topics: |  cognitive | brain | psychology | philosophy

Well, what do you think you understand with?  With your head?  Bah!
      - Nikos Kazantzakis, Zorba the Greek
Ninety percent of life is just being there. - Woody Allen

The image of mind as inexorably interowoven with body, world, and action,
already visible in Martin Heidegger's Being and Time (1927), found clear
expression in Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Structure of Behavior (1942). Some of
the central themes are present in the work of Soviet psychologists, esp Lev
Vygotsky ... [Winograd and Flores 1987] ...  The embodied mind [Varela etal
1991]  is among the immediate roots of several of the trends identified here.

Intro: Car with a cockroach brain

Minds are not disembodied logical reasoning devices. This simple shift in
perspective has spawned some of the most exciting and groundbreaking work in
the contemporary study of mind. ... Where these researches converge we
glimpse a new vision of the nature of biological cognition: a vision that
puts explicit data storage and logical manip8ulation in its place as, at
most, a secondary adjunct to the kinds of dynamics and complex response loops
that couple real brains, bodies and environments.

Of course, not everyone agrees.  An extreme example of the opposite view is a
recent $50 mn attempt to instill commonsense understanding in a computer by
giving it a vast store of explicit knowledge (CYC) ... The most noteworthy
feature of CYC [is] its extreme faith in the power of explicit symbolic
representation: its faith in the internalization of structures built in the
image of strings of words in a public language. CYC's creators, [Lenat and
Feigenbaum.1992, p. 192], argue that the bottleneck for adaptive intelligence
is knowledge, not inference or control.

[Ritzmann 93] R. Ritzmann The neural organization of cockroach escape and its
role in context-dependent orientation.  In Biological Neural Networks in
Invertebrate Neuroethology and Robotics, ed. Beer et al Academic Press.

[Beer and Chiel 93] Randall Beer and Herbert Chiel, Simulations of Cockroach
locomotion and escape.  In [Beer etal 93]

Even the embodied knowledge of a cockroach would probably require several
volumes to capture in detail. p.6 [Hence such systems would need to search
vast amounts of "linguaform, text-like resources"]
[But more insidiously, such text-like strings cannot reflect context-free
knowleedge]

-1 Autonomous Agents--

W. Grey Walter : biologist build cybernetic turtles 1950 : Elmer and Elsie -
sought light but avoided intense light.  Also had own lights when their
motors were running.  Resulted in interactions between themselves,
competition for environmental lights, and a type of dance when confronted
with a mirror.

Vertical microworld is one that slices off a small piece of human-level
cognitive competence as an object of study; e.g. playing chess, producing
past-tense forms for English verbs, etc. The obvious worry is that when we
human beings solve these advanced problems we may well be bringing to bear
computational resources shaped by the other, more basic needs for which
evolution equipped our ancestors.  Neat, design-oriented solutions to these
recent problems may thus be quite unlike the natural solutions...  A
horizontal microworld, in contrast, is the complete behavioral competence of
a whole but relatively simple creature ...

Herbert: can-picking robot from Rod Brooks' lab

2.1

Consider jigsaw puzzles

other reviews

  [w:Andy Clark]

Clark is perhaps most famous for his defence of the hypothesis of the
Extended mind. According to Clark, the dynamic loops through which mind and
world interact are not merely instrumental. The cycle of activity that runs
from brain through body and world and back again actually constitutes
cognition. The mind, on this account, is not bounded by the biological
organism but extends into the environment of that organism. Consider two
subjects carry out a mathematical task. The first completes the task solely
in her head, while the second completes the task with the assistance of paper
and pencil. By Clark's `parity principle', as long as the cognitive
results are the same there is no reason to count the means employed by the
two subjects as different. The process of cognition in the second case
involves paper and pencil, and the conception of `mind' appropriate to
this subject must include these environmental items.

Clark concedes that, in practice, the criterion of equal efficiency is seldom
met. Nonetheless, he believes that the boundary of `skin and skull' is
arbitrary and cognitively meaningless. If the paper and pencil used by the
second subject become a virtual `paper and pencil' visible on a monitor
and controlled by a silicon chip implanted in the head, the differences
between subjects become less clear and Clark's hypothesis becomes more
plausible.

The old opposition of matter versus mind stubbornly persists in the way we
study mind and brain. 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 us. Whereas the mental has been treated as a realm
that is distinct from the body and the world, Clark forcefully attests that a
key to understanding brains is to see them as controllers of embodied
activity. From this paradigm shift he advances the construction of a cognitive
science of the embodied mind.

blurb

Since the early 1990s, another major new strand of cognitive science has
developed in which mind is seen as very much in a body, and the body is seen
as very much in its environment. Some key writers in this group include Clark
(1997), Hendriks-Jansen (1966), Hutchins (1996), and Varela et al. (1991).
Several aspects of these new works in cognitive science are especially
relevant to the topics of this essay.  First, traditional AI as well as
connectionism tend to see human knowledge as somehow residing in a mind that
contemplates a context that calls for action, or at least for recognition and
identification of some kind, but that stands outside of that context. In
contrast, the authors in this group emphasize that knowledge, learning, and
application, all take place in an action context. All stress the biological
evolutionary origins of the human mind, and its workings in an environment,
and they argue that mind must have evolved to enable humans to cope better
with real problems.  A human mind is very much a part of human action,
designed to keep the organism alive and well in a real environment. The title
of Andy Clark's book, `Being There', captures this flavor.