Rudy Garns's Library tagged Clark → View Popular, Search in Google

Apr

2011

Where is my mind?

"The best way through Clark’s book is to start by reading the foreword by David Chalmers and the paper by Clark and Chalmers that is reprinted as an appendix. These are short, informal presentations of the so-called ‘Extended Mind Thesis’ (EMT), of which the rest of the book is an elaboration and discussion. "

www.lrb.co.uk/...where-is-my-mind

- Preview

Fodor mind clark extended-mind MBN

the mind v. world dualism is untenable.
Otto’s notebook is (or may come with practice to serve as) an ‘external memory’, literally a ‘part of his mind’ that resides outside his body.
10 more annotation(s)...
- do minds literally have parts?
- if Otto loses his notebook, Inga loses part of her mind. Could that be literally true? Somehow, I don’t think it sounds right.
- It’s that the stuff about parts of minds and the locations of the parts is all that Clark/Chalmers tell us about what, exactly, the EMT asserts.
- If minds don’t literally have parts, how can cognitive science literally endorse the claim that they do?
- Is what my robot does when it ‘decides’ to change course a sort of thing which if it had happened inside the robot, ‘I would have had no hesitation in accepting as part of [a] cognitive process?’
- The mark of the mental is its intensionality (with an ‘s’); that’s to say that mental states have content; they are typically about things.
- Nothing happens in your mind when your iPhone rings (unless, of course, you happen to hear it do so). That’s not, however, because iPhones are ‘external’, it’s because iPhones don’t, literally and unmetaphorically, have contents.
- there is, after all, a built-in asymmetry between Otto’s sort of case and Inga’s sort.
- the (derived) intensionality of what happens on the outside depends ontologically on the (underived) intensionality of what happens on the inside. Externalism needs internalism; but not vice versa.
- t can’t, for example, turn because it thinks that there may be a couch; or bring its umbrella because it thinks it will rain. Doing those sorts of things requires not just a representation of how the world is, but also a representation of how it would be if . . . And the intensional properties of such representations (unlike those of Otto’s notebook) would have to be underived if what my robot does is to count as literally making a decision.

Dec

2010

Andy Clark - Associative Engines

www.scribd.com/...Andy-Clark-Associative-Engines

- Preview

clark associationism connectionism MBN

Nov

2010

Andy Clark on Extended Mind

In contrast to contemporary arguments that using the web is making people and culture dumber and shallower, Andy Clark advocates the idea that knowledgeable use of digital media might, as Doug Engelbart put it, raise the collective IQ of cultures and extend the minds of individuals.

blip.tv/4338766

- Preview

extended-mind Clark collective-intelligence CDC

in list: Clones, Drones and Cyborgs

Apr

2010

Andy Clark: Papers Available Online

www.philosophy.ed.ac.uk/...publications.html

- Preview

philosophy Clark papers grue

May

2009

Review of Supersized Mind

I was agreeably surprised by Andy Clark’s ‘Supersizing the Mind’. I had assumed it would be a fuller treatment of the themes set out in ‘The Extended Mind’, the paper he wrote with David Chalmers, and which is included in the book as an Appendix. In fact, it ranges more widely and has a number of interesting points to make on the general significance of embodiment and mind extension. Various flavours of externalism, the doctrine that the mind ain’t in the head, seem to be popular at the moment, but Clark’s philosophical views are clearly just part of a coherent general outlook on cognition. (Conscious Entities)

www.consciousentities.com/?p=162

- Preview

Clark mind extended-mind grue cogsci

Feb

2009

Forward to Supersizing the Mind

Clark is a connoisseur of the myriad ways in which the mind relies on the world to get its work done. (Chalmers)

consc.net/supersizing.pdf

- Preview

extended-mind Clark Chalmers cogsci

Supersizing the Mind (review)

Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension, a recent book by philosopher Andy Clark is reviewed by Melvyn Goodale in Nature, and I pass on some clips from his review, because Clark's views exactly mirror the sentiments expressed in my Biology of Mind Book. (Deric Bownds' MindBlog)

mindblog.dericbownds.net/...supersizing-mind.html

- Preview

extended-mind Clark review mind cogsci

Feb

2009

Where is my mind?

There is a gap between the mind and the world, and (as far as anybody knows) you need to posit internal representations if you are to have a hope of getting across it. Mind the gap. You’ll regret it if you don’t. (Jerry Fodor review of Clark)

www.lrb.co.uk/...fodo01_.html

- Preview

mind extended-mind clark fodor cogsci

Is what my robot does when it ‘decides’ to change course a sort of thing which if it had happened inside the robot, ‘I would have had no hesitation in accepting as part of [a] cognitive process?’
But how am I to understand the hypothesis that it would (or wouldn’t) have changed course if it had collided with the couch in my head?
5 more annotation(s)...
- His real argument is that, barring a principled reason for distinguishing between what Otto keeps in his notebook and what Inga keeps in her head, there’s a slippery slope from the one to the other.
- The mark of the mental is its intensionality (with an ‘s’); that’s to say that mental states have content; they are typically about things.
- What I should have said isn’t that only what’s literally and unmetaphorically mental has content, but that if something literally and unmetaphorically has content, then either it is mental (part of a mind) or the content is ‘derived’ from something that is mental. ‘Underived’ content (to borrow John Searle’s term) is the mark of the mental; underived content is what minds and only minds have.
- Externalism needs internalism; but not vice versa. External representation is a side-show; internal representation is ineliminably the main event.
- your internal model of the world contains stuff that the world itself does not; this happens not just when your beliefs are false but also when they are hypothetical (‘if there are clouds, there will be rain’ can be true even if there aren’t any clouds); or when they are modal (‘it might rain’ can be true even if it doesn’t rain); or when they are in the past or future tense (‘it used to rain here a lot’ can be true even if it doesn’t rain here anymore).