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75The 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 …Read more
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The roots of 'norm-hungriness'In Hugh Clapin (ed.), Philosophy of Mental Representation, Oxford University Press. 2002.
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102The frozen cyborg: A reply to Selinger and engström (review)Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 7 (3): 343-346. 2008.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 It leans on a somewhat outdated version of the machine metaphor (exemplified perhaps by a frozen 1970’s Cyborg).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 Selinge…Read more
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408Supersizing the mind: embodiment, action, and cognitive extension (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2008.In Supersizing the Mind, Andy Clark argues that the human mind is not bound inside the head but extends into body and environment.
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72Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied MindOxford University Press USA. 2015.How is it that thoroughly physical material beings such as ourselves can think, dream, feel, create and understand ideas, theories and concepts? How does mere matter give rise to all these non-material mental states, including consciousness itself? An answer to this central question of our existence is emerging at the busy intersection of neuroscience, psychology, artificial intelligence, and robotics.In this groundbreaking work, philosopher and cognitive scientist Andy Clark explores exciting n…Read more
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37Skills, spills and the nature of mindful actionPhenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 1 (4): 385-387. 2002.
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32Sensorimotor skills and perceptionProceedings of the Aristotelian Society 106 (1): 67-88. 2006.[Andy Clark] 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' 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 movement and sensory stimulation. I shall argue that this formulation is too extreme, and that it fails t…Read more
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59Representational trajectories in connectionist learningMinds and Machines 4 (3): 317-32. 1994.The paper considers the problems involved in getting neural networks to learn about highly structured task domains. A central problem concerns the tendency of networks to learn only a set of shallow (non-generalizable) representations for the task, i.e., to miss the deep organizing features of the domain. Various solutions are examined, including task specific network configuration and incremental learning. The latter strategy is the more attractive, since it holds out the promise of a task-in…Read more
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793Reasons, robots and the extended mindMind and Language 16 (2): 121-145. 2001.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
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38Reading the generalizer's mindBehavioral and Brain Sciences 21 (2): 308-310. 1998.In his new commentary, Damper re-emphasises his claim that parity is not a generalisation problem. But when proper account is taken of the arguments he puts forward, we find that the proposed conclusion is not the only one that can be drawn.
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331Radical Predictive ProcessingSouthern Journal of Philosophy 53 (S1): 3-27. 2015.Recent work in computational and cognitive neuroscience depicts the brain as an ever‐active prediction machine: an inner engine continuously striving to anticipate the incoming sensory barrage. I briefly introduce this class of models before contrasting two ways of understanding the implied vision of mind. One way (Conservative Predictive Processing) depicts the predictive mind as an insulated inner arena populated by representations so rich and reconstructive as to enable the organism to ‘throw…Read more
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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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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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214Philosophical issues in brain theory and connectionismIn M. Arbib (ed.), The Handbook of Brain Theory and Neural Networks, Mit Press. 2002.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?
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88Fodor’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 ev…Read more
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452Putting concepts to work: Some thoughts for the twenty first centuryMind and Language 19 (1): 57-69. 2004.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 ev…Read more
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1168Material symbolsPhilosophical Psychology 19 (3): 291-307. 2006.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…Read more
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325Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human IntelligenceOxford University Press. 2003.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 ...
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149In 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 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…Read more
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750Memento’s revenge: The extended mind, extendedIn Richard Menary (ed.), The Extended Mind, Mit Press. pp. 43--66. 2010.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 exaspera…Read more
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17Making Moral Space: A Reply to ChurchlandCanadian Journal of Philosophy 30 (sup1): 307-312. 2000.Like those famous nations divided by a single tongue, my paper 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…Read more
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71Making Moral Space: A Reply to ChurchlandCanadian Journal of Philosophy 30 (Supplement): 307-312. 2000.Like those famous nations divided by a single tongue, my paper 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…Read more
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129Mindware: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Cognitive ScienceOxford University Press. 2001.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 co…Read more
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105Mindware: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Cognitive ScienceOxford University Press USA. 2001.Ranging across both standard philosophical territory and the landscape of cutting-edge cognitive science, Mindware: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Cognitive Science, Second Edition, is a vivid and engaging introduction to key issues, research, and opportunities in the field.Starting with the vision of mindware as software and debates between realists, instrumentalists, and eliminativists, Andy Clark takes students on a no-holds-barred journey through connectionism, dynamical systems, and r…Read more
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156Minds, brains and toolsIn Hugh Clapin (ed.), Philosophy of Mental Representation, Oxford: Clarendon Press. 2002.The selected texts for this discussion were two recent pieces by Dennett (
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380Language, embodiment, and the cognitive nicheTrends in Cognitive Sciences 10 (8): 370-374. 2006.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 rol…Read more
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56Kleinberg 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 Kleinber…Read more
Andy Clark
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