Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension

by Andy Clark

Overview

When historian Charles Weiner found pages of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman's notes, he saw it as a "record" of Feynman's work. Feynman himself, however, insisted that the notes were not a record but the work itself. In Supersizing the Mind, Andy Clark argues that our thinking doesn't happen only in our heads but that "certain forms of human cognizing include inextricable tangles of feedback, feed-forward and feed-around loops: loops that promiscuously criss-cross the boundaries of brain, body and world." The pen and paper of Feynman's thought are just such feedback loops, physical machinery that shape the flow of thought and enlarge the boundaries of mind. Drawing upon recent work in psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, robotics, human-computer systems, and beyond, Supersizing the Mind offers both a tour of the emerging cognitive landscape and a sustained argument in favor of a conception of mind that is extended rather than "brain-bound." The importance of this new perspective is profound. If our minds themselves can include aspects of our social and physical environments, then the kinds of social and physical environments we create can reconfigure our minds and our capacity for thought and reason.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780195333213
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	10/29/2008
Series:	Philosophy of Mind
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Andy Clark is Professor of Philosophy in the School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences, at Edinburgh University in Scotland. He is the author of several books including Being There: Putting Brain, Body and World Together Again (1997) and Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies and The Future Of Human Intelligence (OUP, 2003).

Table of Contents

Forward: By David ChalmersAcknowledgementsIntroduction: BRAINBOUND versus EXTENDEDI: From Embodiment to Cognitive Extension1. The Active Body1.1. A Walk on the Wild Side1.2. Inhabited Interaction1.3. Active Sensing1.4. Distributed Functional Decomposition1.5. Sensing for Coupling1.6. Information Self-Structuring1.7. Perception, Qualia, and Sensorimotor Expectations1.8. Time and Mind1.9. Dynamics and (Soft) Computation1.10Out from the Bedrock2. The Negotiable Body2.1. Where the Rubber Meets the Road2.2. What's in an Interface? 2.3. New Systemic Wholes2.4. Substitutes2.5. Incorporation Vs Use2.6. Towards Cognitive Extension2.7. Three Grades of Embodiment3. Material Symbols3.1. Language as Scaffolding3.2. Augmenting Reality3.3. Sculpting Attention3.4. Hybrid Thoughts? 3.5. From Translation to Coordination3.6. Second-order Cognitive Dynamics3.7. Self-made Minds4. World, Incorporated4.1. Cognitive Niche Construction: A Primer4.2. Cognition in the Globe: A Cameo4.3. Thinking Space4.4. Epistemic Engineers4.5. Exploitative Representation and Wide Computation4.6. Tetris: The Update4.7. The Swirl of Organization4.8. Extending the Mind4.9. BRAINBOUND versus EXTENDED: The Case So FarII. Boundary Disputes5. Mind Re-bound?5.1. EXTENDED Anxiety5.2. Pencil Me In5.3. The Odd Coupling5.4. Cognitive Candidacy5.5. The Mark of the Cognitive? 5.6. Kinds and Minds5.7. Perception and Development5.8. Deception and Contested Space5.9. Folk Intuition and Cognitive Extension5.10. Asymmetry and Lopsideness5.11. Similarity vs Complementarity5.12. Hippo-World6. The Cure for Cognitive Hiccups (HEMC, HEC, HEMC)6.1. Rupert's Challenge6.2. HEC versus HEMC6.3. Parity and Cognitive Kinds (Again)6.4. The Persisting Core6.5. Cognitive Impartiality6.6. A Brain Teaser6.7. Thoughtful Gestures6.8. Material Carriers6.9. Loops as Mechanisms6.10. Anarchic Self-Stimulation6.11. Autonomous Coupling6.12. Why the HEC? 6.13. The Cure7. Rediscovering the Brain7.1. Matter into Mind7.2.. Honey, I Shrunk the Representations7.3. Change Spotting: The Sequel7.4. Thinking about Thinking: The Brain's Eye View7.5. Born-Again Cartesians? 7.6. Surrogate Situations7.7. Plug Points7.8. Brain Control7.9. Asymmetry Arguments7.10. Extended in a Vat7.11. The (Situated) Cognizer's InnardsIII: The Limits of Embodiment8. Painting, Planning, and Perceiving8.1. Enacting Perceptual Experience8.2. The Painter and the Perceiver8.3. Three Virtues of the Strong Sensorimotor Model8.4. A Vice: Sensorimotor (Hyper) Sensitivity8.5. What Reaching Teaches8.6. (Tweaked)Tele-Assistance8.7. Sensorimotor Summarizing8.8. Virtual Content, Again8.9. Beyond the Sensorimotor Frontier9. Disentangling Embodiment9.1. Three Threads9.2. The Separability Thesis9.3 Beyond Flesh-eating Functionalism.9.4. Ada, Adder, and Odder9.5. A Tension Revealed9.6What Bodies Are9.7. Participant Machinery and Morphological Computation9.8. Quantifying Embodiment9.9. The Heideggerian Theatre10. Conclusions: Mindsized BitesAppendix: The Extended Mind (Andy Clark and David Chalmers)

Editorial Reviews

"In Supersizing the Mind, Clark furthers the debate marvelously. He manages to engage, in a detailed and focused way, with the most active and prominent philosophers writing about situated cognition, while also introducing the empirical work and big picture ideas that animate the subject. I highly recommend this book." —Journal of Mind and Behavior

"Supersizing the Mind is an important book for cognitive-science theorists of all stripes.... Although traditional and radical theorists are likely to remain unconvinced, there can be no doubt that Supersizing the Mind will set the terms for many of the coming debates."—Evan Thompson, Times Literary Supplement

"...it offers original thinking in the philosophy of mind, and it is highly recommended for academic collections in that subject."—Library Journal

"In Supersizing the Mind, philosopher Andy Clark makes the compelling argument that the mind extends beyond the body to include the tools, symbols and other artefacts we deploy to engage the world.... Supersizing the Mind is a treat to read. It is brimming with remarkable ideas, novel insights and amusing language."—Nature

"Supersizing the Mind is tantalizing in many respects, and Clark's ingenuity is always on display. Just as his earlier Being There launched many a research project, we expect that Supersizing the Mind will inspire a new generation of philosophers, psychologists, and artificial intelligence researchers to reconsider some basic assumptions about the mind."—Lawrence Shapiro and Shannon Spaulding, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

"This is an important book; it provides compelling and empirically well-supported argument; it offers a survey of the state-of-play in contemporary cognitive science; it directs our attention to the most pressing foundational issue in the study of mind, that of how to reconcile the information-processing perspective with the growing recognition that action and the body, not to mention technology, have a crucial role in our mental lives."—Trends in Cognitive Sciences

From the Publisher

Clark's (philosophy, Edinburgh Univ., Scotland; Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies and the Future of Human Intelligence) title and subtitle are indicative of where his thinking is positioned concerning the philosophy of mind. The traditional view in this area, from the philosophical ancients forward, is that thinking happens only in, or is encapsulated in, our heads. But Clark argues that our minds are not merely embodied but become cognitively extended-hence "supersized"-by interaction in the material world. To fill out this version of the philosophy of mind, Clark looks at recent research in linguistics, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, robotics, computerization, and more. This is not any easy book; it offers original thinking in the philosophy of mind, and it is highly recommended for academic collections in that subject.
—Leon H. Brody

Library Journal