploit classical compositional and systematic representations, distributed representations, or no representations at all? The question is not easily answered. Connectionism, for example, has been criticised for both holding and challenging representational views. The second quesútion concerns the crucial methodological issue of how results emerging from the various brain sciences can help to constrain cognitive scientific models. Finally, the third question focuses attention on (...) a major challenge to contemporary cognitive science: the challenge of understanding the mind as a controller of embodied and environmentally embedded action. (shrink)
Beer’s (2003) paper is a tour de force of detailed comments on the more general notion of “situated- dynamical modeling, and provides a concrete sample ness”, Beer suggests that “on this view, situated action of the kinds of understanding dynamicists may realis- is the fundamental concern and cognition is … one tically hope to achieve. The analysis is thus, as Beer resource among many that can be brought to bear as an states, a “tool for building intuition”, and in this (...) it suc- agent encounters its world”. In the worked example of ceeds brilliantly. But it is also an attempt to show that an agent that approaches circles and avoids diamonds, dynamical approaches can get a foothold in the expla- we see direct evidence of this in the claim that a certain nation of “minimally cognitive behaviors”; that is to three-dimensional projection provides a potent analytic say, behaviors that seem, on the surface at least, good tool. For this projection happens to be one that involves contenders for more traditional forms of problem de- one environmental state variable (vertical object posi- composition and analysis. In these brief comments, I tion), one body state variable (horizontal position rela- want to focus on one important question that I think tive to the object) and one neuronal state variable remains unanswered, and that bears rather directly on (output of interneuron 9). By dispensing with talk of this enterprise of “scaling up”. representations and their contents, and restricting the The question concerns the notion of an integrated depiction of the inner realm to a depiction of inner state dynamical explanation itself. The point about such alone (section 9.3), the dynamicist makes it easy to.. (shrink)
Recent work in Cognitive Science highlights the importance of exemplar-based know-how in supporting human expertise. Influenced by this model, many accounts of moral knowledge now stress exemplar-based, non-sentential know-how at the expense of the rule-and-principle based accounts favored by Kant, Mill and others. I shall argue, however, that moral thought and reason is an intrinsically complex achievement that cannot be understood by reference to either of these roles alone. Moral cognition -- like other forms of ‘advanced’ cognition -- depends (...) on the subtle interplay and interaction between multiple factors and forces and especially (or so I argue) between the use of linguistic tools and formulations and more biologically basic forms of thought and reason. (shrink)
Finding the Mind Content Type Journal Article DOI 10.1007/s11098-010-9598-9 Authors Andy Clark, Philosophy, University of Edinburgh, Dugald Stewart Building, 3 Charles Street, Edinburgh, EH8 9AD Scotland, UK Journal Philosophical Studies Online ISSN 1573-0883 Print ISSN 0031-8116.
Précis of Supersizing the mind: embodiment, action, and cognitive extension (Oxford University Press, NY, 2008) Content Type Journal Article DOI 10.1007/s11098-010-9597-x Authors Andy Clark, Philosophy, University of Edinburgh, Dugald Stewart Building, 3 Charles Street, Edinburgh, EH8 9AD Scotland (UK) Journal Philosophical Studies Online ISSN 1573-0883 Print ISSN 0031-8116.
Sensory substitution devices are a type of sensory prosthesis that (typically) convert visual stimuli transduced by a camera into tactile or auditory stimulation. They are designed to be used by people with impaired vision so that they can recover some of the functions normally subserved by vision. In this chapter we will consider what philosophers might learn about the nature of the senses from the neuroscience of sensory substitution. We will show how sensory substitution devices work by exploiting the cross-modal (...) plasticity of sensory cortex: the ability of sensory cortex to pick up some types of information about the external environment irrespective of the nature of the sensory inputs it is processing. We explore the implications of cross-modal plasticity for theories of the senses that attempt to make distinctions between the senses on the basis of neurobiology. (shrink)
Does the material basis of conscious experience extend beyond the boundaries of the brain and central nervous system? In Clark 2009 I reviewed a number of ‘enactivist’ arguments for such a view and found none of them compelling. Ward (2012) rejects my analysis on the grounds that the enactivist deploys an essentially world-involving concept of experience that transforms the argumentative landscape in a way that makes the enactivist conclusion inescapable. I present an alternative (prediction-and-generative-model-based) account that neatly accommodates all the (...) positive evidence that Ward cites on behalf of this enactivist conception, and that (I argue) makes richer and more satisfying contact with the full sweep of human experience. (shrink)
How do questions concerning consciousness and phenomenal experience relate to, or interface with, questions concerning plans, knowledge and intentions? At least in the case of visual experience the relation, we shall argue, is tight. Visual perceptual experience, we shall argue, is fixed by an agent’s direct unmediated knowledge concerning her poise (or apparent poise) over a currently enabled action space. An action space, in this specific sense, is to be understood not as a fine-grained matrix of possibilities for bodily movement, (...) but as a matrix of possibilities for pursuing and accomplishing one’s intentional actions, goals and projects. If this is correct, the links between planning, intention and perceptual experience are tight, while (contrary to some recent accounts invoking the notion of ‘sensorimotor expectations’) the links between embodied activity and perceptual experience, though real, are indirect. What matters is not bodily activity itself, but our practical knowledge (which need not be verbalized or in any way explicit) of our own possibilities for action. Such knowledge, selected, shaped and filtered by the grid of plans, goals, and intentions, plays, we argue, a constitutive role in explaining the content and character of visual perceptual experience. (shrink)
Adams and Aizawa, in a series of recent and forthcoming papers ((2001), (In Press), (This Volume)) seek to refute, or perhaps merely to terminally embarrass, the friends of the extended mind. One such paper begins with the following illustration: "Question: Why did the pencil think that 2+2=4? Clark's Answer: Because it was coupled to the mathematician" Adams and Aizawa (this volume) ms p.1 "That" the authors continue "about sums up what is wrong with Clark's extended mind hypothesis". The example of (...) the pencil, they suggest, is just an especially egregious version of a fallacy said to pervade the literature on the extended mind. This fallacy, which they usefully dub the "coupling-constitution fallacy", is attributed , in varying degrees and manners, to Van Gelder and Port (1995), Clark and Chalmers (1998), Haugeland (1998), Dennett (2000), Clark (2001), Gibbs (2001), and Wilson (2004). The fallacy, of course, is to move from the causal coupling of some object or process to some cognitive agent, to the conclusion that the object or process is part of the cognitive agent , or part of the agent's cognitive processing (see e.g. Adams and Aizawa (This volume) ms p.2). Proponents of the extended mind and related theses, Adams and Aizawa repeatedly assert, are prone to this fallacy in part because they either ignore or fail to properly appreciate the importance of " the mark of the cognitive" viz the importance of an account of "what makes something a cognitive agent" (op cit ms p.3). The positive part of Adams and Aizawa's critique then emerges as a combination of the assertion that this "mark of the cognitive" involves the idea that "cognition is constituted by certain sorts of causal process that involve non-derived contents" (e.g. op cit ms p.3) and that these processes look to be characterized by psychological laws that turn out to apply to many internal goings-on but not currently (as a matter of contingent empirical fact) to any processes that take place in non-biological tools and artifacts. In what follows, I shall try to show why these arguments display nothing so much as mutual failures of communication: crossed wires concealing a couple of real, important, but much more subterranean, disagreements. In particular, I try to show why the negative considerations advanced by Adams and Aizawa fail to successfully undermine the argument for the extended mind, and why their more radical positive story, unless supplemented by implausible additional claims, fails to cast doubt on the claim that minds like ours can (without the need for any radically new techniques, technologies or interventions) extend into the world. (shrink)
In the movie, Memento, the hero, Leonard, suffers from a form of anterograde amnesia that results in an inability to lay down new memories. Nonetheless, he sets out on a quest to find his wife’s killer, aided by the use of notes, annotated polaroids, and (for the most important pieces of information obtained) body tattoos. Using these resources he attempts to build up a stock of new beliefs and to thus piece together the puzzle of his wife’s death. At one (...) point in the movie, a character exasperated by Leonard’s lack of biological recall, shouts. (shrink)
Is consciousness all in the head, or might the minimal physical substrate for some forms of conscious experience include the goings on in the (rest of the) body and the world? Such a view might be dubbed (by analogy with Clark and Chalmers’s ( 1998 ) claims concerning ‘the extended mind’) ‘the extended conscious mind’. In this article, I review a variety of arguments for the extended conscious mind, and find them flawed. Arguments for extended cognition, I conclude, do not (...) generalize to arguments for an extended conscious mind. (shrink)
1. The Situation in Cognition 2. Situated Cognition: A Potted Recent History 3. Extensions in Biology, Computation, and Cognition 4. Articulating the Idea of Cognitive Extension 5. Are Some Resources Intrinsically Non-Cognitive? 6. Is Cognition Extended or Only Embedded? 7. Letting Nature Take Its Course.
Mind, it is increasingly fashionable to assert, is an intrinsically embodied and environmentally embedded phenomenon. But there is a potential tension between two strands of thought prominent in this recent literature. One of those strands depicts the body as special, and the fine details of a creature’s embodiment as a major constraint on the nature of its mind: a kind of new-wave body-centrism. The other depicts the body as just one element in a kind of equal-partners dance between brain, body (...) and world, with the nature of the mind fixed by the overall balance thus achieved: a kind of extended functionalism (now with an even broader canvas for multiple realizability than ever before). The present paper displays the tension, scouts the space of possible responses, and ends by attempting to specify what the body actually needs to be, given its complex role in these recent debates. (shrink)
Introduction : brainbound versus extended -- From embodiment to cognitive extension -- The active body -- The negotiable body -- Material symbols -- World, Incorporated -- Boundary disputes -- Mind re-bound -- The cure for cognitive hiccups (HEMC, HEC, HEMC ...) -- Rediscovering the brain -- The limits of embodiment -- Painting, planning, and perceiving -- Disentangling embodiment -- Conclusions : mind-sized bites.
Selinger and Engstrom, A moratorium on cyborgs: Computation, cognition and commerce, 2008 (this issue) urge upon us a moratorium on ‘cyborg discourse’. But the argument underestimates the richness and complexity of our ongoing communal explorations. It leans on a somewhat outdated version of the machine metaphor (exemplified perhaps by a frozen 1970’s Cyborg). The modern cyborg, informed by an evolving computational model of mind, can play a positive role in the critical discussions that Selinger and Engstrom seek.
The key question in this three way debate is the role of the collectivity and of agency. Collins and Shrager debate whether cognitive psychology has, like the sociology of knowledge, always taken the mind to extend beyond the individual. They agree that irrespective of the history, socialization is key to understanding the mind and that this is compatible with Clark’s position; the novelty in Clark’s “extended mind” position appears to be the role of the material rather than the role of (...) other minds. Collins and Clark debate the relationship between self, agency, and the human collectivity. Collins argues that the Clark’s extended mind fails to stress the asymmetry of the relationship between the self and its material “scaffolding.” Clark accepts that there is asymmetry but that an asymmetrical ensemble is sufficient to explain the self. Collins says that we know too little about the material world to pursue such a model to the exclusion of other approaches including that both the collectivity and language have agency. The collectivity must be kept in mind! (Though what follows is a robust exchange of views it is also a cooperative effort, authors communicating “backstage” with each other to try to make the disagreements as clear and to the point as possible.). (shrink)
Recent advances in cognitive science and cognitive neuroscience open up new vistas for human enhancement. Central to much of this work is the idea of new human-machine interfaces (in general) and new brain-machine interfaces (in particular). But despite the increasing prominence of such ideas, the very idea of such an interface remains surprisingly under-explored. In particular, the notion of human enhancement suggests an image of the embodied and reasoning agent as literally extended or augmented, rather than the more conservative image (...) of a standard (non-enhanced) agent using a tool via some new interface. In this essay, I explore this difference, and attempt to lay out some of the conditions under which the more radical reading (positing brand new integrated agents or systemic wholes) becomes justified. I adduce some empirical evidence suggesting that the radical result is well within our scientific reach. The main reason why this is so has less to do with the advancement of our science (though that certainly helps) than with our native biological plasticity. We humans, I shall try to show, are biologically disposed towards literal (and repeated) episodes of sensory re-calibration, of bodily re-configuration and of mental extension. Such potential for literal and repeated re-configuration is the mark of what I shall call "profoundly embodied agency," contrasting it with a variety of weaker (less philosophically and scientifically interesting) understandings of the nature and importance of embodiment for minds and persons. The article ends by relating the image of profound embodiment to some questions (and fears) concerning converging technologies for improving human performance. (shrink)
What is the role of conscious visual experience in the control and guidance of human behaviour? According to some recent treatments, the role is surprisingly indirect. Conscious visual experience, on these accounts, serves the formation of plans and the selection of action types and targets, while the control of 'online' visually guided action proceeds via a quasi-independent non-conscious route. In response to such claims, critics such as (Wallhagen [2007], pp. 539-61) have suggested that the notions of control and guidance invoked (...) are unacceptably vague, and that that the image of 'zombie systems' guiding action fails to take account of the possibility that there is genuine but unconceptualized, unnoticed, and/or unreportable experience taking place and guiding or controlling the actions. I address both sets of concerns. I try to show that refining and clarifying the key notions of control and guidance leaves the original argument intact, as does the appeal to unconceptualized, unnoticed, or unreportable experiences. The exercise serves, however, to highlight an important complex of considerations concerning the relations between control, agency, and experience. Better understanding these relations is, I suggest, an important source of insights concerning the nature of phenomenal experience. (shrink)
Thought happens. Here I sit, sipping coffee, scribbling on paper, accessing files, reading and re-reading those four wonderful, challenging, yet immaculately constructive reviews. And somewhere, and to my eternal surprise, thought happens. But where, amidst the whirl of organization, should we locate the cognitive process? One possibility is that everything worth counting as (all or part) of any genuinely cognitive process hereabouts is firmly located inside the head, safe behind the ancient fortress of skin and skull. All the rest, according (...) to this surgically neat view, is scene setting: preparing and maintaining the pitch upon which the great thinking organ performs. (shrink)
What is the relation between perceptual experience and the suite of sensorimotor skills that enable us to act in the very world we perceive? The relation, according to ‘sensorimotor models’ (O’Regan and Noe¨ 2001, Noe¨ 2004) is tight indeed. Perceptual experience, on these accounts, is enacted via skilled sensorimotor activity, and gains its content and character courtesy of our knowledge of the relations between (typically) movement and sensory stimulation. I shall argue that this formulation is too extreme, and that it (...) fails to accommodate the substantial firewalls, dis-integrations, and specialpurpose streamings that form the massed strata of human cognition. In particular, such strong sensorimotor models threaten to obscure the computationally potent insensitivity of key information-processing events to the full subtleties of embodied cycles of sensing and moving. (shrink)
Much work in economics, the social sciences, and elsewhere takes as it starting oint a somewhat unrealistic conception of rationality- a conception that ignores or downplays both the temporal and the situated aspects of human reason. Biological reason, I shall argue, is better concieved as an iterated process of adaptive response made under extreme time pressure and exquisitely keyed to a variety of external structures and circumstances.
Kleinberg (1999) describes a novel procedure for efficient search in a dense hyper-linked environment, such as the world wide web. The procedure exploits information implicit in the links between pages so as to identify patterns of connectivity indicative of “authorative sources”. At a more general level, the trick is to use this second-order link-structure information to rapidly and cheaply identify the knowledge-structures most likely to be relevant given a specific input. I shall argue that Kleinberg’s procedure is suggestive of a (...) new, viable, and neuroscientifically plausible solution to at least (one incarnation of) the so-called “Frame Problem” in cognitive science viz the problem of explaining global abductive inference. More accurately, I shall argue that Kleinberg’s procedure suggests a new variety of “fast and frugal heuristic” (Gigerenzer and Todd (1999)) capable of pressing maximum utility from the vast bodies of information and associations commanded by the biological brain. The paper thus takes up the challenge laid down by Fodor ((1983)(Ms)). Fodor depicts the problem of global knowledge-based reason as the point source of many paradigmatic failings of contemporary computational theories of mind. These failings, Fodor goes on to argue, cannot be remedied by any simple appeal to alternative (e.g. connectionist) modes of encoding and processing. I shall show, however, that connectionist models can provide for one neurologically plausible incarnation of Kleinberg’s procedure. The paper ends by noting that current commercial applications increasingly confront the kinds of challenge (such as managing complexity and making efficient use of vast data-bases) initially posed to biological thought and reason. (shrink)
Markets, companies and various forms of business organizations may all (we have argued) be usefully viewed through the lens of CAS -- the theory of complex adaptive systems. In this chapter, I address one fundamental issue that confronts both the theoretician and the business manager: the nature and opportunities for control and intervention in complex adaptive regimes. The problem is obvious enough. A complex adaptive system, as we have defined it, is soft assembled and largely self-organizing. This means that it (...) is the emergent product of multiple, and often very heterogeneous, interacting factors and forces, and that the crucial interactions are not controlled and orchestrated by an overseeing executive, detailed program, or any other source of strict hierarchical control. There is thus a pressing problem -- are such systems strictly out of control and beyond the reach of useful governance? I shall argue that they are not. Such systems, though initially unfamiliar, can nonetheless be led, influenced and enabled in a variety of ways.I begin then, by clarifying the nature of the problem. What is it about complex adaptive systems that makes control and intervention so difficult? I then (section 2) pursue a biological example: the role of genetic factors in influencing mature form. This example yields some lessons that can be applied to business organizations (section 3). Section 4 pursues a speculative extension of these lessons, applying them to the task of understanding the role of tagging and explicit models in certain kinds of advanced system. There is a brief conclusion. (shrink)
Embodied agents use bodily actions and environmental interventions to make the world a better place to think in. Where does language fit into this emerging picture of the embodied, ecologically efficient agent? One useful way to approach this question is to consider language itself as a cognition-enhancing animal-built structure. To take this perspective is to view language as a kind of self-constructed cognitive niche: a persisting though never stationary material scaffolding whose critical role in promoting thought and reason remains surprisingly (...) ill-understood. It is the very materiality of this linguistic scaffolding, I suggest, that is responsible for some key benefits. By materializing thought in words, we create structures that are themselves proper objects of perception, manipulation, and (more) thought. (shrink)
Like those famous nations divided by a single tongue, my paper (this volume) and Professor P.M. Churchland's deep and engaging reply offer different spins on a common heritage. The common heritage is, of course, a connectionist vision of the inner neural economy- a vision which depicts that economy in terms of supra-sentential state spaces, vector-to-vector transformations, and the kinds of skillful pattern-recognition routine we share with the bulk of terrestrial intelligent life-forms. That which divides us is, as ever, much harder (...) to isolate and name. Clearly, it has something to do with the role of moral talk and exchange, and something to do with the conception of morality itself (and, correlatively, with the conception of moral progress). Most of this Reply will be devoted to clarifying the nature of the disputed territory. First, though (as a prophylactic against misunderstanding) I shall rehearse some points of agreement concerning moral talk and progress. (shrink)
In the movie, Memento, the hero, Leonard, suffers from a form of anterograde amnesia that results in an inability to lay down new memories. Nonetheless, he sets out on a quest to find his wife’s killer, aided by the use of notes, annotated polaroids, and (for the most important pieces of information obtained) body tattoos. Using these resources he attempts to build up a stock of new beliefs and to thus piece together the puzzle of his wife’s death. At one (...) point in the movie, a character exasperated by Leonard’s lack of biological recall, shouts: “YOU know? What do YOU know. YOU don’t know anything. In 10 minutes time YOU won’t even know you had this conversation” Leonard, however, believes that he does, day by day, come to know new things. But only courtesy of those photos, tattoos, tricks and ploys. Who is right?These are the kinds of question addressed at length in the paper (co-authored with David Chalmers) ‘The Extended Mind’. Is the mind contained (always? sometimes? never?) in the head? Or does the notion of thought allow mental processes (including believings) to inhere in extended systems of body, brain and aspects of the local environment? The answer, we claimed, was that mental states, including states of believing, could be grounded in physical traces that remained firmly outside the head. As long as a few simple conditions were met (more on which below), Leonard’s notes and tattoos could indeed count as new additions to his store of long-term knowledge and dispositional belief. In the present treatment I revisit this argument, defending our strong conclusion against a variety of subsequent observations and objections. In particular, I look at objections that rely on a contrast between the (putatively) intrinsic content of neural symbols and the merely derived content of external inscriptions, at objections concerning the demarcation of scientific domains via natural kinds, and at objections concerning the ultimate locus of agentive control and the nature of perception versus introspection. I also mention a possible alternative interpretation of the argument as (in effect) a reductio of the very idea of the mind as an object of scientific study. This is an interesting proposal. (shrink)
What is the relation between the material, conventional symbol structures that we encounter in the spoken and written word, and human thought? A common assumption, that structures a wide variety of otherwise competing views, is that the way in which these material, conventional symbol-structures do their work is by being translated into some kind of content-matching inner code. One alternative to this view is the tempting but thoroughly elusive idea that we somehow think in some natural language (such as English). (...) In the present treatment I explore a third option, which I shall call the "complementarity" view of language. According to this third view the actual symbol structures of a given language add cognitive value by complementing (without being replicated by) the more basic modes of operation and representation endemic to the biological brain. The "cognitive bonus" that language brings is, on this model, not to be cashed out either via the ultimately mysterious notion of "thinking in a given natural language" or via some process of exhaustive translation into another inner code. Instead, we should try to think in terms of a kind of coordination dynamics in which the forms and structures of a language qua material symbol system play a key and irreducible role. Understanding language as a complementary cognitive resource is, I argue, an important part of the much larger project (sometimes glossed in terms of the "extended mind") of understanding human cognition as essentially and multiply hybrid: as involving a complex interplay between internal biological resources and external non-biological resources. (shrink)
Advanced biological brains are by nature open-ended opportunistic controllers. Such controllers compute, pretty much on a moment-to-moment basis, what problem-solving resources are readily available and recruit them into temporary problem-solving wholes. Neural plasticity, exaggerated in our own species, makes it possible for such resources to become factored deep into both our cognitive and physical problem-solving routines. One way to think about this is to depict the biological brain as a master of what I shall dub ‘ecological control’. Ecological control is (...) the kind of top-level control that does not micro-manage every detail, but rather encourages substantial devolvement of power and responsibility. This kind of control allows much of our skill at walking to reside in the linkages and elastic properties of muscles and tendons. And it allows (I claim) much of our prowess at thought and reason to depend upon the robust and reliable operation, often (but not always) in dense brain-involving loops, of a variety of non-biological problem-solving resources spread throughout our social and technological surround. Are the complex distributed systems that result in some sense ‘out of control’, beyond the reach of useful (you might even, though problematically, say, ‘personal’) governance? I shall argue that they are not, although understanding them requires us to re-think some key ideas about control and the nature of the self. To (try to) make this case, I shall first examine some strategies for efficient, external opportunity exploiting control in simple systems. I shall then argue that many of the same lessons apply to the case of higher-level human problem-solving. (shrink)
Recent studies such as Thelen and Smith (1994), Kelso (1995), Van Gelder (1995), Beer (1995), and others have presented a forceful case for a dynamical systems approach to understanding cognition and adaptive behavior. These studies call into question some foundational assumptions concerning the nature of cognitive scientific explanation and (in particular) the role of notions such as internal representation and computation. These are exciting and important challenges. But they must be handled with care. It is all to easy in this (...) debate to lose sight of the explanatorily important issues and to talk at cross purposes, courtesy of the (suprisingly) various ways in which different theorists often concieve key terms. (shrink)
The image of the presence of symbols in an inner code pervades recent debates in cognitive science. Classicists worship in the presence. Connectionists revel in the absence. However, the very ideas of code and symbol are ill understood. A major distorting factor in the debates concerns the role of processing in determining the presence or absence of a stuctured inner code. Drawing on work by David Kirsh and David Chambers , the present paper attempts to re-define such notions to begin (...) to reflect the inextrictability of code and presence. (shrink)
In _Action in Perception _Alva No develops and presents a sensorimotor account of vision and of visual consciousness. According to such an account seeing (and indeed perceiving more generally) is analysed as a kind of skilful bodily activity. Such a view is consistent with the emerging emphasis, in both philosophy and cognitive science, on the critical role of embodiment in the construction of intelligent agency. I shall argue, however, that the full sensorimotor model faces three important challenges. The first is (...) to negotiate a path between two prima facie unsatisfactory readings of the central claim that conscious perceptual experience is constituted by knowledge of patterns of sensorimotor dependence. The second is to convince us that the sensorimotor contribution, in such cases, is actually constitutive of perceptual experience rather than merely causally implicated in the origination of such experience.2 And the third is to respond to the important challenge raised by what I will dub 'sensorimotor summarizing' models of the relation between conscious experience and richly detailed sensorimotor routines. According to such models3 conscious perceptual experience only rather indirectly reflects the rich detail of our actual sensorimotor engagements, which are instead lightly sampled as a coarse guide, optimized for planning and reasoning, and geared and filtered according to current needs and purposes. (shrink)
Fodor’s theory makes thinking prior to doing. It allows for an inactive agent or pure reflector, and for agents whose actions in various ways seem to float free of their own conceptual repertoires. We show that naturally evolved creatures are not like that. In the real world, thinking is always and everywhere about doing. The point of having a brain is to guide the actions of embodied beings in a complex material world. Some of those actions are, to be sure, (...) more recondite than others. But in every case the contents of thoughts still look to depend, in some non-unique but vitally important way, on the kinds of doings they support. (shrink)
It is widely appreciated that the difficulty of a particluar computation varies according to how the input data are presented. What is less understood is the effect of this computation/representation tradeoff within familiar learning paradigms. We argue that existing learning algoritms are often poorly equipped to solve problems involving a certain type of important and widespread regularity, which we call 'type-2' regularity. The solution in these cases is to trade achieved representation against computational search. We investigate several ways in which (...) such a trade-off may be pursued including simple incremental learning, modular connectionism, and the developmental hypothesis of 'representational redescription'. In addition, the most distinctive features of human cognition- language and culture- may themselves be viewed as adaptions enabling this representation/computation trade-off to be pursued on an even grander scale. (shrink)
O'Regan and Noe present a wonderfully detailed and comprehensive defense of a position whose broad outline we absolutely and unreservedly endorse. They are right, it seems to us, to stress the intimacy of conscious content and embodied action, and to counter the idea of a Grand Illusion with the image of an agent genuinely in touch, via active exploration, with the rich and varied visual scene. This is an enormously impressive achievement, and we hope that the comments that follow will (...) be. (shrink)
While applauding the bulk of the account on offer, we question one apparent implication viz, that every difference in sensorimotor contingencies corresponds to a difference in conscious visual experience.
Some recent cognitive-scientific research suggests that a considerable amount of intelligent action is generated not by the systematic activity of internal representations, but by complex interactions involving neural, bodily, and environmental fators. Following an analysis of this threat to representational explanation, we persue an analogy between roles of genes in the production of the biological form and the role of neural states in the production of behaviour, in order to develop a notion of of genic representation.
What do linguistic symbols do for minds like ours, and how (if at all) can basic embodied, dynamical and situated approaches do justice to high-level human thought and reason? These two questions are best addressed together, since our answers to the first may inform the second. The key move in ‘scaling-up’ simple embodied cognitive science is, I argue, to take very seriously the potent role of human-built structures in transforming the spaces of human learning and reason. In particular, in this (...) paper I look at a range of cases involving what I dub ‘surrogate situations’. Here, we actively create restricted artificial environments that allow us to deploy basic perception-action- reason routines in the absence of their proper objects. Examples include the use of real-world models, diagrams and other concrete external symbols to support dense looping interactions with a variety of stable external structures that stand in for the absent states of affairs. (shrink)
Adams and Aizawa, in a series of recent and forthcoming papers ((2001), (In Press), (This Volume)) seek to refute, or perhaps merely to terminally embarrass, the friends of the extended mind. One such paper begins with the following illustration: "Question: Why did the pencil think that 2+2=4? Clark's Answer: Because it was coupled to the mathematician" Adams and Aizawa (this volume) ms p.1 "That" the authors continue "about sums up what is wrong with Clark's extended mind hypothesis". The example of (...) the pencil, they suggest, is just an especially egregious version of a fallacy said to pervade the literature on the extended mind. This fallacy, which they usefully dub the "coupling-constitution fallacy", is attributed , in varying degrees and manners, to Van Gelder and Port (1995), Clark and Chalmers (1998), Haugeland (1998), Dennett (2000), Clark (2001), Gibbs (2001), and Wilson (2004). The fallacy, of course, is to move from the causal coupling of some object or process to some cognitive agent, to the conclusion that the object or process is part of the cognitive agent , or part of the agent's cognitive processing (see e.g. Adams and Aizawa (This volume) ms p.2). Proponents of the extended mind and related theses, Adams and Aizawa repeatedly assert, are prone to this fallacy in part because they either ignore or fail to properly appreciate the importance of " the mark of the cognitive" viz the importance of an account of "what makes something a cognitive agent" (op cit ms p.3). The positive part of Adams and Aizawa's critique then emerges as a combination of the assertion that this "mark of the cognitive" involves the idea that "cognition is constituted by certain sorts of causal process that involve non-derived contents" (e.g. op cit ms p.3) and that these processes look to be characterized by psychological laws that turn out to apply to many internal goings-on but not currently (as a matter of contingent empirical fact) to any processes that take place in non-biological tools and artifacts. In what follows, I shall try to show why these arguments display nothing so much as mutual failures of communication: crossed wires concealing a couple of real, important, but much more subterranean, disagreements. In particular, I try to show why the negative considerations advanced by Adams and Aizawa fail to successfully undermine the argument for the extended mind, and why their more radical positive story, unless supplemented by implausible additional claims, fails to cast doubt on the claim that minds like ours can (without the need for any radically new techniques, technologies or interventions) extend into the world. (shrink)
“The Matrix is a computer-generated dreamworld built to keep us under control” Morpheus, early in The Matrix. “ In dreaming, you are not only out of control, you don’t even know it…I was completely duped again and again the minute my pons, my amygdala, my perihippocampal cortex, my anterior cingulate, my visual association and parietal opercular cortices were revved up and my dorsolateral prefrontal cortex was muffled” ” J. Allan Hobson, The Dream Drugstore, p.64 The Matrix is an exercise in (...) ambivalence, and at the very heart of that ambivalence lies the Dream. In our dreams, we are not in control. Real dreaming, unlike many popular philosophers’ fictions, is an altered state, closely related to the states induced by chemical manipulations such as the use of (certain) medical or recreational drugs. The dreaming brain is not like the wakeful brain. Normal sensory input is blocked, attentional capacities are impaired or lost, memory is distorted, reasoning and logic are weakened, narratives run wild, self-reflection is dampened or destroyed, emotion and instinct are hyperstimulated, and forms of ‘top-down’ willed control and decision-making diluted and easily overwhelmed. (shrink)
How does language (spoken or written) impact thought? One useful way to approach this important but elusive question may be to consider language itself as a cognition-enhancing animal-built structure. To take this perspective is to view language as a kind of self-constructed cognitive niche. These self-constructed cognitive niches play, I suggest, three distinct but deeply interlocking roles in human thought and reason. Working together, these three interlocking routines radically transform the human mind, and mark a genuine discontinuity in the space (...) of anitnal minds. (shrink)
How does language (spoken or written) impact thought? One useful way to approach this important but elusive question may be to consider language itself as a cognition-enhancing animal-built structure. To take this perspective is to view language as a kind of self-constructed cognitive niche. These self-constructed cognitive niches play, I suggest, three distinct but deeply interlocking roles in human thought and reason. Working together, these three interlocking routines radically transform the human mind, and mark a genuine discontinuity in the space (...) of anitnal minds. (shrink)
In Natural-Born Cyborgs, Clark argues that what makes humans so different from other species is our capacity to fully incorporate tools and supporting cultural ...
Peter Carruthers correctly argues for a cognitive conception of the role of language. But such a story need not include the excess baggage of compositional inner codes, mental modules, mentalese, or translation into logical form (LF).
Kleinberg (1999) describes a novel procedure for efficient search in a dense hyper-linked environment, such as the world wide web. The procedure exploits information implicit in the links between pages so as to identify patterns of connectivity indicative of “authorative sources”. At a more general level, the trick is to use this second-order link-structure information to rapidly and cheaply identify the knowledge- structures most likely to be relevant given a specific input. I shall argue that Kleinberg’s procedure is suggestive of (...) a new, viable, and neuroscientifically plausible solution to at least (one incarnation of) the so-called “Frame Problem” in cognitive science viz the problem of explaining global abductive inference. More accurately, I shall argue that. (shrink)
Dennett depicts human minds as both deeply different from, yet profoundly continuous with, the minds of other animals and simple agents. His treatments of mind, consciousness, free will and human agency all reflect this distinctive dual perspective. There is, on the one hand, the (in)famous Intentional Stance, relative to which humans, dogs, insects and even the lowly thermostat (e.g. Dennett (1998) p.327) are all pronounced capable of believing and desiring in essentially the same theoretical sense. And there is, on the (...) other hand, a noteworthy (and increasing) insistence that human minds are special in that they exhibit a distinctive kind of “informational organization”: one that confers consciousness (Dennett (1998) p.347), and creates the space for agency, purpose, self-control (Dennett (1984) p.100), and “significant suffering” (Dennett (1998) p.351). What follows is a critical examination of this dual perspective, and of Dennett’s account of the key factor that makes us special - human language and our immersion in the sea of culture (Dennett (1998) p.146, (1996) p.130, (in press) p.7). In particular, I shall ask whether Dennett’s dual perspective masks a deeper tension in his accounts of consciousness and personhood, and whether the appeal to the transformative power of human language and culture can bear the heavy explanatory burden Dennett places upon it. These turn out to be significant challenges but ones which also help clarify the scope and power of this complex, multi-layered account. I end by commenting briefly on the wider significance of Dennett’s project as a major contribution to current debates concerning the continuity (or otherwise) of evolved cognitive strategies and the essentially hybrid (biological and non-biological) nature of human minds and persons. (shrink)
We seem, or so it seems to some theorists, to experience a rich stream of highly detailed information concerning an extensive part of our current visual surroundings. But this appearance, it has been suggested, is in some way illusory. Our brains do not command richly detailed internal models of the current scene. Our seeings, it seems, are not all that they seem. This, then, is the Grand Illusion. We think we see much more than we actually do. In this paper (...) I shall (briefly) rehearse the empirical evidence for this rather startling claim, and then critically examine a variety of responses. One especially interesting response is a development of the so-called ‘skill theory’, according to which there is no illusion after all. Instead, so the theory goes, we establish the required visual contact with our world by an ongoing process of active exploration, in which the world acts as a kind of reliable, interrogable, external memory (Noe, Pessoa and. (shrink)
In this paper, we discuss the thesis of selective representing — the idea that the contents of the mental representations had by organisms are highly constrained by the biological niches within which the organisms evolved. While such a thesis has been defended by several authors elsewhere, our primary concern here is to take up the issue of the compatibility of selective representing and realism. In this paper we hope to show three things. First, that the notion of selective representing (...) is fully consistent with the realist idea of a mind-independent world. Second, that not only are these two consistent, but that the latter (the realist conception of a mind-independent world) provides the most powerful perspective from which to motivate and understand the differing perceptual and cog- nitive profiles themselves. And third, that the (genuine and important) sense in which organism and environment may together constitute an integrated system of scientific interest poses no additional threat to the realist conception. (shrink)
In this article, we highlight three questions: (1) Does human cognition rely on structured internal representations? (2) How should theories, models and data relate? (3) In what ways might embodiment, action and dynamics matter for understanding the mind and the brain?
In this paper, we discuss the thesis of selective representing –- the idea that the contents of the mental representations had by organisms are highly constrained by the biological niches within which the organisms evolved. While such a thesis has been defended by several authors elsewhere, our primary concern here is to take up the issue of the compatibility of selective representing and realism. In this paper we hope to show three things. First, that the notion of selective representing is (...) fully consistent with the realist idea of a mind-independent world. Second, that not only are these two consistent, but that the latter (the realist conception of a mind-independent world) provides the most powerful perspective from which to motivate and understand the differing perceptual and cognitive profiles themselves. And third, that the (genuine and important) sense in which organism and environment may together constitute an integrated system of scientific interest poses no additional threat to the realist conception. (shrink)
Mindware: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Cognitive Science invites readers to join in up-to-the-minute conceptual discussions of the fundamental issues, problems, and opportunities in cognitive science. Written by one of the most renowned scholars in the field, this vivid and engaging introductory text relates the story of the search for a cognitive scientific understanding of mind. This search is presented as a no-holds-barred journey from early work in artificial intelligence, through connectionist (artificial neural network) counter-visions, and on to neuroscience, (...) artificial life, dynamics, and robotics. The journey ends with some wide-ranging and provocative speculation about the complex coadaptive dance between mind, culture, and technology. Each chapter opens with a brief sketch of a major research tradition or perspective, followed by short yet substantial critical discussions dealing with key topics and problems. Ranging across both standard philosophical territory and the landscape of cutting-edge cognitive science, Clark highlights challenging issues in an effort to engage readers in active debate. Topics covered include mental causation; machine intelligence; the nature and status of folk psychology; the hardware/software distinction; emergence; relations between life and mind; the nature of perception, cognition, and action; and the continuity (or otherwise) of high-level human intelligence with other forms of adaptive response. Numerous illustrations, text boxes, and extensive suggestions for further reading enhance the text's utility. Helpful appendices provide background information on dualism, behaviorism, identity theory, consciousness, and more. An exceptional text for introductory and more advanced courses in cognitive science and the philosophy of mind, Mindware is also essential reading for anyone interested in these fascinating and ever-changing fields. (shrink)
A suitable project for the new Millenium is to radically reconfigure our image of human rationality. Such a project is already underway, within the Cognitive Sciences, under the umbrellas of work in Situated Cognition, Distributed and De-centralized Cogition, Real-world Robotics and Artificial Life1. Such approaches, however, are often criticized for giving certain aspects of rationality too wide a berth. They focus their attention on on such superficially poor cousins as.
How should we characterize the functional role of conscious visual experience? In particular, how do the conscious contents of visual experience guide, bear upon, or otherwise inform our ongoing motor activities? According to an intuitive and (I shall argue) philosophically influential conception, the links are often quite direct. The contents of conscious visual experience, according to this conception, are typically active in the control and guidance of our fine-tuned, real-time engagements with the surrounding three-dimensional world. But this idea (which I (...) shall call the Assumption of Experience-Based Control) is hostage to empirical fortune. It is a hostage, moreover, whose safety is in serious doubt. Thus Milner and Goodale (1995) argue for a deep and abiding dissociation between the contents of conscious seeing, on the one hand, and the resources used for the on-line guidance of visuo-motor action, on the other. This ‘dual visual systems’ hypothesis, which finds many echoes in various other bodies of cognitive scientific research, poses a prima facie challenge to the Assumption of Experience-Based Control. More importantly, it provides (I shall argue) fuel for an alternative and philosophically suggestive account of the functional role of conscious visual experience. (shrink)
O'Regan and Noe present a wonderfully detailed and comprehensive defense of a position whose broad outline we absolutely and unreservedly endorse. They are right, it seems to us, to stress the intimacy of conscious content and embodied action, and to counter the idea of a Grand Illusion with the image of an agent genuinely in touch, via active exploration, with the rich and varied visual scene. This is an enormously impressive achievement, and we hope that the comments that follow will (...) be taken in a spirit of constructive questioning. Overall, we have two main reservations. (shrink)
Neural organization raises, in an especially clear way, a major problem confronting contemporary cognitive science. The problem (the “big issue” of my title) is: What is the relation between the strategies used to solve basic problems of perception and action and those used to solve more abstract or “cognitive” problems? Is there a smooth, incremental route from what Arbib et al. call “instinctual schemas” to higher-level kinds of cognitive prowess? I argue that, despite some suggestive comments, Arbib et al. do (...) not resolve this issue. (shrink)
Recent work in cognitive science highlights the importance of exemplar-based know-how in supporting human expertise. Influenced by this model, certain accounts of moral knowledge now stress exemplar-based, non-sentential know-how at the expense of rule-and-principle based accounts. I shall argue, however, that moral thought and reason cannot be understood by reference to either of these roles alone. Moral cognition -- like other forms of ‘advanced’ cognition -- depends crucially on the subtle interplay and interaction of multiple factors and forces and especially (...) (or so I argue) between the use of linguistic tools and formulations and more biologically basic forms of thought and reason. (shrink)
--œWhere Brain, Body, and World Collide--� reprinted by permission of Daedalus, Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, from the issue entitled, --œThe Brain,--� Spring 1998, Vol. 127, No. 2.
The last ten years have seen an increasing interest, within cognitive science, in issues concerning the physical body, the local environment, and the complex interplay between neural systems and the wider world in which they function. --œPhysically embodied, environmentally embedded--� approaches thus loom large on the contemporary cognitive scientific scene. Yet many unanswered questions remain, and the shape of a genuinely embodied, embedded science of the mind is still unclear. I begin by sketching a few examples of the approach, and (...) then raise a variety of critical questions concerning its nature and scope. A distinction is drawn between two kinds of appeal to embodiment: 'simple' cases, in which bodily and environmental properties merely constrain accounts that retain the focus on inner organization and processing, and more radical appeals, in which attention to bodily and environmental features is meant to transform both the subject matter and the theoretical framework of cognitive science. (shrink)
Recent work in "embodied, embedded" cognitive science links mental contents to large-scale distributed effects: dynamic patterns implicating elements of (what are traditionally seen as) sensing, reasoning and acting. Central to this approach is an idea of biological cognition as profoundly "action-oriented" - geared not to the creation of rich, passive inner models of the world, but to the cheap and efficient production of real-world action in real-world context. A case in point is Hurley's (1998) account of the profound role of (...) motor output in fixing the contents of conscious visual awareness - an account that also emphasizes distributed vehicles and long-range dynamical loops. Such stories can seem dramatically opposed to accounts, such as Milner and Goodale (1995), that stress relatively local mechanisms and that posit firm divisions between processes of visual awareness and of visuomotor action. But such accounts, I argue, can be deeply complimentary and together illustrate an important lesson. The lesson is that cognition may be embodied and action-oriented in two distinct - but complimentary - ways. There is a way of being embodied and action-oriented that implies being closely geared to the fine-grained control of low level effectors (hands, arms, legs and so on). And there is a way of being embodied and action-oriented that implies being closely geared to gross motor intentions, current goals, and schematic motor plans. Human cognition, I suggest, is embodied and action-oriented in both these ways. But the neural systems involved, and the size and scope of the key dynamic loops, may be quite different in each case. (shrink)
There is a definite challenge in the air regarding the pivotal notion of internal representation. This challenge is explicit in, e.g., van Gelder, 1995; Beer, 1995; Thelen & Smith, 1994; Wheeler, 1994; and elsewhere. We think it is a challenge that can be met and that (importantly) can be met by arguing from within a general framework that accepts many of the basic premises of the work (in new robotics and in dynamical systems theory) that motivates such scepticism in the (...) first place. Our strategy will be as follows. We begin (Section 1) by offering an account (an example and something close to a definition) of what we shall term Minimal Robust Representationalism (MRR). Sections 2 & 3 address some likely worries and questions about this notion. We end (Section 4) by making explicit the conditions under which, on our account, a science (e.g., robot- ics) may claim to be addressing cognitive phenomena. (shrink)
This is the second of two volumes of essays in commemoration of Alan Turing; it celebrates his intellectual legacy within the philosophy of mind and cognitive science. A distinguished international cast of contributors focus on the relationship beteen a scientific, computational image of the mind and a common-sense picture of the mind as an inner arena populated by concepts, beliefs, intentions, and qualia. Topics covered include the causal potency of folk-psychological states, the connectionist reconception of learning and concept formation, the (...) understanding of the notion of computation itself, and the relation between philosophical and psychological theories of concepts. -/- Also available in paperback is the companion volume, Machines and Thought, edited by Peter Millican and Andy Clark, which focuses on Turing's main innovations in artificial intelligence. (shrink)
This is the first of two volumes of essays in commemoration of Alan Turing, whose pioneering work in the theory of artificial intelligence and computer science continues to be widely discussed today. A group of prominent academics from a wide range of disciplines focus on three questions famously raised by Turing: What, if any, are the limits on machine 'thinking'? Could a machine be genuinely intelligent? Might we ourselves be biological machines, whose thought consists essentially in nothing more than the (...) interaction of neurons according to strictly determined rules? The discussion of these fascinating issues is accessible to non-specialists and stimulating for all readers. -/- Also available in paperback is the companion volume: Connectionism, Concepts, and Folk Psychology, edited by Andy Clark and Peter Millican. While Volume 1 concentrates on Turing's main innovations in artificial intelligence, Volume 2 looks more broadly at his intellectual legacy in philosophy and cognitive science. (shrink)
