Robots
The Volume 18, Number 1 issue of Scientific American Reports is a special edition on robotics. The following articles feature: 1. Bill Gates’s “A Robot in Every Home” concentrates on such commonplace items as the vacuum cleaner and not the…
Category Archive Browsing Category: extended mind
Browse by:
Bounds of Cognition II
Press release cum interview for The Bounds of Cognition, a book I have already heartily recommended. I’m pleased to say that the authors are contributing to a themed issue of the Journal of Mind and Behavior on the “extended mind” that I’m editing.
Cognition unbound
It seems that the notion of embodied cognition is seeing a spike in the release of new books – not to mention that the mainstream media has now picked up the idea. I’ve already mentioned the Boston Globe piece. I’ve since discovered that there is an NPR piece plugging the Blakeslees’ The Body Has a Mind of Its Own. Other recent similar titles…
Embodied Cognition
On my daily train commute into Boston I was asked by another regular commuter what book I was reading – I showed him Adams’ & Aizawa’s The Bounds of Cognition. After reading the dust jacket blurb he then gave a surprisingly detailed “man on the Clapham omnibus” account of what he took to be “the body…
Plasticizing a “computer brain”
This from today’s Jerusalem Post. What’s particularly interesting is that were a biological computer a real possibility, this would vindicate the extended mind thesis. Prof. Eshel Ben-Jacob of TAU’s faculty of exact sciences and his research assistant Dr. Itay Baruchi were chosen for their innovative work in brain research and their success in creating a memory-…
Hayek on distributed knowledge
Cass Sunstein writes on the TPM Blog that Hayek’s ideas of distributed knowledge “bear directly on open source software, wikis, prediction markets, and perhaps much more”. Yes, indeed. The mechanism that captures this aggregating phenomenon is called STIGMERGY: the phenomenon of indirect communication mediated by modifications of the environment. Indeed, much of what goes on in the complex…
From Ants to People, an Instinct to Swarm
Some four months ago I commented on how swarm behavior is entering the public consciousness. Well there is an article in yesterday’s the science section of the New York Times that continues this trend. But if you want a really good recent article on swarm intelligence, I would refer you to the paper “The biological principles…
Natural-born Cyborgs
A copy of my review of Andy Clark’s Natural-Born Cyborgs is now available through MindPapers.
Stigmergic epistemology, stigmergic cognition
My recent co-authored paper now available to download through MindPapers. The abstract: To know is to cognize, to cognize is to be a culturally bounded, rationality-bounded and environmentally located agent. Knowledge and cognition are thus dual aspects of human sociality. If social epistemology has the formation, acquisition, mediation, transmission and dissemination of knowledge in complex…
The Outsourced Brain
A journalistic take on what is essentially active externalism or the thesis of the extended mind. David Brooks (yes, THAT David Brooks) implicitly refers to notions of collaborative filtering, swarming, stigmergy, and even memetics. Of course, one suspects that Brooks has only the slighest conceptual inkling of what’s going on. Notions of the extended mind enjoy currency both in academic and popular literature: the ‘‘global…
manwithoutqualities 