Supersizing the Mind

Studies of mind, thought and reason have tended to marginalize the role of bodily form, real-world action, and environmental backdrop. In recent years, both in philosophy and cognitive science, this tendency has been identified and, increasingly, resisted. The result is a plethora of work on what has become known as embodied, situated, distributed, and even 'extended' cognition. Work in this new, loosely knit field depicts thought and reason as in some way inextricably tied to the details of our gross bodily form, our habits of action and intervention, and the enabling web of social, cultural, and technological scaffolding in which we live, move, learn, and think. But exactly what kind of link is at issue? And what difference might such a link or links make to our best philosophical, psychological, and computational models of thought and reason? These are among the large unsolved problems in this increasingly popular field. Drawing upon recent work in psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, robotics, human-computer systems, and beyond, Supersizing the Mind offers both a tour of the emerging landscape, and a sustained argument in favor of one approach to the key issues. That approach combines the use of representational, computational, and information-theoretic tools with an appreciation of the importance of context, timing, biomechanics, and dynamics. More controversially, it depicts some coalitions of biological and non-biological resources as the extended cognitive circuitry of individual minds. With a substantial foreword by David Chalmers, Supersizing the Mind is essential reading for all those interested in embodied cognition, the extended mind, and the likely shape of twenty-first century cognitive scientific explanation.

Andy Clark is Professor of Philosophy in the School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences, at Edinburgh University in Scotland. He is the author of several books including Being There: Putting Brain, Body and World Together Again (1997) and Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies and The Future Of Human Intelligence (OUP, 2003). His research interests include robotics and artificial life, the cognitive role of human-built structures, specialization and interactive dynamics in neural systems, and the interplay between language, thought and action.