Check out this essay forthcoming from the power team of Clark, Kilverstein and Farina.
Sensory substitution devices are a type of sensory prosthesis that (typically) convert visual stimuli transduced by a camera into tactile or auditory stimulation. They are designed to be used by people with impaired vision so that they can recover some of the functions normally subserved by vision. In this chapter we will consider what philosophers might learn about the nature of the senses from the neuroscience of sensory substitution. We will show how sensory substitution devices work by exploiting the cross-modal plasticity of sensory cortex: the ability of sensory cortex to pick up some types of information about the external environment irrespective of the nature of the sensory inputs it is processing. We explore the implications of cross-modal plasticity for theories of the senses that attempt to make distinctions between the senses on the basis of neurobiology.
September 20, 2012
Short URL Andy Clark, Cognitive science, julian kilverstein, mirko farina, neuroscience, Philosophy of mind, Sensory cortex, Sensory substitution distributed cognition, distributed knowledge, embodied cognition, embodiment, enactivism, extended cognitive systems, extended mind, externalism
This from PCS
July 23, 2012
Short URL Clark, Cognition, Cognitive neuroscience, Cognitive science, complexity, consciousness, Consciousness Studies, David Chalmers, Extended Mind, Functional magnetic resonance imaging, Philosophy, Philosophy of mind distributed cognition, distributed knowledge, extended cognitive systems, extended mind, externalism
July 20, 2012
Short URL Artificial intelligence, Cognition, Cognitive science, Pierre-Paul Grassé, Spontaneous order, Stigmergy, Web 2.0, Web Design and Development, World Wide Web computational intelligence, computer science, distributed cognition, distributed knowledge, extended mind, externalism, stigmergic, stigmergic cognition, stigmergy
Well, this article was inevitable - first mentioned here). Francis Heylighen has been talking about this for a few years now as has myself in discussing Hayek, distributed cognition and co-evolved mind and sociality not to mention my ongoing interest in stigmergy which I argue is a species of EM.
Abstract: This article explores the notion of the Web-extended mind, which is the idea that the technological and informational elements of the Web can sometimes serve as part of the mechanistic substrate that realizes human mental states and processes. It is argued that while current forms of the Web may not be particularly suited to the realization of Web-extended minds, new forms of user interaction technology as well as new approaches to information representation do provide promising new opportunities for Web-based forms of cognitive extension. In addition, it is suggested that extended cognitive systems often rely on the emergence of social practices and conventions that shape how a technology is used. Web-extended minds may thus depend on forms of socio-technical co-evolution in which social forces and factors play just as important a role as do the processes of technology design and development.
Keywords: cognition, cognitive extension, cognitive technology, extended mind, Internet, linked data, Web science, World Wide Web.
July 17, 2012
Short URL Andy Clark, Cognition, Cognitive science, complexity, Extended Mind, Externalism, Francis Heylighen, Friedrich Hayek, Mind, Stigmergy complexity, distributed cognition, distributed knowledge, global brain, network theory, networks, neural networks, social connectionism, social epistemology, sociocognition, spontaneous orders, stigmergic, stigmergic cognition, stigmergy
Uncorrected proof of final contribution to Stigmergy 3.0 line-up.
July 5, 2012
Short URL complexity, Epistemology, Pierre-Paul Grassé, Spontaneous order, Stigmergy stigmergy, distributed knowledge, distributed cognition, stigmergic, stigmergic cognition, picbreeder
The latest in press article from the special issue.
July 1, 2012
Short URL Cognitive science, complexity, Construction, Spontaneous order, Stigmergy stigmergy, distributed knowledge, distributed cognition, stigmergic, stigmergic cognition, Lars Rune Christensen
The penultimate paper to the CSR EM issue by the super team of Theiner, Allen and Goldstone.
June 26, 2012
Short URL Cognition, Cognitive science, complexity, Extended Mind, Philosophy of mind, social epistemology, Social Sciences stigmergy, distributed knowledge, emergence, distributed cognition, collective intentionality, colin allen, robert goldstone, Georg Theiner, collective knowledge
Marge and my intro now available as an uncorrected proof. Stay tuned for the rest of the papers comprising this special issue.
According to Andy Clark “[M]uch of what goes on in the complex world of humans, may thus, somewhat surprisingly, be understood in terms of so-called stigmergic algorithms” (Clark, 1996, p. 279; 1997, p. 186). Pierre-Paul Grassé, the brilliant mind who first conceptualized the notion probably wouldn’t disagree (Grassé, 1959). Grassé was as much a zoologist as he was an entomologist. Under his editorship the monumental (17-volume) Traité de Zoologie, Anatomie, Systématique, Biologie was guided.
June 24, 2012
Short URL Andy Clark, Ant, Cognitive science, complexity, Grassé, Philosophy of mind, Pierre-Paul Grassé, social epistemology, Social Sciences, Spontaneous order, Stigmergy, Traité de Zoologie adam smith, complexity, distributed cognition, distributed knowledge, Don Lavoie, extended cognitive systems, extended mind, externalism, hayek, Herbert Simon, Margery Doyle, stigmergic, stigmergic cognition, stigmergy
My chum David Emanuel Andersson has just had this edited collection published. Here is an excerpt from his intro:
In what is perhaps the best-known article in the history of the Austrian school, Friedrich Hayek (1945) asserts that market prices distill and thus reflect the unique local knowledge of a multitude of individuals, each of whom resides and works in a particular place. Because only an autonomously acting individual can take advantage of her unique creativity, skills, and personal connections to others, centralization of economic decisionmaking guarantees that much useful local knowledge is irretrievably lost. It is impossible to communicate the totality of all local entrepreneurial ideas and tacit knowledge to a small group of top-down planners; their cognitive limitations guarantee substandard economic performance (Hayek, 1952). We should therefore not be surprised that it is valuable to possess ‘‘knowledge of people, of local conditions, and special circumstances’’ (Hayek, 1945, p. 522). Given the great number of citations to Hayek (1945) in the general economics literature, it would require no great stretch of the imagination to imagine that Hayek – and by extension the Austrian school – had set in motion a way of theorizing about economic phenomena that later gave rise to theories about knowledge spillovers, urbanization economies, and local social networks. But this was not to be. There are virtually no references to Hayek or any other Austrian economist in the spatial economics literature prior to the year 2000. The lack of interest in Austrian economics among spatial economists was reciprocated by a similar lack of interest in spatial economics among self-professed Austrians. To my knowledge, Pierre Desrochers (1998) wrote the first explicitly Austrian contribution that deals exclusively with spatial economic phenomena. In spite of this historical disconnect, Austrian ideas have entered the spatial economics, economic geography, and urban planning literatures because of the close parallels between the influential ideas of the urbanist Jane Jacobs and Austrian market process theory. While Jacobs (1961) does not refer to Hayek or any other Austrian, her Death and Life of Great American Cities at times reads like an Austrian theory of urban planning: [N]obody, including the planning commission, is capable of comprehending places within the city other than in either generalized or fragmented fashion. They do not even have the means of gathering and comprehending the intimate, many-sided information required, partly because of their own unsuitable structural inadequacies in other departments. Here is an interesting thing about coordination both of information and of action in cities, and it is the crux of the matter: The principal coordination needed comes down to coordination among different services within localized places. This is at once the most difficult kind of coordination, and the most necessary. (Jacobs, 1961, quoted in Ikeda, 2006, p. 22) With her emphases on (implicit) methodological individualism, the importance of local knowledge, and complex evolving orders, Jacobs provides a rich source of insights for those who wish to combine Austrian economic theory with a dynamic approach to agglomeration economies. Such a dynamic approach focuses on entrepreneurial processes rather than on idealized equilibrium states. Unsurprisingly, both Hayek and Jacobs figure prominently in this volume. But they are far from the only influences. This book is a collection of 13 essays that address spatial aspects of the market process from refreshingly diverse approaches. They range from the extension of Austrian theory to spatial phenomena over hybrid combinations of ideas from distinct traditions to state-of-the-art spatial models that integrate Austrian concepts such as ‘‘roundaboutness’’ or entrepreneurial innovation.
June 22, 2012
Short URL Austrian School, Friedrich Hayek, Hayek, Jane Jacobs, Social Sciences social epistemology, liberalism, distributed knowledge, philosophy of social science, complexity, distributed cognition, David Emanuel Andersson, philosophy of economics, spontaneous orders, complex adaptive systems, individualism, spatial economics
Here is a recent paper kindly brought to my attention by the author.
To achieve the aim of establishing the case for externalist neuroeconomics, I rely on other approaches to externalism in the cognitive sciences which focus on the role of external causal processes establishing mental phenomena in terms of interactions between neuronal states and external facts. These approaches are to be found in the growing literature on “distributed cognition” or the “extended mind” (e.g., Clark, 2011; Hutchins, 1995; Hutchins, 2005; Sterelny, 2004; Ross, Spurrett, Kincaid, & Stephens, 2007; for a critical view, see, e.g., Sprevak, 2009). In this literature, the operations of the human mind are seen as being fundamentally dependent on external facts, referring not only to the obvious role of devices which leverage cognitive skills, but more fundamentally to the externalization of all cognitive processes in the sense that cognitive performance essentially involves the external world and includes both physical entities and social interaction. Therefore, a straightforward sketch of an externalist approach that is different from the externalism of standard economics is possible. This would offer a fresh view on neuroeconomics (for a related argument, see Wilcox, 2008). In this view, if one continued to use the term “utility” in explaining human choice, “utility” would not correspond exclusively to a neuronal state in a neuro-reductionist approach, but to a causal conjunction between a neuronal state and an external fact.
June 15, 2012
Short URL Andy Clark, Cognition, Cognitive neuroscience, Cognitive science, Extended Mind, Externalism, Internalism and externalism, neuroscience, philosophical psychology, Philosophy of mind, social epistemology Carsten Herrmann-Pillath, distributed cognition, distributed knowledge, extended mind, externalism, neuroeconomics, neurophilosophy