Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension (Philosophy of Mind) 1st Edition

by Andy Clark (Author)

10 customer reviews

ISBN-13: 978-0195333213

ISBN-10: 0195333217

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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.

Editorial Reviews

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"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

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).

Series: Philosophy of Mind
Hardcover: 286 pages
Publisher: Oxford University Press; 1 edition (October 29, 2008)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0195333217
ISBN-13: 978-0195333213
Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review: 10 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,771,435 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1645 in Cognitive Psychology (Books)
- #1427 in Humanist Philosophy
- #3138 in Consciousness & Thought Philosophy

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Dennis Waters

good overview of where things stand right now, emphasizing "right now"

March 1, 2009

Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase

Andy Clark's unfortunately-titled Supersizing the Mind sounds at first like some sort of awful self-help book, like one of those "play Bach for baby in the womb" treatises.

But of course it is nothing like that. It is the latest of the prolific Clark's manifestos in support of what is more generally known as the Situated Cognition Movement [cf. The Cambridge Handbook of Situated Cognition], of which he is a founder. It is expansive and well-written.

Without wading into the detail (which, n.b., you will have to do if you read the book) this movement looks at the mind in the context of not only the brain but also the body and the environment in which the body wanders. It presents a strong contrast to computational models of the mind that are mostly about abstract representations and algorithms, i.e., Turing Machine implementations of intelligence.

I am sympathetic to Clark's approach and so did not read Supersizing the Mind as critically as I might have. If you are interested in understanding where some of the key arguments in modern cognitive science reside, I can recommend this book wholeheartedly. Clark does a clear and fair job of explaining both himself and his critics.

But it is important to remember that Supersizing the Mind represents a point in time. In five years the field will have moved on in terms of research and challenges to both old and new approaches to understanding intelligence. So get it while you can; otherwise wait for Clark's next.

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Stephen E. Robbins

Supersizing - but with some Bloombergian Reduction

April 9, 2014

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

This book is without doubt a repository of deep and extensive thought on critical issues of the mind and the body's role in mind. It is rich in information and research findings, exploring wherever possible, as Clark puts it, approaches that combine a bedrock computational approach and information processing perspective with a potent functional role for timing and environmentally coupled action. It is a book to come back to.

For me the center piece is Clark's detailed and extensive attention to Noë's theory of enactive-based vision, the central thesis of which is that a set of potential actions (or sensori-motor expectations) are constitutive to our perceptual experience. The possible set of actions I can take with a chair are different from the set related to a coffee cup - the differences underlie the difference in the visual experience of each. Noe's thesis is critical in the extended mind framework, for in Noë's framework, there are no representations, no built-up internal model of the world in the brain. Our image of the external world is simply a function of this relation to possible action, the body being in a dynamic loop with the external world - a body-environment system. But as critical as this thesis is to the notion of extended mind, Clark abandons it based on his reading of the research findings of Milner and Goodale on the functions of the dorsal stream (calibrating/performing action in real time, not visual awareness) and the ventral stream (representations of the objects/visual awareness) and the phenomenal effects of damage to either stream. (Gallese [2007, The "Conscious" Dorsal Stream] neglected by Clark, holds a modified, less dichotomous view). As convincing as this reading might appear, the problem is that for Milner and Goodale (Clark assenting) the ventral stream is used for an internal representation of the external world. Noë's vision of extended mind re vision is discarded, but Clark has nothing to replace it with - we have, rather, returned to the model of internal representations bounded by the skull - with all the problems Noë was striving to solve.

Understanding the role of action in vision is indeed critical, as Clark laudably understands - hence his effort in examining this. The difficulty running through everyone here, to include other extended mind theorists, is that no one has any theory on how to explain the origin of the image of the external world. Neither Milner and Goodale, nor Clark, could begin to actually explain the process by which the brain creates an image of the external world via or within the ventral stream, i.e., how these "internal representations" in the chemical flows happen to become my image of the kitchen with its tables, chairs and spoon stirring coffee in the cup. Noë's abstract thesis - a different action set for the chair versus the coffee cup - still says nothing as to how - simply because each object is related to action - an image comes about for either. A quick example of what a concrete model looks like cuts to the chase: Embed Noë, for example, in Bergson (Matter and Memory, 1896). Bergson, the premier and totally ignored theorist of the extended mind, presciently saw the universal field as a holographic field and the brain as effectively being a modulated reconstructive wave passing through (or resonating within) this field, and thus "specific to" a subset of the field, now, by this selective specification, an "image" of a (past) portion of this field ever transforming - as this field is in an indivisible (or non-differentiable) motion. This image is at a scale of time imposed by the brain's underlying dynamics - the fly in Clark's or Noë's (unanalyzed) "environment" could be the "buzzing" being of normal scale, a being flapping its wings like a heron, or a crystalline ensemble of whirling particles. The selection principle for a subset out of the mass of holographic information is the relevance to the body's action, and to Bergson - deeply reflective Noë's relation to action - perception is "virtual action." In this holographic reconstructive wave model, where within the brain there are indeed no representations of the external world and no image being produced by or in the brain, we now have a concrete mechanism for explaining the origin of the image of the environment - not a vague abstraction about an "action relationship with the environment." Given Bergson's selection principle/requirement is correct, now we could begin to seriously flesh out the meaning of "virtual action" as per Clark's efforts, as, say, in determining the role of the "sensori-motor summarizing" representations that Clark feels are attached to the external objects represented in the ventral stream. (For the sake of those interested, as I know no other explication of Bergson in this regard, one can search (Amazon): "Collapsing the Singularity").

Clark rightly warns of the excesses in many theorists of the extended mind concept, where destruction of representations is taken "all the way" to cognition itself. But the excess is a symptom of having no clear conception of the origin of the perceptual image, therefore complete ambiguity over the existence of images from memory employed in thought - the origin of our intuition that we indeed use representations in thought - just like I do for building a new chicken coop. With no theory of the image of the external world, there is in fact no theory of the nature of experience, thus how this experience can be stored (it cannot) and retrieved (it can, but differently than currently conceived). This is reflected in a complete lack of an actual theory of memory in the book, other than in the occasional reference via the term "informative encodings" or a discussion of retrieval of memories by use of external cues, but with no theory of the mechanism or laws by which any of this works.

Clark's work is a great source for the struggle with clarifying deep issues of the extended mind concept, the role of action, the dynamic interaction of body and environment. For the AI folk, it holds concepts that must be considered. It is just also unfortunately reflective of the general problem of consciousness and the origin of the image/experience of the world plaguing our theory of mind.

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Alex Hogan

I wholeheartedly recommend this book

June 26, 2013

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

This book isn't for the faint of heart. It can be hard to follow and because of that you may find yourself rereading sections. But it's well worth it if your interested in the operation of the human mind. Especially your own.

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Mason D. Kelsey

Significant Defense of the Extended Mind

January 24, 2010

Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase

One of the tricks in philosophy is to take a vague concept and pump the hell out of it. The mind is one of those dangerously vague folk psychology concepts along with self, consciousness, awareness, and most of the buzz words in Cognitive Science. So what one seeks to do is to whittle down the concept to get the bark off and find the essential core. Then and only then does it seem legitimate for one to work on what it would mean to extend it, whatever "it" is. But how long do we have to wait for the 'reductionist' Churchlands to whittle things down and solve that riddle?

Andy Clark has, by the accident of our history, been handed a hot potato in that mind is one of those "it"s that no one knows really what it is. So it is essential that we move to the biological neurological explanation of what "it" is as best we can. That is not what Andy is doing here, and he knows it. But what's the man to do? The problem is that mind appears to be a supervened phenomena which you are not likely to find in some lobe in the brain. Given that, what Andy has done is to work with what we know about the mind so far and he does tap into a lot of empirican studies that have been completed over several decades.

And he also knows when to stop. For example, he mentions extension of the mind into society, a social sense of the extended mind, but leaves that topic for a later book. Just as well as Alvin Goldman and Frederique de Vignemont are already guarding the gates to that temple with their rejection of the Embodiment of Mind in Society. It will take some interesting new arguments, perhaps from an evolutionary anthropological point of view (Sarah Blaffer Hrdy?) to find a way in.

They are not alone. Adam and Aizawa, Ned Block with his emphasis on qualia, and Robert Rupert are presenting strong objections that have to be addressed. Clark does address Adams and Aizawa in chapter five and in chapter six some of Rupert's arguments are argued against. But Rupert just published a new book (which you can also buy through Amazon) that may have some new arguments or even rebutals to Clark's refutations. (I haven't had a chance to read Rupert's new book so cannot comment on it here.)

I must admit my bias. I love Clark's book. I've read it several times and get new ideas each time I read it. And isn't that what philosophy is all about, building up the framework to get to the next level?

Read this book! Amazon has a great price and you won't regret it. Pay attention to chapter one, it seems to be about robots, but it is just the beginning of an argument for melting our ideas about what has to be embedded in the head. Andy admits to the essential neurological core of what happens in the brain. No brain, no mind. He just wants us to realize that there is more to the mind that what happens in the brain. By the time you get past chapter seven you will realize that is a no brainer. Then, just to settle you down, Andy puts on the brakes in the last three chapters and draws what he feels are the limits to extension.

So why is this all so very important? Because humans are about to launch off into a world that merges the brain with the external world that, coupled with genetic engineering, will forever change what it means to be a human. Just having the Internet has probably raised the average virtual IQ of teens by at least 10 points, if they can get over the game phase. (Clark doesn't consider the Internet a part of the Extended Mind, but I do.) Don't worry, it is not the scary story that Dr. Bill Joy fears. It is humanity that metaphorizes, not unlike a butterfly, or locust, your choice. But you need a manuel. Here is the beginning of that manuel.

46 people found this helpful

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Jason Graham

Five Stars

June 13, 2015

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

great

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Amazon Customer

Five Stars

September 17, 2016

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

Fascinating!

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Nita C.

Three Stars

April 26, 2016

Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase

Good read.

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Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension (Philosophy of Mind) 1st Edition