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

by Andy Clark (Author)
4.3 4.3 out of 5 stars 61 ratings
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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.
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  1. ISBN-10
    0199773688
  2. ISBN-13
    978-0199773688
  3. Edition
    1st
  4. Publisher
    Oxford University Press
  5. Publication date
    December 31, 2010
  6. Part of series
    Philosophy of Mind
  7. Language
    English
  8. Dimensions
    9.53 x 5.69 x 0.7 inches
  9. Print length
    318 pages
  10. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

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"brilliant...[providing] the best argument I've seen for the idea that minds are smeared over more space than neuroscience might have us believe" --New Scientist "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." --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

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Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Oxford University Press; 1st edition (December 31, 2010)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 318 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0199773688
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0199773688
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.05 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 9.53 x 5.69 x 0.7 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.3 4.3 out of 5 stars 61 ratings

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Andy Clark

Andy Clark

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4.3 out of 5 stars
61 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

John P. House
5.0 out of 5 stars Under promise and over deliver
Reviewed in the United States on March 10, 2021
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A great book. I received it quickly and in good condition.
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Nita C.
3.0 out of 5 stars Three Stars
Reviewed in the United States on April 27, 2016
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Good read.
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Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
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Fascinating!
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Stephen E. Robbins
4.0 out of 5 stars Supersizing - but with some Bloombergian Reduction
Reviewed in the United States on April 9, 2014
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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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Jason Graham
5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
Reviewed in the United States on June 13, 2015
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great
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Leandro
5.0 out of 5 stars A Relevant lecture
Reviewed in the United States on May 1, 2009
It is general and deep in contents at the same time. Very interesting even for the specialist in this matter
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MotionlessArrival
3.0 out of 5 stars Can't Make Up His Mind
Reviewed in the United States on August 20, 2013
This book doesn't do what I thought it would. I presumed it would be developing the evidence and arguments for extended and situated cognition - following on from Clark and Chalmer's influential paper of 1998 - but most of it instead lays out reaction to that initial excursion and appears considerably more conservative.

Now I review the contents page, I can see that this withdrawal toward the traditional position is actually part of the structure of the book. Section I: From Embodiment to Cognitive Extension is a progressive deployment of cognition outward, into the `external' world. Sections II and III, however: Boundary Disputes and The Limits of Embodiment - that is from page 85 to 217, i.e. the rest of the book - mostly review, and to a large part concur with, arguments against the cognitive excursion of the initial adventure. Indeed, by the concluding chapters, Clark is largely tempted to re-inter cognition; not only in the head but to some supervenary, inwardly contained executor, in withdrawal from embedded and extended engagement. Instead of supersizing the mind, he shrinks it, to:

`...a certain higher-level information processing poise, itself essential for conscious experience, is achieved. The kind of poise required will vary from case to case but will typically be pitched at some remove from the full details of our active sensorio-motor repertoire.' [p195]

Clark acknowledges that:

`...the broad notion of a relatively high-level executive interaction between conscious seeing and fine-grained motor control is highly attractive.'[189]

This increasing focus on a causally detached executor [albeit embodied in the brain] seems to forget the expressive, outward looking enthusiasm with which he began:

`...the relevant parts of the world are in the loop... this sort of coupling leads to an active externalism.' [from the original paper]

In Supersizing the Mind, after the initial outlay, and certainly from chapter 7 onwards: Rediscovering the Brain, Clark seems to forget that the book is supposed to be about extended cognition; outside the head. Instead, he looks inward to the stuff of the brain and repeatedly advocates a decoupled space therein for cognitive processing, arguing against the non-duality and contiguity of embodiment, situation and experience. This return of his focus to the brain is symptomatic.

He goes on to substantiate a decoupling of cognition and reasoning from direct involvement in the world by postulating human experience of duality itself as a natural function of the cortex - in which he identifies one structural stream as being assigned to coarser stuff and one, separate stream, giving access to reason, reflection and representational abstracts - in a sort of naturally occurring, brain based Cartesianism which serves reason's independence from the world and actually embodies duality in the head `in a specific visual processing stream geared toward enduring object properties, explicit recognition, and semantic recall... memory and conscious visual experience depend on a type of mechanism and coding that is different from and largely independent of the mechanisms and coding used to guide visuomotor action in real time.' [p182/3] - as if visuo-motor action in real time is functionally non-cognitive and always unconscious without this separate but mirroring reflection taking place in a different place. And, err, apparently forgetting that in earlier chapters he'd been quite certain - in criticising the `dogma of intrinsic unsuitability' - that there is no essential difference between areas of substrate; neuronal supports of cognition and the self-moderating complexity of reception/feedback networks; therefore any allocation of bounding divisions is largely arbitrary. Also, there's something handily objectifying [for Cartesians] in the hegemony of the visual when compared to the other avenues of consciousness.

But even after so locating a biological area of hierarchical processing, he is still perplexed by the idea that thought and reason may still be constrained and conditioned by their substrate in body and environs:

`...something more fundamentally - but I fear mysteriously - fleshy: the idea that embodiment vastly restricts the space of `minds like ours', tying human thought and reason non-trivially and inextricably to the details of human bodily form.' [p204]

He can't quite make up his mind.

In innumerable places, Clark demonstrates that his fundamental conception is of a divorce between information and the structures that carry it - that information is somehow different from its embodiment and other-than its vehicle at any given moment. This presumption goes un-examined. Perhaps its inconceivable that the information is described by the state, and not the other way round - or that both of these are errors of an unexamined dualist ontology.

It is often difficult to separate out any consistent view that Clark is advocating, from the times when he is merely rehearsing, and performing for us, alternative views. Because these views are often incompatible it feels as though the book itself is incoherent over a large scale - advocating first this and then that - especially when apparently advocating those views which are untenable within the criteria for cognition already established as the instantiating premises for extended cognition. It doesn't seem as though the author deliberately deploys contradictory understandings to work up a dialectic. If he were then surely, at some point, he would analyse the compatibility of the two primary modes of understanding and description - those broadly commensurate with a dual on non-dual ontology, instead of mixing them up so.

After asserting the dorsal/ventral division of cognisance as an existent and biologically verifiable brain actuality, he scuppers it 80 pages later by postulating:

`The clean division between mechanical [body] design and controller design that characterises many humanly engineered solutions looks quite unimportant [indeed often counterproductive], if what we seek is efficiency, and maximal exploitation of resources.' [p211]

Which had me often thinking, then why did you waste my time with that other stuff? As informative as the book is about different areas of the current understanding of cognition, and the responses to the initial paper's postulate, this is not a consistently transparent and coherent disclosure in its bracketing of those.

Advocates of extended cognition, Clark argues:

`...fail to do justice to the many firewalls, fragmentations, and divisions of cognitive labour that characterise our engagements with the world our senses reveal.'

It's the universalising rhetoric I have a difficulty with here. Once authors introduce universalising, rhetorical structures, I begin to feel they've lost the plot. Clark is here manifesting a political and experiential tension - between the individual as independent and the individual as socially located, influenced and distributed - and justifying it as science by the use of an abstract and universalising rhetorical structure. It could be the case that the experience he is describing is the experience of a socially individuated subject, programmed by the social structures of the object world around him to feel exactly that way - thereby emphasising the actual linked up nature of the concatenation of structures across boundaries in the physical world, and the experiences they shape. If he were to `own' this projection, he might discover he is the one who experiences many firewalls, fragmentations and divisions of cognitive labour that characterise his engagements with the world of his senses. {I suggest a little meditation, which has been shown to alter brain physiology in ways that bring about a more integrated experience - perhaps based on meditative reassignments and plasticity transgressions of these supposedly inherent divisions, huh? ;} No surprise then, that from this conditioned experience, he tries to bring round the structures he sees in the brain to justify his particular experience of divided cognition. And the `potent insensitivity of key informational processing routines to the full subtleties of embodied cycles of sensing and moving' [p195] he describes, may well be his - and exactly so occasioned. It is perhaps those scientists who feel themselves embedded in, and extending into, the world who find themselves advocating situated cognition and extended informational being; preferring to deliver themselves in the world and describing life and biology in line with that. This is a social experience in which `I am other people' and which, even therefore in its scientific analysis, tends away from the designation of isolated structures. It is an alternatively grounded social and political experience which holds forth tenable, experiential descriptions of the world as the location of mind in a wholesale manner, with no withholdings or grasping onto reactionary concerns with ontological individualism. Just as it was Wordsworth who suggested, `The mind lives in its surroundings.'

It's a pity that Clark doesn't follow the implications of his initial excursion, `once the hegemony of skin and skull is usurped, we may see ourselves more truly as creatures of the world,' [from the original paper] because his review of the field in the first section of this book is intriguing, suggestive, scholarly and valuable. Instead of pursuing this liberation, subsequent chapters, unfortunately, move progressively back into the head and asseverate the alienation of processing from experience to re-establish a detached, de-severed interior subjectivity concerned with reason and supposedly independent, free-agent processing.

His main inhibition here may, again, be cultural and political and dependent on his personal experience of selfhood and view of the world. He finds it very difficult to give up on the idea of individual humans as the origins of agency, and in some sense independently causal. It's striking how, in the original paper, there had been much more emphasis on following the inescapable concatenations of causality:

`All the components in the system play an active causal role, and they jointly govern behaviour. .. The external features here are just as causally relevant as typical internal features of the brain.'

In the present publication, this assignment of equality of causation is more difficult for him. He is now sympathetic with Rupert, who fears the loss of a persisting biological individual and bounded self. He desires a place of privilege. But it is a mainstay of systems biology that, in biological systems, there are no privileged loci of causation. In wishing to hang on to an agent located outside the unavoidable concatenation of biological systems and the physical world, Clark suggests that we are somehow not biological beings. Yet, simultaneously and incoherently, he tries to then embed this detachment in the cortical separation of a `dorsal' and `ventral' processing system. As if we have biologically dependent but nonetheless emergent properties which detach consciousness from its integrated base yet remain in a base that nonetheless is bounded by physical laws. It's incoherent and desperate. This is a political assertion about the independence of individual free willed agents. It requires a metaphysical realm, like God. This is why his early criticism of Cartesianism fails - he himself is incoherent with regard to this agent, and is unable to follow the implications of physical causality, embodiment and entrainment - hence his increasing reaction to it in the course of this study and the desperate attempt to reconsolidate some detached individual even by postulating a detachment, dissociation and decoupling in the physical structures of the brain - which he calls `dual-streaming.' But he gives no evidence as to where this reflective, reasoning and comparing free agent might further exist in its unaffected reaches as something other than the contiguous cells of neurons nerves brain flesh lungs and blood which moves in situations in the immediately pervious world. Or how that independent agent, if it is so detached in its neurophysical preclusion, may then interface with and act on external concatenations in a univocal manner. This tension against an interiorised agent arises because the project of situated or extended cognition is identical [and identically located with] that of causally extending cognition. Egocentrism is incompatible with an understanding of cognition as distributed and covalent. [Compare the Lankavatara Sutra: 'Their minds are joyful when studying about and practising the things belonging to appearances that can be discriminated, but they become confused by the notion of an uninterrupted chain of causation, and they become fearful when they consider the aggregates that make up personality and its object world as being maya-like, empty and egoless.']

In later chapters [this is the book's locational movement in the ideation of the self], Clark reintroduces, and insists on, the notion of representations - but as if these representations and the perceiver to whom they are shown were not governed and confined by the contiguity of the cells that constitute them. Yet in this interiority he can find no further person who looks at them, just as no-one can be found within the abacus or within Otto's notebook. Clark provides no evidence that people exist independently of the cells of their brain or the cells of the situation they are in. God - that is a detached, transcendent first causal agent - can no more be specifically located in the head than it can be in the abacus, equally moving, that I am manipulating as an informational location. Clark's on-going, underlying and unexamined presumptive appeal to free-willed individual agency [which structures much of his investigation] is unsubstantiated. The unseen, un-evidenced and supposedly cordoned seer of all seen is nowhere locatable: Clark merely suggests that the putatively detached brain structures he identifies may be the free seat of independently existing and first-causal, intervenary metaphysical entities. This obsession inhibits the analysis.

`Cognizers use representations [surrogates that can be decoupled and run off-line] in place of direct engagements with the world. Noncognizers, by contrast, remain trapped in a web of closed-loop interactions with the very aspects of the world upon which their survival depends.' [p152]

And then there's a shipload of further unexamined [at the very starting place] anthropocentrism as to what consciousness and conscious cognisance actually is. There are anthropocentric presumptions - multiple references to the `special' status of human cognition - and un-clarified allocations of consciousness running throughout the work. There are places where animals don't seem to count as conscious and `conscious perception' is only given to the superior `reasoning' of the human cortex: its only once something has been consciously seen [ what does this mean - parametered? reified? labelled with a word in a place in which only human language can constitute reflection?] that it can count: `a certain higher-level information processing poise, itself essential for conscious experience.' But the contrast he offers between conscious cognition and non-conscious cognition is not clarified. Nor are two sets of neurons; essentially conscious cognizers and essentially unconscious cognizers, identified. The hypothesis of extended cognition was surely a response to science's failure thus far to isolate and identify consciousness, or mind, or cognition in a particular, supported, nail-able location - exactly why situated and extended proponents went looking elsewhere. The book increasingly forgets this.

The text is probably excellent on the current state of the art in cognitive science, but Clark additionally forgets a lot of philosophy. He seems unaware that the attitude he quotes as being that of Alva Noe is a re-engagement with the phenomenology of perception of Merleau-Ponty in which lived experience [instead of separating itself off from the world] constitutes itself [and even that separation] in a series of perceptually and socially constructed engagements with, and as, the breathing palpablility of an ever presencing world in which all consciousness is deeply imbricated. [Even in so far as social organisation has its ramifications in the allocation of plasticities in the brain.]

Anyhow, I guess it would be hard to sustain critical theory, politics and philosophy simultaneously with the extensive coverage of cognitive science that Clark delivers. My main disappointment is that two thirds of the book is cranially based and seems to forget that the original title was Supersizing the Mind. A commitment to following the implications of the non-localizability of cognition is what I would have preferred. A backward step, even though a very informative one.
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Dennis Waters
4.0 out of 5 stars good overview of where things stand right now, emphasizing "right now"
Reviewed in the United States on March 2, 2009
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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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R B
5.0 out of 5 stars Parfait
Reviewed in Canada on March 26, 2019
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Très satisfait!
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Yusuf Khan
5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 28, 2014
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brilliant.
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MotionlessArrival
3.0 out of 5 stars Can't Make Up His Mind
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 20, 2013
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This book doesn't do what I thought it would. I presumed it would be developing the evidence and arguments for extended and situated cognition - following on from Clark and Chalmer's influential paper of 1998 - but most of it instead lays out reaction to that initial excursion and appears considerably more conservative.

Now I review the contents page, I can see that this withdrawal toward the traditional position is actually part of the structure of the book. Section I: From Embodiment to Cognitive Extension is a progressive deployment of cognition outward, into the `external' world. Sections II and III, however: Boundary Disputes and The Limits of Embodiment - that is from page 85 to 217, i.e. the rest of the book - mostly review, and to a large part concur with, arguments against the cognitive excursion of the initial adventure. Indeed, by the concluding chapters, Clark is largely tempted to re-inter cognition; not only in the head but to some supervenary, inwardly contained executor, in withdrawal from embedded and extended engagement. Instead of supersizing the mind, he shrinks it, to:

`...a certain higher-level information processing poise, itself essential for conscious experience, is achieved. The kind of poise required will vary from case to case but will typically be pitched at some remove from the full details of our active sensorio-motor repertoire.' [p195]

Clark acknowledges that:

`...the broad notion of a relatively high-level executive interaction between conscious seeing and fine-grained motor control is highly attractive.'[189]

This increasing focus on a causally detached executor [albeit embodied in the brain] seems to forget the expressive, outward looking enthusiasm with which he began:

`...the relevant parts of the world are in the loop... this sort of coupling leads to an active externalism.' [from the original paper]

In Supersizing the Mind, after the initial outlay, and certainly from chapter 7 onwards: Rediscovering the Brain, Clark seems to forget that the book is supposed to be about extended cognition; outside the head. Instead, he looks inward to the stuff of the brain and repeatedly advocates a decoupled space therein for cognitive processing, arguing against the non-duality and contiguity of embodiment, situation and experience. This return of his focus to the brain is symptomatic.

He goes on to substantiate a decoupling of cognition and reasoning from direct involvement in the world by postulating human experience of duality itself as a natural function of the cortex - in which he identifies one structural stream as being assigned to coarser stuff and one, separate stream, giving access to reason, reflection and representational abstracts - in a sort of naturally occurring, brain based Cartesianism which serves reason's independence from the world and actually embodies duality in the head `in a specific visual processing stream geared toward enduring object properties, explicit recognition, and semantic recall... memory and conscious visual experience depend on a type of mechanism and coding that is different from and largely independent of the mechanisms and coding used to guide visuomotor action in real time.' [p182/3] - as if visuo-motor action in real time is functionally non-cognitive and always unconscious without this separate but mirroring reflection taking place in a different place. And, err, apparently forgetting that in earlier chapters he'd been quite certain - in criticising the `dogma of intrinsic unsuitability' - that there is no essential difference between areas of substrate; neuronal supports of cognition and the self-moderating complexity of reception/feedback networks; therefore any allocation of bounding divisions is largely arbitrary. Also, there's something handily objectifying [for Cartesians] in the hegemony of the visual when compared to the other avenues of consciousness.

But even after so locating a biological area of hierarchical processing, he is still perplexed by the idea that thought and reason may still be constrained and conditioned by their substrate in body and environs:

`...something more fundamentally - but I fear mysteriously - fleshy: the idea that embodiment vastly restricts the space of `minds like ours', tying human thought and reason non-trivially and inextricably to the details of human bodily form.' [p204]

He can't quite make up his mind.

In innumerable places, Clark demonstrates that his fundamental conception is of a divorce between information and the structures that carry it - that information is somehow different from its embodiment and other-than its vehicle at any given moment. This presumption goes un-examined. Perhaps its inconceivable that the information is described by the state, and not the other way round - or that both of these are errors of an unexamined dualist ontology.

It is often difficult to separate out any consistent view that Clark is advocating, from the times when he is merely rehearsing, and performing for us, alternative views. Because these views are often incompatible it feels as though the book itself is incoherent over a large scale - advocating first this and then that - especially when apparently advocating those views which are untenable within the criteria for cognition already established as the instantiating premises for extended cognition. It doesn't seem as though the author deliberately deploys contradictory understandings to work up a dialectic. If he were then surely, at some point, he would analyse the compatibility of the two primary modes of understanding and description - those broadly commensurate with a dual or non-dual ontology, instead of mixing them up so.

After asserting the dorsal/ventral division of cognisance as an existent and biologically verifiable brain actuality, he scuppers it 80 pages later by postulating:

`The clean division between mechanical [body] design and controller design that characterises many humanly engineered solutions looks quite unimportant [indeed often counterproductive], if what we seek is efficiency, and maximal exploitation of resources.' [p211]

Which had me often thinking, then why did you waste my time with that other stuff? As informative as the book is about different areas of the current understanding of cognition, and the responses to the initial paper's postulate, this is not a consistently transparent and coherent disclosure in its bracketing of those.

Advocates of extended cognition, Clark argues:

`...fail to do justice to the many firewalls, fragmentations, and divisions of cognitive labour that characterise our engagements with the world our senses reveal.'

It's the universalising rhetoric I have a difficulty with here. Once authors introduce universalising, rhetorical structures, I begin to feel they've lost the plot. Clark is here manifesting a political and experiential tension - between the individual as independent and the individual as socially located, influenced and distributed - and justifying it as science by the use of an abstract and universalising rhetorical structure. It could be the case that the experience he is describing is the experience of a socially individuated subject, programmed by the social structures of the object world around him to feel exactly that way - thereby emphasising the actual linked up nature of the concatenation of structures across boundaries in the physical world, and the experiences they shape. If he were to `own' this projection, he might discover he is the one who experiences many firewalls, fragmentations and divisions of cognitive labour that characterise his engagements with the world of his senses. {I suggest a little meditation, which has been shown to alter brain physiology in ways that bring about a more integrated experience - perhaps based on meditative reassignments and plasticity transgressions of these supposedly inherent divisions, huh? ;} No surprise then, that from this conditioned experience, he tries to bring round the structures he sees in the brain to justify his particular experience of divided cognition. And the `potent insensitivity of key informational processing routines to the full subtleties of embodied cycles of sensing and moving' [p195] he describes, may well be his - and exactly so occasioned. It is perhaps those scientists who feel themselves embedded in, and extending into, the world who find themselves advocating situated cognition and extended informational being; preferring to deliver themselves in the world and describing life and biology in line with that. This is a social experience in which `I am other people' and which, even therefore in its scientific analysis, tends away from the designation of isolated structures. It is an alternatively grounded social and political experience which holds forth tenable, experiential descriptions of the world as the location of mind in a wholesale manner, with no withholdings or grasping onto reactionary concerns with ontological individualism. Just as it was Wordsworth who suggested, `The mind lives in its surroundings.'

It's a pity that Clark doesn't follow the implications of his initial excursion, `once the hegemony of skin and skull is usurped, we may see ourselves more truly as creatures of the world,' [from the original paper] because his review of the field in the first section of this book is intriguing, suggestive, scholarly and valuable. Instead of pursuing this liberation, subsequent chapters, unfortunately, move progressively back into the head and asseverate the alienation of processing from experience to re-establish a detached, de-severed interior subjectivity concerned with reason and supposedly independent, free-agent processing.

His main inhibition here may, again, be cultural and political and dependent on his personal experience of selfhood and view of the world. He finds it very difficult to give up on the idea of individual humans as the origins of agency, and in some sense independently causal. It's striking how, in the original paper, there had been much more emphasis on following the inescapable concatenations of causality:

`All the components in the system play an active causal role, and they jointly govern behaviour. .. The external features here are just as causally relevant as typical internal features of the brain.'

In the present publication, this assignment of equality of causation is more difficult for him. He is now sympathetic with Rupert, who fears the loss of a persisting biological individual and bounded self. He desires a place of privilege. But it is a mainstay of systems biology that, in biological systems, there are no privileged loci of causation. In wishing to hang on to an agent located outside the unavoidable concatenation of biological systems and the physical world, Clark suggests that we are somehow not biological beings. Yet, simultaneously and incoherently, he tries to then embed this detachment in the cortical separation of a `dorsal' and `ventral' processing system. As if we have biologically dependent but nonetheless emergent properties which detach consciousness from its integrated base yet remain in a base that nonetheless is bounded by physical laws. It's incoherent and desperate. This is a political assertion about the independence of individual free willed agents. It requires a metaphysical realm, like God. This is why his early criticism of Cartesianism fails - he himself is incoherent with regard to this agent, and is unable to follow the implications of physical causality, embodiment and entrainment - hence his increasing reaction to it in the course of this study and the desperate attempt to reconsolidate some detached individual even by postulating a detachment, dissociation and decoupling in the physical structures of the brain - which he calls `dual-streaming.' But he gives no evidence as to where this reflective, reasoning and comparing free agent might further exist in its unaffected reaches as something other than the contiguous cells of neurons nerves brain flesh lungs and blood which moves in situations in the immediately pervious world. Or how that independent agent, if it is so detached in its neurophysical preclusion, may then interface with and act on external concatenations in a univocal manner. This tension against an interiorised agent arises because the project of situated or extended cognition is identical [and identically located with] that of causally extending cognition. Egocentrism is incompatible with an understanding of cognition as distributed and covalent. [Compare the Lankavatara Sutra: 'Their minds are joyful when studying about and practising the things belonging to appearances that can be discriminated, but they become confused by the notion of an uninterrupted chain of causation, and they become fearful when they consider the aggregates that make up personality and its object world as being maya-like, empty and egoless.']

In later chapters [this is the book's locational movement in the ideation of the self], Clark reintroduces, and insists on, the notion of representations - but as if these representations and the perceiver to whom they are shown were not governed and confined by the contiguity of the cells that constitute them. Yet in this interiority he can find no further person who looks at them, just as no-one can be found within the abacus or within Otto's notebook. Clark provides no evidence that people exist independently of the cells of their brain or the cells of the situation they are in. God - that is a detached, transcendent first causal agent - can no more be specifically located in the head than it can be in the abacus, equally moving, that I am manipulating as an informational location. Clark's on-going, underlying and unexamined presumptive appeal to free-willed individual agency [which structures much of his investigation] is unsubstantiated. The unseen, un-evidenced and supposedly cordoned seer of all seen is nowhere locatable: Clark merely suggests that the putatively detached brain structures he identifies may be the free seat of independently existing and first-causal, intervenary metaphysical entities. This obsession inhibits the analysis.

`Cognizers use representations [surrogates that can be decoupled and run off-line] in place of direct engagements with the world. Noncognizers, by contrast, remain trapped in a web of closed-loop interactions with the very aspects of the world upon which their survival depends.' [p152]

And then there's a shipload of further unexamined [at the very starting place] anthropocentrism as to what consciousness and conscious cognisance actually is. There are anthropocentric presumptions - multiple references to the `special' status of human cognition - and un-clarified allocations of consciousness running throughout the work. There are places where animals don't seem to count as conscious and `conscious perception' is only given to the superior `reasoning' of the human cortex: its only once something has been consciously seen [ what does this mean - parametered? reified? labelled with a word in a place in which only human language can constitute reflection?] that it can count: `a certain higher-level information processing poise, itself essential for conscious experience.' But the contrast he offers between conscious cognition and non-conscious cognition is not clarified. Nor are two sets of neurons; essentially conscious cognizers and essentially unconscious cognizers, identified. The hypothesis of extended cognition was surely a response to science's failure thus far to isolate and identify consciousness, or mind, or cognition in a particular, supported, nail-able location - exactly why situated and extended proponents went looking elsewhere. The book increasingly forgets this.

The text is probably excellent on the current state of the art in cognitive science, but Clark additionally forgets a lot of philosophy. He seems unaware that the attitude he quotes as being that of Alva Noe is a re-engagement with the phenomenology of perception of Merleau-Ponty in which lived experience [instead of separating itself off from the world] constitutes itself [and even that separation] in a series of perceptually and socially constructed engagements with, and as, the breathing palpablility of an ever presencing world in which all consciousness is deeply imbricated. [Even in so far as social organisation has its ramifications in the allocation of plasticities in the brain.]

Anyhow, I guess it would be hard to sustain critical theory, politics and philosophy simultaneously with the extensive coverage of cognitive science that Clark delivers. My main disappointment is that two thirds of the book is cranially based and seems to forget that the original title was Supersizing the Mind. A commitment to following the implications of the non-localizability of cognition is what I would have preferred. A backward step, even though a very informative one.
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