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Andy Clark Being There. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1997. Pp. xix + 269.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2020
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References
1 Powers, Richard Galatea 2.2 (New York: Farrar Strauss Giroux 1996), 326Google Scholar
2 This is a caveat I will repeat throughout this essay: Clark alternates between leading cheers for the radical claims the proponents of embodied mind make and offering a voice of reason which suggests that we should not wholly embrace those radical claims. For expositional reasons, the text of this essay presents Clark as being of one mind — supportive — about these claims, while in truth he is much more ambivalent about them.
3 Of course the termites are not following any rule. The ‘rule’ is encoded in the internal structures that govern the termites’ behavior. The termites perform the movements that are coded for in their nervous systems, and that coding implicitly includes the rule, ‘drop the mud balls where the chemical trace is strongest.’ For simplicity, I refer to this as following the rule. (One might wish to claim that their behavior is described by a rule, but this claim has echoes of claims that planetary motion is described by a rule. The rule does causally affect the termites’ nest-building behavior whereas no rule causally affects planetary motion.)
4 See Saidel, E. ‘Beliefs, Desires, and The Ability to Learn,’ American Philosophical Quarterly 35 (1998) 21–37Google Scholar.
5 As cited by Gallistel, Charles R. Organization of Action: A New Synthesis (Hillsdale, NJ: LEA 1980) 334–59Google Scholar.
6 Two caveats need to be made here: (i) by ‘representation,’ in this discussion, I do not intend what might be thought of as a full-bodied linguistic representation. Instead, all that is necessary is some internal state that stands for the goal in the organism's internal economy. The activation of the node representing food on the rat's cognitive map suffices for a representation of the rat's goal. (ii) Some organisms are able to overcome some, limited, obstacles and remain oriented toward their goal without a distinct representation of the goal What sets humans (and rats, if the cognitive map story is accurate) apart from these organisms, with respect to some of our behaviors, is that we are able to continue to relinquish means to our goals while remaining directed toward the goals.
7 No intentional commitment is meant here.
8 In fairness to Clark, it is not clear that he endorses this claim. At times he appears to subscribe to, and argue for, the wildest claims of the moboticists, but at other times, he clearly argues for a more considered, conservative view.
9 Ironically, perhaps, this has distinct echoes of Wittgenstein's, Ludwig (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus [Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press 1974])Google Scholar claim that to ‘know an object’ is to ‘know all its possible occurrences in states of affairs’ (see 2.01ff.).
10 Uexkull, J. Von ‘A Stroll Through the Worlds on Animals and Men,’ in Instinctive Behavior, Lashley, K. ed. (New York: International Universities Press 1934)Google Scholar
11 Thelen, Esther and Smith, Linda B. A Dynamic Systems Approach to the Development of Cognition and Action (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press 1994)Google Scholar.
12 Thach, W. Goodkin, H. and Keating, J. ‘The Cerebellum and the Adaptive Coordination of Movement,’ Annual Review of Neuroscience 15 (1992) 403–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar
13 For the philosopher with evolution on the mind the answer to this question should appear obvious: we may have evolved the perceptual abilities we have because they allow us to detect certain features of the environment that were important for the continued survival and reproductive success of our ancestors, but these perceptual abilities allow us to detect various other aspects of the environment which were unimportant in the evolution of our perceptual capacities. (This answer nicely acknowledges Von Uexkull's insight while also accounting for the ways in which human beings seem to surpass the limited world of the tick, by noticing more than is merely necessary.) I discuss the bearing evolution has on the thesis of embodied mind below.
14 One way to think about the issues brought up here is to think about issues of externalism and internalism. When Putnam, Hilary (‘The Meaning of Meaning,’ in Putnam, Hilary Mind, Language, and Reality: Philosophical Papers, Vol. 2 [New York: Cambridge University Press 1975] 215–71)CrossRefGoogle Scholar famously claimed that, ‘meanings ain't in the head,’ he opened the door to the claim that the mind ‘ain't in the head’ either. Wilson, Robert (Cartesian Minds and Physical Bodies [New York: Cambridge University Press 1995])CrossRefGoogle Scholar takes just this approach. But, as Segal, Gabriel (‘Review: Robert A. Wilson Cartesian Psychology and Physical Minds,’ British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 48 1997: 151–6)CrossRefGoogle Scholar points out, to claim that the environment plays a role in aiding our cognition is a far cry from claiming that cognition itself is in the environment.
15 Perhaps I should not find this so hard to believe. In a clever epilogue, ‘I am John's Brain,’ Clark claims that the ideas ‘John’ comes up with after a productive day of work are no more traceable to John's brain than to the scraps of paper that allowed for the collection of those ideas. In fact, Clark claims that (as the brain might put it), ‘I do not have John's thoughts, John has John's thoughts, and I am just one item in the array of physical events and processes that enable this thinking to occur’ (224). Perhaps Clark would be willing to say that his brain does not deserve credit for producing this book, but I cannot even imagine what else would even be a candidate for deserving the credit. The answer, suggested above, that Clark — rather than Clark's brain —deserves the credit is a non-starter if ‘Clark’ involves scraps of paper with ideas scribbled on them.
16 Curiously, Clark acknowledges this point: ‘If a creature needs to use the same body of information to drive multiple or open-ended types of activity, it will often be economical to deploy a more action-neutral encoding which can then act as input to a whole variety of more specific computational routines.’ However, he follows this observation with the suggestion that, ‘it may even be the case that the vast majority of fast, fluent daily problem solving and action depends on [action-oriented internal representations]’ (152). As our perceptions generate representations that are used to govern more than one action, it seems unlikely —by Clark's lights —that much of our problem-solving and action depends on action-oriented internal representations.
17 However, we may well wish to look to evolution for a corrective of theories born of other domains. A good question to ask of any theory of the mind is, ‘Is it evolutionarily plausible?'
18 See Gould, S.J. and Lewontin, R.C. ‘The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme,’ Proceedings of the Royal Society London 205 (1978) 581–98Google Scholar.
19 The intentional expressions in this sentence are not meant to be taken literally, hence the scare quotes.
20 I am grateful to Colin Allen, Marc Ereshefsky, Larry Shapiro, and two anonymous referees for their comments on an earlier draft of this essay.