Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again

Front Cover
MIT Press, Jan 23, 1998 - Psychology - 292 pages
Brain, body, and world are united in a complex dance of circular causation and extended computational activity. In Being There, Andy Clark weaves these several threads into a pleasing whole and goes on to address foundational questions concerning the new tools and techniques needed to make sense of the emerging sciences of the embodied mind. Clark brings together ideas and techniques from robotics, neuroscience, infant psychology, and artificial intelligence. He addresses a broad range of adaptive behaviors, from cockroach locomotion to the role of linguistic artifacts in higher-level thought.
 

Contents

Autonomous Agents Walking on the Moon
11
12 The Robots Parade
12
13 Minds without Models
21
14 Niche Work
21
15 A Feel for Detail?
23
16 The Refined Robot
27
The Situated Infant
31
22 Action Loops
32
65 Decisions Decisions
117
66 The Brain Bites Back
121
The Neuroscientific Image
123
72 The Monkeys Fingers
124
From Feature Detection to Tuned Filters6
127
74 Neural Control Hypotheses
130
75 Refining Representation
135
Being Computing Representing
137

23 Development without Blueprints
35
24 Soft Assembly and Decentralized Solutions
38
25 Scaffolded Minds
41
26 Mind as Mirror vs Mind as Controller
43
Mind and World The Plastic Frontier
49
33 Leaning on the Environment
55
34 Planning and Problem Solving
59
35 After the Filing Cabinet
63
Collective Wisdom SlimeMoldStyle
67
42 Two Forms of Emergence
69
43 Sea and Anchor Detail
72
44 The Roots of Harmony
73
45 Modeling the Opportunistic Mind
76
A Capsule History
79
Explaining the Extended Mind
81
Evolving Robots
81
52 An Evolutionary Backdrop
82
53 Genetic Algorithms as Exploratory Tools
83
54 Evolving Embodied Intelligence
84
55 SIM Wars Get Real
88
56 Understanding Evolved Embodied Embedded Agents
91
Emergence and Explanation
97
63 Dynamical Systems and Emergent Explanation
107
64 Of Mathematicians and Engineers
113
83 ActionOriented Representation
143
84 Programs Forces and Partial Programs
147
85 Beating Time
154
86 Continuous Reciprocal Causation
157
87 RepresentationHungry Problems
160
88 Roots
164
89 Minimal Representationalism
170
Further
171
Minds and Markets
173
92 Lost in the Supermarket
174
94 Inside the Machine
180
95 Designer Environments
184
Language The Ultimate Artifact
187
102 Beyond Communication
188
103 Trading Spaces
194
The Mangrove Effect
201
105 The Fit of Language to Brain
205
106 Where Does the Mind Stop and the Rest of the World Begin?
207
Minds Brains and Tuna A Summary in Brine
213
A Brain Speaks
217
Notes
223
Bibliography
243
Index
259
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About the author (1998)

Andy Clark is Doctor of Philosophy at the School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences at the University of Sussex.

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