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

240 Pages·1996·2.37 MB·English

by  Andy Clark

Page iii

Being There
Putting Brain, Body, and World Together
Again
Andy Clark
A Bradford Book
The MIT Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England

Page iv

Second printing, 1997
© 1997 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical
means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in
writing from the publisher.
Set in Sabon by The MIT Press.
Printed and bound in the United States of America.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Clark, Andy.
Being there: putting brain, body, and world together again / Andy Clark.
p. cm.
"A Bradford book."
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 0-262-03240-6
1. Philosophy of mind. 2. Mind and body. 3. Cognitive science. 4. Artificial intelligence. I. Title.
BD418.3.C53 1996
153—dc20
96-11817
CIP
Cover illustration: Starcatcher (1956) by Remedios Varo. The author wishes to thank Walter Gruen for
his generosity in granting permission.

Page v

for my father, Jim Clark, the big Scot who taught me how to wonder. …
Page vii

Contents
Preface: Deep Thought Meets Fluent Action xi
Acknowledgments xv
Groundings xvii
Introduction: A Car with a Cockroach Brain 1
I Outing the Mind 9
1 Autonomous Agents: Walking on the Moon 11
1.1 Under the Volcano 11
1.2 The Robots' Parade 12
1.3 Minds without Models 21
1.4 Niche Work 23
1.5 A Feel for Detail? 25
1.6 The Refined Robot 31
2 The Situated Infant 35
2.1 I, Robot 35
2.2 Action Loops 36
2.3 Development without Blueprints 39
2.4 Soft Assembly and Decentralized Solutions 42
2.5 Scaffolded Minds 45
2.6 Mind as Mirror vs. Mind as Controller 47
3 Mind and World: The Plastic Frontier 53
3.1 The Leaky Mind 53
3.2 Neural Networks: An Unfinished Revolution 53
3.3 Leaning on the Environment 59
3.4 Planning
and
Problem
Solving
63
3.5 After the Filing Cabinet 67

Page viii

4 Collective Wisdom, Slime-Mold-Style 71
4.1 Slime Time 71
4.2 Two Forms of Emergence 73
4.3 Sea and Anchor Detail 76
4.4 The Roots of Harmony 77
4.5 Modeling the Opportunistic Mind 80
Intermission: A Capsule History 83
II Explaining the Extended Mind 85
5 Evolving Robots 87
5.1 The Slippery Strategems of the Embodied, Embedded Mind 87
5.2 An Evolutionary Backdrop 88
5.3 Genetic Algorithms as Exploratory Tools 89
5.4 Evolving Embodied Intelligence 90
5.5 SIM Wars (Get Real!) 94
5.6 Understanding Evolved, Embodied, Embedded Agents 97
6 Emergence and Explanation 103
6.1 Different Strokes? 103
6.2 From Parts to Wholes 103
6.3 Dynamical Systems and Emergent Explanation 113
6.4 Of Mathematicians and Engineers 119
6.5 Decisions, Decisions 123
6.6 The Brain Bites Back 127
7 The Neuroscientific Image 129
7.1 Brains: Why Bother? 129
7.2 The Monkey's Fingers 130
7.3 Primate Vision: From Feature Detection to Tuned Filters 133
7.4 Neural Control Hypotheses 136
7.5 Refining Representation 141
8 Being, Computing, Representing 143
8.1 Ninety Percent of (Artificial) Life? 143
8.2 What Is This Thing Called Representation? 143
8.3 Action-Oriented Representation 149
8.4 Programs, Forces, and Partial Programs 153
8.5 Beating Time 160

Page ix

8.6 Continuous Reciprocal Causation 163
8.7 Representation-Hungry Problems 166
8.8 Roots 170
8.9 Minimal Representationalism 174
III Further! 177
9 Minds and Markets 179
9.1 Wild Brains, Scaffolded Minds 179
9.2 Lost in the Supermarket 180
9.3 The Intelligent Office? 184
9.4 Inside the Machine 186
9.5 Designer Environments 190
10 Language: The Ultimate Artifact 193
10.1 Word Power 193
10.2 Beyond Communication 194
10.3 Trading Spaces 200
10.4 Thoughts about Thoughts: The Mangrove Effect 207
10.5 The Fit of Language to Brain 211
10.6 Where Does the Mind Stop and the Rest of the World Begin? 213
11 Minds, Brains, and Tuna (A Summary in Brine) 219
Epilogue 223
Notes 229
Bibliography 249
Index 265
Page xi

Preface: Deep Thought Meets Fluent Action
If you had to build an intelligent agent, where would you begin? What strikes you as the special
something that separates the unthinking world of rocks, waterfalls, and volcanos from the realms of
responsive intelligence? What is it that allows some parts of the natural order to survive by perceiving
and acting while the rest stay on the sidelines, thought-free and inert?
"Mind," "intellect," "ideas": these are the things that make the difference. But how should they be
understood? Such words conjure nebulous realms. We talk of "pure intellect,'' and we describe the
savant as "lost in thought." All too soon we are seduced by Descartes' vision: a vision of mind as a realm
quite distinct from body and world. 1 A realm whose essence owes nothing to the accidents of body and
surroundings. The (in)famous "Ghost in the Machine."2
Such extreme opposition between matter and mind has long since been abandoned. In its stead we find a
loose coalition of sciences of the mind whose common goal is to understand how thought itself is
materially possible. The coalition goes by the name cognitive science, and for more than thirty years
computer models of the mind have been among its major tools. Theorizing on the cusp between science
fiction and hard engineering, workers in the subfield known as artificial intelligence3 have tried to give
computational flesh to ideas about how the mind may arise out of the workings of a physical
machine—in our case, the brain. As Aaron Sloman once put it, "Every intelligent ghost must contain a
machine."4 The human brain, it seems, is the mechanistic underpinning of the human mind. When
evolution threw up complex brains, mobile bodies, and nervous systems, it opened the door (by purely
physical means) to whole new

Page xii

ways of living and adapting—ways that place us on one side of a natural divide, leaving volcanos,
waterfalls, and the rest of cognitively inert creation on the other.
But, for all that, a version of the old opposition between matter and mind persists. It persists in the way
we study brain and mind, excluding as "peripheral" the roles of the rest of the body and the local
environment. It persists in the tradition of modeling intelligence as the production of symbolically coded
solutions to symbolically expressed puzzles. It persists in the lack of attention to the ways the body and
local environment are literally built into the processing loops that result in intelligent action. And it
persists in the choice of problem domains: for example, we model chess playing by programs such as
Deep Thought 5 when we still can't get a real robot to successfully navigate a crowded room and we still
can't fully model the adaptive success of a cockroach.
In the natural context of body and world, the ways brains solve problems is fundamentally transformed.
This is not a deep philosophical fact (though it has profound consequences). It is a matter of practicality.
Jim Nevins, who works on computer-controlled assembly, cites a nice example. Faced with the problem
of how to get a computer-controlled machine to assemble tight-fitting components, one solution is to
exploit multiple feedback loops. These could tell the computer if it has failed to find a fit and allow it to
try to again in a slightly different orientation. This is, if you like, the solution by Pure Thought. The
solution by Embodied Thought is quite different. Just mount the assembler arms on rubber joints,
allowing them to give along two spatial axes. Once this is done, the computer can dispense with the fine-
grained feedback loops, as the parts "jiggle and slide into place as if millions of tiny feedback
adjustments to a rigid system were being continuously computed."6 This makes the crucial point that
treating cognition as pure problem solving invites us to abstract away from the very body and the very
world in which our brains evolved to guide us.
Might it not be more fruitful to think of brains as controllers for embodied activity? That small shift in
perspective has large implications for how we construct a science of the mind. It demands, in fact, a
sweeping reform in our whole way of thinking about intelligent behavior. It requires us to abandon the
idea (common since Descartes) of the mental

Page xiii

as a realm distinct from the realm of the body; to abandon the idea of neat dividing lines between
perception, cognition, and action 7; to abandon the idea of an executive center where the brain carries
out high-level reasoning8; and most of all, to abandon research methods that artificially divorce thought
from embodied action-taking.
What emerges is nothing less than a new science of the mind: a science that, to be sure, builds on the
fruits of three decades' cooperative research, but a science whose tools and models are surprisingly
different—a cognitive science of the embodied mind. This book is a testimony to that science. It traces
some of its origins, displays its flavor, and confronts some of its problems. It is surely not the last new
science of mind. But it is one more step along that most fascinating of journeys: the mind's quest to
know itself and its place in nature.