Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again
Andy Clark
Language: English
Pages: 292
ISBN: 0262531569
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Brain, body, and world are united in a complex dance of circular causation and extended computational activity. In Being There, Andy Clark weaves these several threads into a pleasing whole and goes on to address foundational questions concerning the new tools and techniques needed to make sense of the emerging sciences of the embodied mind. Clark brings together ideas and techniques from robotics, neuroscience, infant psychology, and artificial intelligence. He addresses a broad range of adaptive behaviors, from cockroach locomotion to the role of linguistic artifacts in higher-level thought.
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The external media in ways that maximally exploit their peculiar virtues. Third, we must begin to face up to some rather puzzling (dare I say metaphysical?) questions. For starters, the nature and the bounds of the intelligent agent look increasingly fuzzy. Gone is the central executive5 in the brain—the real boss who organizes and integrates the activities of mul- tiple special-purpose subsystems. And gone is the neat boundary between the thinker (the bodiless intellectual engine) and the.
Does not itself establish the complete lack of any specification or program. Indeed, such a characterization looks most compelling only at the extreme limit- ing case in which the notion of a coded specification collapses into the notion of a simple applied force or a single unstructured command. There is thus plenty of very interesting space to explore between the idea of a stored program that specifies a problem-solving strategy at a very low level (e.g., the level of muscle firing.
Yield useful guides for action). In these representation-hungry cases, the system must, it seems, create some kind of inner item, pattern, or process whose role is to stand in for the elusive state of affairs. These, then, are the cases in which it is most natural to expect to find system states that count as full-blooded internal representations. It may seem, indeed, that in such cases there cannot fail to be internal representations underlying behavioral success. This, however, is too.
The door so that you cannot help but run across it (and hence recall the need for olive oil) as you set out for the shops. A slightly more complex case (Dennett 1993) concerns the use of labels as a source of environmental simplification. One idea here is that we use signs and labels to provide perceptually simple clues to help us negotiate complex environments. Signs for cloakrooms, for nightclubs, and for city centers all fulfill this role. They allow a little individual learning to go a.
Was thus created was "much more than a symbolic invention, like the alphabet, or a specific external memory medium, such as improved paper or printing"; it was "the process of externally encoded cognitive change and discovery." To complete our initial inventory of the cognitive virtues of linguisti- cally scaffolded thought, consider the physical properties of certain exter- nal media. As I construct this chapter, for example, I am continually Language: The Ultimate Artifact 207 creating,.