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Where Brain, Body and World Collide

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Introduction

The brain fascinates because it is the biological organ of mindfulness itself. It is the inner engine that drives intelligent behaviour. Such a depiction provides a worthy antidote to the once-popular vision of the mind as somehow lying outside the natural order. But it is a vision with a price. For it has concentrated much theoretical attention on an uncomfortably restricted space; the space of the inner neural machine, divorced from the wider world which then enters the story only via the hygienic gateways of perception and action. Recent work in neuroscience, robotics and psychology casts doubt on the effectiveness of such a shrunken perspective. Instead, it stresses the unexpected intimacy of brain, body and world and invites us to attend to the structure and dynamics of extended adaptive systems – ones involving a much wider variety of factors and forces. Whilst it needs to be handled with some caution, I believe there is much to be learnt from this broader vision. The mind itself, if such a vision is correct, is best understood as the activity of an essentially situated brain: a brain at home in its proper bodily, cultural and environmental niche.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    See B.C. Smith (1996), p. 148. Note that Smith’s worry, at root, concerns the gap between physiological and semantic or intentional questions.

  2. 2.

    Thus we read, for example, that computational approaches make possible “a science of structure and function divorced from material substance [that] ... can answer questions traditionally posed by psychologists” (Pylyshyn (1986, p. 68).

  3. 3.

    See, for example, David Marr’s (1982) distinction between the levels of computation, algorithm and implementation.

  4. 4.

    See, for example, Simon (1982), Dawkins (1982), Clark (1997) Chapter 4.

  5. 5.

    For a review, see Clark (1997) Chapter 5.

  6. 6.

    Schieber & Hibbard (1993).

  7. 7.

    The notion of synergy aims to capture the idea of links that constrain the collective unfolding of a system comprising many parts. For example, the front wheels of a car exhibit a built-in synergy which allows a single driver ‘command’ (at the steering wheel) to affect them both at once. Synergetic links may also be learnt, as when we acquire an automated skill, and may be neurally as well as brute-physiologically grounded. See Kelso (1995), pp. 38, 52.

  8. 8.

    For a survey of such experiments, see Welch (1978).

  9. 9.

    In this case, without any perceived shift in the visual scene.

  10. 10.

    In a somewhat related vein, Caminiti et al. (1990) show that the directional preference of individual cells encoding reaching movement commands varies according to initial arm position. See also discussion in Jeannerod (1997), Chapter 1.

  11. 11.

    Though much of the connectivity is reciprocal. See Van Essen & Anderson (1990), Churchland et al. (1991), p. 40.

  12. 12.

    The exception is if subjects are told in advance to watch out for changes to a certain feature. See McConkie (1990), Churchland et al. (1994).

  13. 13.

    Thanks to David Clark for pointing this out.

  14. 14.

    See Churchland et al. (1994), p. 44, Wurz & Mohler (1976).

  15. 15.

    For an accessible introduction, see P.M. Churchland (1995).

  16. 16.

    This is known as a ‘subsumption’ architecture, because the layers each constitute a complete behaviour-producing system and interact only in simple ways such as by one layers subsuming (turning off) the activity of another or by one layer’s co-opting and hence ‘building-in’ the activity of another (see Brooks (1991)).

  17. 17.

    By a process of spreading activation amongst landmark encoding nodes – see Mataric (1991).

  18. 18.

    Such representations bear some resemblance to what the ecological psychologist J.J. Gibson called “affordances,” although Gibson himself would reject our emphasis on inner states and encodings. For an affordance is the potential of use and activity that the local environment offers to a specific kind of being: chairs afford sitting (to humans) and so on. See Gibson (1979). The philosopher Ruth Millikan has developed a nice account of action-oriented representation under the label ‘pushmipullyu representation’ – see Millikan (1995).

  19. 19.

    This example is borrowed from Clark (1995).

  20. 20.

    The story is detailed in Triantafyllou & Triantafyllou (1995) and further discussed in Clark (1997). A 49 inch eight-segment anodised aluminum and lycra robot tuna is being used at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) to test the details of the theory.

  21. 21.

    See Edwards, Baum & Morrow-Howell (1994), Baum (1991).

  22. 22.

    Some of this additional structure is maintained and provided by family and friends. (But similarly, much of our own wideware is provided by language, culture and institutions which we do not ourselves create.)

  23. 23.

    Such counterbalancing is, as Marcel Kinsbourne has usefully reminded me, a somewhat delicate and complex matter. The mere provision of the various props and aids is useless unless the patient remains located in a stable, familiar environment. And the ability of different patients to make use of such added environmental structure itself varies according to the nature and extent of the neurally based deficit.

  24. 24.

    See Dawkins (1982).

  25. 25.

    See Kutsch et al. (1993). Thanks to Joe Faith for drawing this example to my attention.

  26. 26.

    See, for example,, Thelen & Smith (1994), Port and Van Gelder (1995).

  27. 27.

    See, for example,, Hutchins (1995).

  28. 28.

    See Clark (1997), Crutchfield & Mitchell (1995), Mitchell et al. (1994), van Gelder (1995).

  29. 29.

    For example,, Fodor (1975), Fodor & Pylyshyn (1988).

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Acknowledgments

I am very grateful to Stephen Graubard and the participants at the Daedalus Authors Meeting (Paris, October 1997) for a wealth of useful advice, good criticism and wise counsel. Special thanks to Jean Pierre Changeux, Marcel Kinsbourne, Vernon Mountcastle, Guilio Tonini, Steven Quartz and Semir Zeki. As usual, any remaining errors are all my own.

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  1. Department of Philosophy, Edinburgh University, Edinburgh, UK

    Andy Clark

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  1. University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

    Carl Knappett

  2. University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

    Lambros Malafouris

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Clark, A. (2008). Where Brain, Body and World Collide . In: Knappett, C., Malafouris, L. (eds) Material Agency. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-74711-8_1

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