Check out this recent(ish) paper by Andy Clark in Mind Vol. 118 . 472 . October 2009
Is consciousness all in the head, or might the minimal physical substrate for some forms of conscious experience include the goings on in the (rest of the) body and the world? Such a view might be dubbed (by analogy with Clark and Chalmers’s (1998) claims concerning ‘the extended mind’) ‘the extended conscious mind’. In this article, I review a variety of arguments for the extended conscious mind, and find them flawed. Arguments for extended cognition, I conclude, do not generalize to arguments for an extended conscious mind.
Here is the wonderfully lucid and often provocative Maggie Boden being interviewed. Check out her monumental Mind as Machine. Few, if any, are better placed to offer such a wide perspective of this wildly exciting field.
Here’s the penultimate draft of the aforementioned paper by Julian Kiverstein and Mirko Farina:
Abstract: Like many other studies, this paper focuses on the ways in which the functional isomorphism between neural and extra-neural features can provide the means to meet the criteria for cognitive extension. However, unlike these other studies, this paper acknowledges the stalemate into which the debate over Extended and Embedded has fallen. While surveying the literature directed at the functionalist version of Extended Mind, we investigate the feasibility of the complementarity approach. By exploring the offshoots of recent studies encompassing developmental niche construction, neural development and nurtured cognitive structures, we attempt to validate this complementarity alternative and in bringing it back to fore thereby escape the apparent impasse.
Check out the very important work being done by Roger Koppl and his associate Jim Cowan of the Institute for Forensic Science Administration (for an accessible overview of Roger and Jim’s work see Roger’s Forbes interview from a few years back). To get a sense just how vital their work is consider the stats cited in their paper:
There are over one million felony convictions per year. Risinger (2007) has established that the “minimum factual wrongful conviction rate” for capital rape-murders from 1982 through 1989 is at least 3.3% (pp. 768 & 778). The study of Saks and Koehler (2005) suggests that about two thirds of false convictions arise in part from forensic science testing errors or false or misleading forensic science testimony. Multiplying these numbers gives you a number greater than 20,000.
Extended cognition is the view that some cognitive processes extend beyond the brain. One prominent strategy of arguing against extended cognition is to offer necessary conditions on cognition and argue that the proposed extended processes fail to satisfy these conditions (Adams and Aizawa, 2008; Rupert, 2010; Weiskopf, 2008). I argue that this strategy is misguided and fails to refute extended cognition. I suggest a better way to evaluate the case for extended cognition that should be acceptable to all parties, captures the intuitiveness of previous objections, and avoids the problems with the strategy of offering necessary conditions on cognition. I conclude that extended cognition theorists have failed to establish the truth of extended cognition.
Today marks the death of Robert Nozick one of the most versatile philosophers of the last quarter of the 20th Century. The more I read Nozick, the more astonishing his talent seems to be. He writes with such subtle twists about so many issues from politics to epistemology to identity to consciousness, to ethics to philosophical method – with great humility and aplomb. Philosophical Explanations is amazing for its clarity and its “meaning of life” purview for somebody within the analytical tradition. Though I admire the quality of Nozick’s mind I don’t think he led in any interesting directions. Anarchy, State and Utopia is full of clever arguments but there are counter-arguments as well (yet another mind, along with Hayek, misappropriated by the ideological libertarians). The book rests on assumptions about rights which are never made good anywhere in Nozick’s work. PE treats of ethics but doesn’t say anything about how the rights-talk of ASU can be supported. The epistemological parts of PE are a blind alley: his tracking theory doesn’t work for knowledge – or for value. He was a brilliant firework, spectacular in full blaze, then leaving us as much in the dark as ever. This said, he remains one of my favourite philosophers up there with Ryle.
A view that chimes with mine is by Alan Ryan and can be found in The Independent. A rather dull obituary can be found in The Telegraph. Here is a piece from the Harvard Gazette written by none other than Putnam, Scanlon, Scarry and Cavell. For a thoroughly uninformed (not to mention the typos) obituary see The Guardian. I briefly made contact with Nozick on the publication of his last bookprimarily because of the chapter on Truth and Relativism which was well within the EPISTEME remit. I wanted to ask if he’d care to become an honorary founding editor of EPISTEME: I had no idea just how ill he was. It was not to be.
I’m surprised that I couldn’t find any recordings (video or audio) of Nozick. Here is a recording that I assume is of Nozick.
The new issue of Swarm Intelligence is now available. The excerpt below from the editors’ introduction – they may not realise it, but it this is as Hayekian as one can get:
Swarm Cognition is a novel multidisciplinary approach that encompasses research in neurosciences, cognitive psychology, social ethology and swarm intelligence, with the aim of studying cognition as an emergent collective phenomenon in which perception, attention, decision making and other cognitive processes are brought forth by a multitude of elementary units tightly interacting among each other. Within the Swarm Cognition framework a broad view of cognition is adopted, so that its definition also includes the behaviour displayed in a distributed system like an ant colony. Indeed, an ant colony can display complex cognitive functions as a result of the interactions among the system components. The parallel with brain activities is straightforward. An ant is part of a colony, much as a neuron is part of a brain. An ant cannot do much in isolation, but a colony is a highly resilient adaptive system. Similarly, a neuron is individually able to only make limited interactions with other neurons, but the brain is capable of highly complex cognitive processes. In other words, both ants and neurons behave/act in perfect harmony with other conspecifics/cells to accomplish tasks that go beyond the capability of a single individual. Out of metaphor, Swarm Cognition aims at studying cognitive processes as the emergent result of the collective dynamics in a distributed system, be the system composed of autonomous agents like ants or basic control units like neurons.
Therefore, Swarm Cognition can be considered part of swarm intelligence, above all for those studies that recognise cognitive processes in the behaviour of distributed systems. In this respect, swarm intelligence can offer a wide range of tools and techniques to understand, study and implement complex behaviour in distributed systems. Swarm Cognition can broaden the perspective of swarm intelligence by applying such techniques to the study of cognitive behaviour, and by exploring the relationship of the behaviour of complex distributed systems with studies in neuro- and cognitive sciences, which are not commonly targeted in the context of swarm intelligence.
Here is a recently published entry on F.H. Bradley for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. To my mind, Bradley was the most formidable of the British idealists. I treasure my first edition copy of Appearance and Reality.
