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264Time and MindJournal of Philosophy 95 (7): 354. 1998.Mind, it has recently been argued1, is a thoroughly temporal phenomenon: so temporal, indeed, as to defy description and analysis using the traditional computational tools of cognitive scientific understanding. The proper explanatory tools, so the suggestion goes, are instead the geometric constructs and differential equations of Dynamical Systems Theory. I consider various aspects of the putative temporal challenge to computational understanding, and show that the root problem turns on the pres…Read more
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264Twisted tales: Causal complexity and cognitive scientific explanation (review)Minds and Machines 8 (1): 79-99. 1998.Recent work in biology and cognitive science depicts a variety of target phenomena as the products of a tangled web of causal influences. Such influences may include both internal and external factors as well as complex patterns of reciprocal causal interaction. Such twisted tales are sometimes seen as a threat to explanatory strategies that invoke notions such as inner programs, genes for and sometimes even internal representations. But the threat, I shall argue, is more apparent than real. C…Read more
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262Finding the Mind: Book Symposium on Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension (review)Philosophical Studies 152 (3). 2011.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.
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261Consciousness as Generative EntanglementJournal of Philosophy 116 (12): 645-662. 2019.Recent work in cognitive and computational neuroscience depicts the human brain as a complex, multi-layer prediction engine. This family of models has had great success in accounting for a wide variety of phenomena involving perception, action, and attention. But despite their clear promise as accounts of the neurocomputational origins of perceptual experience, they have not yet been leveraged so as to shed light on the so-called “hard problem” of consciousness—the problem of explaining why and …Read more
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258Expecting the World: Perception, Prediction, and the Origins of Human KnowledgeJournal of Philosophy 110 (9): 469-496. 2013.
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253Busting Out: Predictive Brains, Embodied Minds, and the Puzzle of the Evidentiary VeilNoûs 51 (4): 727-753. 2017.Biological brains are increasingly cast as ‘prediction machines’: evolved organs whose core operating principle is to learn about the world by trying to predict their own patterns of sensory stimulation. This, some argue, should lead us to embrace a brain-bound ‘neurocentric’ vision of the mind. The mind, such views suggest, consists entirely in the skull-bound activity of the predictive brain. In this paper I reject the inference from predictive brains to skull-bound minds. Predictive brains, I…Read more
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234Coupling, constitution and the cognitive kind: A reply to Adams and AizawaIn Richard Menary (ed.), The Extended Mind, Mit Press. pp. 81-99. 2010.Adams and Aizawa, in a series of recent and forthcoming papers,, ) 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 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 esp…Read more
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221Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together AgainMIT Press. 1981.In treating cognition as problem solving, Andy Clark suggests, we may often abstract too far from the very body and world in which our brains evolved to guide...
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212Happily entangled: prediction, emotion, and the embodied mindSynthese 195 (6): 2559-2575. 2018.Recent work in cognitive and computational neuroscience depicts the human cortex as a multi-level prediction engine. This ‘predictive processing’ framework shows great promise as a means of both understanding and integrating the core information processing strategies underlying perception, reasoning, and action. But how, if at all, do emotions and sub-cortical contributions fit into this emerging picture? The fit, we shall argue, is both profound and potentially transformative. In the picture we…Read more
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203Parallel distributed processing is transforming the field of cognitive science. Microcognition provides a clear, readable guide to this emerging paradigm from a cognitive philosopher's point of view. It explains and explores the biological basis of PDP, its psychological importance, and its philosophical relevance.
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190What ‘Extended Me’ knowsSynthese 192 (11): 3757-3775. 2015.Arguments for the ‘extended mind’ seem to suggest the possibility of ‘extended knowers’—agents whose specifically epistemic virtues may depend on systems whose boundaries are not those of the brain or the biological organism. Recent discussions of this possibility invoke insights from virtue epistemology, according to which knowledge is the result of the application of some kind of cognitive skill or ability on the part of the agent. In this paper, I argue that there is a fundamental tension in …Read more
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189Bayesing Qualia: Consciousness as Inference, Not Raw DatumJournal of Consciousness Studies 26 (9-10): 19-33. 2019.The meta-problem of consciousness (Chalmers, 2018) is the problem of explaining the behaviours and verbal reports that we associate with the so-called 'hard problem of consciousness'. These may include reports of puzzlement, of the attractiveness of dualism, of explanatory gaps, and the like. We present and defend a solution to the meta-problem. Our solution takes as its starting point the emerging picture of the brain as a hierarchical inference engine. We show why such a device, operating unde…Read more
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180Beyond Desire? Agency, Choice, and the Predictive MindAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 98 (1): 1-15. 2020.‘Predictive Processing’ is an emerging paradigm in cognitive neuroscience that depicts the human mind as an uncertainty management system that constructs probabilistic predictions of sensory s...
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178Re-inventing ourselves: The plasticity of embodiment, sensing, and mindJournal of Medicine and Philosophy 32 (3). 2006.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 augment…Read more
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167That lonesome whistle: A puzzle for the sensorimotor model of perceptual experienceAnalysis 66 (1): 22-25. 2006.
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160The cognizer's innards: A psychological and philosophical perspective on the development of thoughtMind and Language 8 (4): 487-519. 1993.
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157Trading spaces: Computation, representation, and the limits of uninformed learningBehavioral and Brain Sciences 20 (1): 57-66. 1997.Some regularities enjoy only an attenuated existence in a body of training data. These are regularities whose statistical visibility depends on some systematic recoding of the data. The space of possible recodings is, however, infinitely large type-2 problems. they are standardly solved! This presents a puzzle. How, given the statistical intractability of these type-2 cases, does nature turn the trick? One answer, which we do not pursue, is to suppose that evolution gifts us with exactly the rig…Read more
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152From folk psychology to naive psychologyCognitive Science 11 (2): 139-54. 1987.The notion of folk‐psychology as a primitive speculative theory of the mental is called into question. There is cause to believe that folk‐psychology has more in common with a naive physics than with early speculative physical theorising. The distinction between these is elaborated. The conclusion drawn is that commonsense ascription of psychological content, though not a suitable finishing point for cognitive science, should still provide a more reliable source of data than some contemporary th…Read more
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150Are we predictive engines? Perils, prospects, and the puzzle of the porous perceiverBehavioral and Brain Sciences 36 (3): 233-253. 2013.The target article sketched and explored a mechanism (action-oriented predictive processing) most plausibly associated with core forms of cortical processing. In assessing the attractions and pitfalls of the proposal we should keep that element distinct from larger, though interlocking, issues concerning the nature of adaptive organization in general
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149Parallel distributed processing is transforming the field of cognitive science. Microcognition provides a clear, readable guide to this emerging paradigm from a cognitive philosopher's point of view. It explains and explores the biological basis of PDP, its psychological importance, and its philosophical relevance.
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147The active inference approach to ecological perception: general information dynamics for natural and artificial embodied cognitionFrontiers in Robotics and AI 5 (21): 1-22. 2018.The emerging neurocomputational vision of humans as embodied, ecologically embedded, social agents—who shape and are shaped by their environment—offers a golden opportunity to revisit and revise ideas about the physical and information-theoretic underpinnings of life, mind, and consciousness itself. In particular, the active inference framework makes it possible to bridge connections from computational neuroscience and robotics/AI to ecological psychology and phenomenology, revealing common unde…Read more
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146This is an amended version of material that first appeared in A. Clark, Microcognition: Philosophy, Cognitive Science, and Parallel Distributed Processing (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1989), Ch. 1, 2, and 6. It appears in German translation in Metzinger,T (Ed) DAS LEIB-SEELE-PROBLEM IN DER ZWEITEN HELFTE DES 20 JAHRHUNDERTS (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. 1999)
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146As Ruben notes, the macrostrategy can allow that the distinction may also be drawn at some micro level, but it insists that descent to the micro level is ...
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146Relational learning re-examinedBehavioral and Brain Sciences 20 (1): 83-83. 1997.We argue that existing learning algorithms are often poorly equipped to solve problems involving a certain type of important and widespread regularity that 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.”.
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143Précis of Supersizing the mind: embodiment, action, and cognitive extension (Oxford University Press, NY, 2008) (review)Philosophical Studies 152 (3). 2011.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.
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142A nice surprise? Predictive processing and the active pursuit of noveltyPhenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 17 (3): 521-534. 2018.Recent work in cognitive and computational neuroscience depicts human brains as devices that minimize prediction error signals: signals that encode the difference between actual and expected sensory stimulations. This raises a series of puzzles whose common theme concerns a potential misfit between this bedrock informationtheoretic vision and familiar facts about the attractions of the unexpected. We humans often seem to actively seek out surprising events, deliberately harvesting novel and exci…Read more
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141Keeping the collectivity in mind?Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 7 (3): 353-374. 2008.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 mi…Read more
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140What Reaching Teaches: Consciousness, Control, and the Inner ZombieBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 58 (3): 563-594. 2007.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 n…Read more