Citations related to MIND (Philosophy of ...) and to WHAT IS KNOWING (works cited listed at bottom):

"The tale of the tuna reminds us that biological systems profit profoundly from local environmental structure. The environment is not best conceived solely as a problem domain to be negotiated. It is equally, and crucially, a resource to be factored into the solutions. This simple observation has, as we have seen, some far-reaching consequences.

"First and foremost, we must recognize the brain for what it is. Ours are not the brains of disembodied spirits conveniently glued into ambulant, corporeal shells of flesh and blood. Rather, they are essentially the brains of embodied agents capable of creating and exploiting structure in the world. Conceived as controllers of embodied action, brains will sometimes devote considerable energy not to the direct, one-stop solution of a problem, but to the control and exploitation of environmental structures. Such structures, molded by an iterated sequence of brain-world interactions, can alter and transform the original problem until it takes a form that can be managed with the limited resources of pattern-completing, neural-network-style cognition.

"Second, we should therefore beware of mistaking the problem-solving profile of the embodied, socially and environmentally embedded mind for that of the basic brain. Just because humans can do logic and science, we should not assume that the brain contains a full-blown logic engine or that it encodes scientific theories in ways akin to their standard expression in words and sentences. Instead, both logic and science rely heavily on the use and manipulation of external media, especially the formalisms of language and logic and the capacities of storage, transmission, and refinement provided by cultural institutions and by the use of spoken and written text. These resources, I have argued, are best seen as alien but complementary to the brain's style of storage and computation. The brain need not waste its time replicating such capacities. Rather, it must learn to interface with the external media in ways that maximally exploit their peculiar virtues.

"Third, we must begin to face up to some rather puzzling (dare I say metaphysical?) questions. For starters, the nature and the bounds of the intelligent agent look increasingly fuzzy. Gone is the central executive in the brain--the real boss who organizes and integrates the activities of multiple special-purpose subsystems. And gone is the neat boundary between the thinker (the bodiless intellectual engine) and the thinker's world. In place of this comforting image we confront a vision of mind as a grab bag of inner agencies whose computation roles are often best described by including aspects of the local environment (both in complex control loops and in a variety of information transformations and manipulations). In light of all this, it may for some purposes be wise to consider the intelligent system as a spatio-temporally extended process not limited by the tenuous envelope of skin and skull. Less dramatically, the traditional divisions among perception, cognition, and action look increasingly unhelpful." Clark, Andy, Being There: Putting brain, Body, and World Together Again, MIT Press, 1997. pp. 220-1.


“Mind and matter are constructs, whereas pure experience, which is neutral between the two, is primordial. One implication of the hypothesis that we are directly acquainted with reality is that the contents of consciousness can no longer be regarded as being ‘in the mind’ (let alone in the brain). Reality just is the flux of experience.” Wallace, B. Alan. The Taboo of Subjectivity: Toward a New Science of Consciousness. Oxford University Press. 2000. p. 63


“Representation implies symbolic activity, an activity that is certainly at the center of our semantic and syntactical language skills. It is no wonder that in thinking about how the brain can repeat a performance–that it can, for example, call up what may appear to be an image already experienced–we are tempted to say that the brain represents. The flaws in yielding to this temptation, however, are obvious: There is no precoded message in the signal, no structures capable of the high-precision storage of a code, no judge in nature to provide decisions on alternative patterns, and no homunculus in the head to read a message. For these reasons, memory in the brain cannot be representation in the same way as it is in our devices.” Edelman, Gerald and Tononi, Giulio. A Universe of Consciousness: How Matter becomes Imagination. Basic Books. 2000. p. 94.


“...the key conclusion is that whatever its form, memory itself is a system property. It cannot be equated exclusively with circuitry, with synaptic changes, with biochemistry, with value constraints, or with behavioral dynamics. Instead, it is the dynamic result of the interactions of all these factors acting together, serving to select an output that repeats a performance or an act.” Edelman, Gerald and Tononi, Giulio. A Universe of Consciousness: How Matter becomes Imagination. Basic Books. 2000. p. 99.


"There is no single, definitive 'stream of consciousness,' because there is no central Headquarters, no Cartesian Theater where 'it all comes together' for the perusal of a Central Meaner. Instead of such a single stream (however wide), there are multiple channels in which specialist circuits try, in parallel pandemoniums, to do their various things, creating Multiple Drafts as they go. Most of these fragmentary drafts of 'narrative' play short-lived roles in the modulation of current activity but some get promoted to further functional roles, in swift succession, by the activity of a virtual machine in the brain. The seriality of this machine (its 'von Neumannesque' character) is not a 'hard-wired' design feature, but rather the upshot of a succession of coalitions of these specialists.

"The basic specialists are part of our animal heritage. They were not developed to perform peculiarly human actions, such as reading and writing, but ducking, predator-avoiding, face-recognizing, grasping, throwing, berry-picking, and other essential tasks. They are often opportunistically enlisted in new roles, for which their native talents more or less suit them. The result is not bedlam only because the trends that are imposed on all this activity are themselves the product of design. Some of this design is innate, and is shared with other animals. But it is augmented, and sometimes even overwhelmed in importance, by microhabits of thought that are developed in the individual, partly idiosyncratic results of self-exploration and partly the predesigned gifts of culture. Thousands of memes, mostly borne by language, but also by wordless 'images' and other data structures, take up residence in an individual brain, shaping its tendencies and thereby turning it into a mind." Dennett, Daniel, Consciousness Explained, Little, Brown and Company, 1991, pps. 253-4.


"The existence of developmental principles leading to variance in connections and to overlapping arbors with unidentifiable (and not necessarily repeatable) patterns of synapses creates a crisis for those who believe that the nervous system is precise and 'hardwired' like a computer. We may ask 'How has this crisis been met, when it has been recognized at all, by those who believe in the idea of the brain as a computer?

"First, these explanations dismiss variations below a certain microscopic level as 'noise,,' a necessary consequence of the developmental dilemma. Second, they deal with the absence of uniquely specified connections by arguing that higher levels of organization such as maps either do not need such connections or compensate for their absence in some fashion. And third, they explain the absence of precisely identified synaptic inputs by assuming that neurons use a code similar to those used to identify phone credit card or computer users. In neurons, the place and time codes presumably relate to the frequency, spacing, or type of neuronal electrical activity, or to the kinds of chemical transmitters with which they are associated. Notice, however, that these explanations assume that individual neurons carry information, just as some electronic devices carry information. I argue later that this is not a defensible assumption and that these explanations are inadequate. No convincing evidence for the kinds of codes that humans use in telegraphy, computing, or other forms of human communication has been found in the human nervous system.

"This brings us to some deeper riddles for those who would propose that the brain is a kind of computer. These riddles constitute a set of functional crises pertaining to physiology and to psychology. The first is this: If one explores the microscopic network of synapses with electrodes to detect the results of electrical firing, the majority of synapses are not expressed, that is, they show no detectable firing activity. They are what have been called 'silent synapses.' But why are they silent, and how does their silence relate to the signals, codes, or messages that they are supposed to be carrying?

"A second dilemma concerns the functions and interactions of maps of the kind we have already considered for the retinotectal system. Despite the conventional wisdom of anatomy books, these maps are not fixed; in some brain areas, there are major fluctuations in the borders of maps over time. Moreover, maps in each different individual appear to be unique. Most strikingly, the variability of maps in adult animals depends on the available signal input. This might not seem to pose a dilemma at first; after all, computers change theirs 'maps' or tables on the alteration of software. But the functioning maps of the nervous system are based on anatomical maps--and at this anatomical level, they are changed in the adult brain only by the death of neurons. If the functioning neural maps are changing as a result of 'software' changes, what is the code that gives two different individuals with variant anatomical maps the same output or result? One standard explanation is to say that there are alternative systems in the brain that handle changing input, each alternative fixed and hard-wired but switched in or out by changing input. The facts show, however, that the variance of neural maps is not discrete or two-valued but rather continuous, fine-grained, and extensive. Thus, the number of alternatives would have to be very large.

"Another set of observations brings us to psychological dilemmas of the most profound kind. They cast doubt on the idea that the complex behavior of animals with complex brains can be explained solely be 'learning.' Indeed, this crisis highlights the fundamental problem of neuroscience: How can an animal initially confront a small number of 'events' or 'objects' and after this exposure adaptively categorize of recognize an indefinite number of novel objects (even in a variety of contexts) as being similar or identical to the small set that it first encountered? How can an animal, in the absence of a teacher, recognize an object at all? How can it then generalize and 'construct a universal' in the absence of that object or even in its presence? This kind of generalization occurs without language in animals such as pigeons, as I discuss later on.

"Explanations of these challenging problems tend either to rely on the existence of hidden cues, not obvious to the experimenter, or to treat the world of the responding organism as if its 'objects' or 'events' came with labels on them. But in reality, the world, with its 'objects,' is an unlabeled place; the number of ways in which macroscopic boundaries in an animal's environment can be partitioned by that animal into objects is very large, if not infinite. Any assignment of boundaries made by an animal is relative, not absolute, and depends on its adaptive or intended needs.

"What is striking is that the ability to partition 'objects' and their arrangements depends on the functioning of the maps that we discussed earlier. But how do maps interact to give definition of objects and clear-cut action or behavior? In human beings, a consideration of this question leads to what I call the homunculus crisis: the unitary appearance to a perceiver of perceptual processes that are known to be based on multiple and complex parallel subprocesses and on many maps." Edelman, Gerald, Bright Air, Brilliant Fire; on the Matter of the Mind, Basic, 1992, 27-8.


“This unity with our body, however, is no more strict identity than is our unity with our own past experience. Rather: ‘The body is that portion of nature with which each moment of human experience intimately cooperates. There is an inflow and outflow of factors between the bodily actuality and the human experience, so that each shares in the existence of the other.’ Griffin, David Ray. Unsnarling the World-Knot: Consciousness, Freedom, and the Mind-Body Problem. University of California Press. 1998. p. 148. Subquote is from Alfred North Whitehead, Modes of Thought, 1938. p. 115.


"Individuals in possession of reading, writing, and other visuo-graphic skills thus become somewhat like computers with networking capabilities; they are equipped to interface, to plug into whatever network becomes available. And once plugged in, their skills are determined by both the network and their own biological inheritance. Humans without such skills are isolated from the external memory system, somewhat like a computer that lacks the input/output devices needed to link up with a network. Network codes are collectively held by specified groups of people; those who possess the code, and the right of access, share a common source of representations and the knowledge encoded therein. Therefore, they share a common memory system; and as the data base in that system expands far beyond the mastery of any single individual, the system becomes by far the greatest determining factor in the cognitions of individuals.

"The memory system, once collectivized into the external symbolic storage system, becomes virtually unlimited in capacity and much more robust and precise. Thought moves from the relatively informal narrative ramblings of the isolated mind to the collective arena, and ideas thus accumulate over the centuries until they acquire the precision of continuously refined exterior devices, of which the prime example is modern science. But science, ubiquitous though it is at present, is atypical in historical terms. Human cultural products have usually been stored in less obviously systematic forms: religions, rituals, oral literary traditions, carvings, songs–in fact, in any cultural device that allows some form of enduring externalized memory, with rules and routes of access." Donald, Merlin. Origins of the Modern Mind. Harvard University Press. 1991. p. 311.


“The need to make a coherent, conscious scene out of seemingly disparate elements is seen at all levels and in all modalities of consciousness.” Edelman, Gerald and Tononi, Giulio. A Universe of Consciousness: How Matter becomes Imagination. Basic Books. 2000. p. 26.


“However, anatomical segregation is only half the story. The other half is anatomical integration:” Edelman, Gerald and Tononi, Giulio. A Universe of Consciousness: How Matter becomes Imagination. Basic Books. 2000. p. 44.


“...reentry allows for a unity of perception and behavior that would otherwise be impossible, given the absence in the brain of a unique, computerlike central processor with detailed instructions or of algorithmic calculations for the coordination of functionally segregated areas.” Edelman, Gerald and Tononi, Giulio. A Universe of Consciousness: How Matter becomes Imagination. Basic Books. 2000. p. 49.


“In another series of experiments focused on the motor side of consciousness, Libet showed that the conscious intention to act appears only after a delay of about 350 msec from the onset of specific cerebral activity that precedes a voluntary act.” Edelman, Gerald and Tononi, Giulio. A Universe of Consciousness: How Matter becomes Imagination. Basic Books. 2000. p. 69.


“The three-way fracturing of the emotion category into socially sustained pretenses, affect program responses and higher cognitive states extends to many specific emotion categories, such as anger. Some instances of anger fall into each of these three categories.” Griffiths, Paul E. What Emotions Really Are. University of Chicago Press. 1997. p. 17.


"Holding as we do that, while knowledge of any kind is a thing to be honoured and prized, one kind of it may, either by reason of its greater exactness or of a higher dignity and greater wonderfulness in its objects, be more honourable and precious than another, on both accounts we should naturally be led to place in the front rank the study of the soul. The knowledge of the soul admittedly contributes greatly to the advance of truth in general, and, above all, to our understanding of Nature, for the soul is in some sense the principle of animal life....

"A further problem presented by the affections of soul is this: are they all affections of the complex of body and soul, or is there any one among them peculiar to the soul by itself? To determine this is indispensable but difficult. If we consider the majority of them, there seems to be no case in which the soul can act or be acted upon without involving the body, e.g., anger, courage, appetite, and sensation generally. Thinking seems the most probable exception; but if this too proves to be a form of imagination or to be impossible without imagination, it too requires a body as a condition of its existence." Aristotle. Psychology. c. 350 B.C., translated by J.A. Smith, from Book I, The Pocket Aristotle. Washington Square Press. 1958. pp. 50, 52.


“In the twentieth century, scientific materialism was the ideology that suppressed modes of inquiry into mental phenomena that do not conform to its principles. Modern science began, with the Copernican Revolution, by displacing humanity from the center of the natural world, but scientific materialism has gone to the extreme of denying human subjectiviy any place at all in the natural world. This dogma would rather deny the existence of introspection, or at least marginalize its significance, than acknowledge that, four hundred years after the Scientific Revolution, we still have no scientific means of exploring consciousness directly. In this regard, we are right now in a dark age; but the extent of our ignorance of mental phenomena is obscured by the extraordinary progress that has been made in the physical sciences, including modern neuroscience.” The Taboo of Subjectivity: Toward a New Science of Consciousness. B. Alan Wallace. Oxford University Press. 2000. p. 88


“After four centuries of advances in scientific knowledge, more than a century of psychological research, and roughly a half century of progress in the neurosciences, even most advocates of scientism acknowledge that science has yet to give any intelligible account of the nature of consciousness. Nevertheless, the extent of our ignorance concerning consciousness is often overlooked. This ignorance is like a retinal blind spot in the scientific vision of the world, of which modern society seems largely unaware.” The Taboo of Subjectivity: Toward a New Science of Consciousness. B. Alan Wallace. Oxford University Press. 2000. p. 145.


“However, we emphatically do not identify consciousness in its full range as arising solely in the brain, since we believe that higher brain functions require interactions both with the world and with other persons.” Edelman, Gerald and Tononi, Giulio. A Universe of Consciousness: How Matter becomes Imagination. Basic Books. 2000. p. xii.


"Regular vigilance gradually turned into regular exploration, and a new behavioral strategy began to evolve; the strategy of acquiring information 'for its own sake,' just in case it might prove valuable someday. Most mammals were attracted to this strategy, especially primates, who developed highly mobile eyes, which, via saccades, provided almost uninterrupted scanning of the world. This marked a rather fundamental shift in the economy of the organisms that made this leap: the birth of curiosity, or epistemic hunger. Instead of gathering information only on a pay-as-you-go, use-it-immediately basis, they began to become what the psychologist George Miller has called informavores: organisms hungry for further information about the world they inhabited (and about themselves). Consciousness Explained, Daniel Dennett, Little, Brown and Company, 1991, pps. 180-1.


“... we will see not only that biological and mental processes are isomorphic but that, when taken together, they constitute yet another complex adaptive system.” Taylor, Mark C. The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture. University of Chicago. 2001. p. 206.


[Claim of] “Strong continuity: Life and mind have a common abstract pattern. The functional properties characteristic of mind are enriched versions of the functional properties that are fundamental to life in general.” Godfrey-Smith, Peter. Complexity and the Function of Mind in Nature. Cambridge University Press. 1996. p. 73.


“...the understanding of intentionality and causality requires the individual to understand the mediating forces in these external events that explain ‘why’ a particular antecedent-consequent sequence occurs as it does–and these mediating forces are typically not readily observable.” Tomasello, Michael. The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition. Harvard University Press. 1999. p. 23.


“Neurons come in two flavors, excitatory and inhibitory,...” Edelman, Gerald and Tononi, Giulio. A Universe of Consciousness: How Matter becomes Imagination. Basic Books. 2000. p. 40.


“The afflictions of the mind are naturally calmed when the mind is settled in a state of nongrasping, and the clear and empty nature of awaeness is vividly perceived. Whenever thoughts arise, one simply observes them without aversion or approval, and by so doing, thoughts no longer impede the cultivation of sustained attention, nor do they obscure the nature of consciousness. This practice is sometimes elucidated with the analogy of a raven at sea. According to ancient Indian tradition, when a ship went out to sea, a raven was brought along; and when the navigator wanted to know whether he had come near shore, he would release the raven. As in the biblical account of Noah and the ark, if there was no land nearby, the raven would circle around and around, and eventually alight back on the ship. Likewise, in this contemplative practice, one releases the mind so that thoughts flow out freely, without suppressing any of them. As long as thoughts are arising, one observes them without interference, and eventually they disappear, or ‘alight’ back in the nature of awareness from which they originated. With sustained practice, without ever suppressing ideation, the mind becomes still and conceptual dispersion ceases of its own accord.” The Taboo of Subjectivity: Toward a New Science of Consciousness. B. Alan Wallace. Oxford University Press. 2000. p. 111.


“While there are valid and invalid cognitions, there are no valid and invalid brain states, any more than there are meaningful and meaningless brain states.” The Taboo of Subjectivity: Toward a New Science of Consciousness. B. Alan Wallace. Oxford University Press. 2000. p. 132.


“The noosphere is a product of the biosphere as transformed by human knowledge and action.”

“The noosphere represents an ultimate and inevitable sphere of evolution.”

“The noosphere is a manifestation of global mind.”

“The noosphere is the mental sphere in which change and creativity are inherent although essentially unpredictable.” Samson, Paul and David Pitt. The Biosphere and Noosphere Reader. Routledge. 1999. Pps. 2-3.


“We should then be proceeding precisely on the lines of Copernicus’ primary hypothesis. Failing of satisfactory progress in explaining the movements of the heavenly bodies on the supposition that they all revolved round the spectator, he tried whether he might not have better success if he made the spectator to revolve and the stars to remain at rest. A similar experiment can be tried in metaphysics, as regards the intuition of objects. If intuition must conform to the constitution of the objects, I do not see how we could know anything of the latter a priori; but if the object (as object of the senses) must conform to the constitution of our faculty of intuition, I have no difficulty in conceiving such a possibility.” Jay Ogilvy’s quote from Kant, I., Preface to the Critique of Pure Reason, on page 25-6 of his “Coming Together” article from CTR conference on evolution and consciousness (Preface to the Second Edition, p. 22 (B xvi-xvii); tr. Norman Kemp Smith, St. Martin’s Press, New York, 1961.


“...the key conclusion is that whatever its form, memory itself is a system property. It cannot be equated exclusively with circuitry, with synaptiic changes, with biochemistry, with value constraints, or with behavioral dynamics. Instead, it is the dynamic result of the interactions of all these factors acting together, serving to select an output that repeats a performance or an act.” Edelman, Gerald & Tononi, Giulio. A Universe of Consciousness: How Matter Becomes Imagination. Basic Books. 2000. P. 99.



"The view we advocate here is reflected by a growing body of research in cognitive science. In areas as diverse as the theory of situated cognition (Suchman 1987), studies of real-world-robotics (Beer 1989), dynamical approaches to child development (Thelen and Smith 1994), and research on the cognitive properties of collectives of agents (Hutchins 1995), cognition is often taken to be continuous with processes in the environment." Clark, Andy & Chalmers, David. "The Extended Mind." Analysis 58.1 January 1998. p. 10.


“Figure and ground are aspects of human cognition. They are not features of objective, mind-independent reality.” Johnson, Mark & George Lakoff. Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought. Basic Books. 1999. P. 198.


“The structure of concepts includes prototypes of various sorts: typical cases, ideal cases, social stereotypes, salient exemplars, cognitive reference points, end points of graded scales, nightmare cases, and so on. Each type of prototype uses a distinct form of reasoning. Most concepts are not characterized by necessary and sufficient conditions.” Johnson, Mark & George Lakoff. Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought. Basic Books. 1999. P. 77.


“Up to about eight months of age, infants interact with the world, including other people, largely in terms of what Piaget called sensori-motor schemata. They are engaged in developing motor skills and the knowledge that comes with them–they move limbs, grasp and manipulate objects and use objects in conjunction with one other, as when repeatedly banging on a surface with a spoon. Then, what Tomasello calls the nine-month revolution occurs. Infants begin to engage with objects and other people in the form of a triad–self, other and object–where previously all interactions were dyadic, involving self and other or self and object.” Plotkin, Henry. The Imagined World Made Real: Towards a Natural Science of Culture. Rutgers University Press. 2003. P. 198.


“... over the last twenty years a number of views of mental representation have been developed that break from the encoding tradition. One of these is the notion of distributed representation. On this view of representation, what is in the head are not discrete symbols, each encoding their own piece of information, but less content-laden nodes which, in combination with the connection strengths linking them, collectively represent information about the world. A related alternative conception of representation is that of subsymbolic computation, whereby the units over which the computations are defined, the representations, are not themselves symbols (that is, codes). Both of these conceptions of representation were developed within a connectionist framework, but they have a basis in dynamic approaches to cognition more generally. What these views share is the idea of thinking about representation as fleeting, situated, dynamic, and interactive, and as such they mark a departure from encoding views of representation.” Wilson, Robert A. Boundaries of the Mind: The Individual in the Fragile Sciences. Cambridge University Press. 2004. P. 148.


“Representation is not simply a form of encoding but more generally a form of informational exploitation of which encoding is a special case. Representations need not be thought of as internal copies of or codes for worldly structures. Rather, representation is an activity that individuals perform in extracting and deploying information that is used in their further actions.” Wilson, Robert A. Boundaries of the Mind: The Individual in the Fragile Sciences. Cambridge University Press. 2004. P. 183.


“This idea [mediational approach to development] carried with it the working assumption that individual mental abilities are significantly modified by the various mediational tools that they employ. Such mediators include maps, tools, and other artifacts, numerical systems, memory aids, and, most importantly for Vygotsky, spoken and written language. All such mediators are not only cultural products in that they are the products of particular cultural histories and thus are available to an individual only within the corresponding cultural contexts. In addition, they are employed primarily within the context of social interaction and facilitation, typically in small groups or dyads. As Vygotsky says, ‘The path from object to child and from child to object passes through another person. This complex human structure is the product of a developmental process deeply rooted in the links between individual and social history.’” Wilson, Robert A. Boundaries of the Mind: The Individual in the Fragile Sciences. Cambridge University Press. 2004. Pps. 200-1.


“Although I have said less about the mind as embodied, I think that the exploitative view of representation can be applied to make sense of the embodiment of cognition as well, where the body becomes another resource that cognitive systems use to work their magic no different in kind from cognitive resources in the environment to which the individual is coupled.” Wilson, Robert A. Boundaries of the Mind: The Individual in the Fragile Sciences. Cambridge University Press. 2004. P. 210.


“The externalism developed in this chapter takes the symbolic nature of thought seriously but suggests that internal symbols are simply one kind of cognitive resource used in memory (as constituents of a store-house), [in] cognitive development (as constituents of theories), and in folk psychology (as consituents of beliefs). External symbols are an obvious second kind of cognitive resource used in cognitive processing, but simply to see externalists as adding external to internal symbols would be to mischaracterize the shift in perspective implied by the externalism I have defended. For the central notion becomes that of a cognitive system. Some cognitive systems are wide, and some contain both internal and external symbols. But enactive, bodily cognitive systems, such as wide procedural memory systems, may be conceptualized in terms of explicit symbols only with some strain, as may wide perceptual systems that involve the extraction of information that is usually thought of as non- or sybsymbolic.

“A large part of the significance of mind-world coupling lies in its iterative nature. We take part of the world, and learn how to incorporate and use it as part of our cognitive processing. That, in turn, allows us to integrate other parts of the world that, in turn, both boost our cognitive capacities and allow us to cognitively integrate further parts of the world. And so on. Although some recent discussions of the embeddedness of cognition have focused on novel and future technologies–from cell phones, to electronic implants, to telerobotics–the two most significant forms of iterative scaffolding are older than the human species: the advent of spoken language (itself a scaffold for much higher cognition and written symbol systems), and the cognitive dependence of infants on their parents (the mother of all inventions?).” Wilson, Robert A. Boundaries of the Mind: The Individual in the Fragile Sciences. Cambridge University Press. 2004. P. 212.


“I shall suggest that processes of awareness call out for a radical rethinking along externalist lines, one that turns on taking locational externalism about consciousness more seriously than it has been taken, even by externalists about the phenomenal. The argument here will be similar to that given in the previous chapter, where I argued that our conceptions of memory, cognitive development, and folk psychology should be explicitly refashioned along externalist lines. At the heart of this reconceptualization are three features of processes of awareness that have usually been ignored or downplayed: They are temporally extended; they are typically scaffolded on environmental and cultural tools; and they are both embodied and embedded.” Wilson, Robert A. Boundaries of the Mind: The Individual in the Fragile Sciences. Cambridge University Press. 2004. P. 217.


“Both culturally and individually we construct perception-action cycles that involve attuning ourselves to the world, and the world to ourselves. Many such cycles are constituted primarily by conscious experiences and acts, and their temporal extension, over minutes or hours, goes hand-in-hand with their spatial extension beyond the brain of individual cognizers.” Wilson, Robert A. Boundaries of the Mind: The Individual in the Fragile Sciences. Cambridge University Press. 2004. P. 218.


“The one thing that seems to have united psychologists, neuroscientists, and cognitive scientists is the assumption that the brain functions to construct and utilize representations of the world around us. The ecological psychology promoted here does not share this assumption, and instead tries to understand how organisms make their way in the world, not how a world is made inside of organisms.” Reed, Edward S. Encountering the World: Toward an Ecological Psychology. 1996. Oxford University Press. Pps. 10-11.


“The result of these tendencies is that psychology is divided into a set of post-Cartesian dualisms: sensation versus perception, stimulus-response versus cognitive, innate versus learned, reactive versus motivated. These dualisms reinforce the belief that reactive behavior is relatively unvarying and mechanistic, whereas instructed behavior is flexible–but they do this simply by way of assumption, not by way of testing or verifying such claims. In turn, these dualisms lead to the idea that the role of the mind is to make some sort of mental model of the world with which to ‘interpret’ input signals and create instructions for action. And this idea firmly places the mind outside the natural world.” Reed, Edward S. 1996. Encountering the World: Toward an Ecological Psychology. Oxford University Press. P. 16.


“It is now believed that during the long evolution of our brain, nervous systems changed in four principal ways. First, they became increasingly centralized in architecture, evolving from a loose network of nerve cells (as in the jellyfish) to a spinal column and complex brain with impressive swellings at the hindbrain and forebrain. This increasingly centralized structure also became increasingly hierarchical. It appears that newer additions to the human brain took over control from the previous additions and in effect became their new masters. Accordingly, the initiation of voluntary behavior as well as the ability to plan, engage in conscious thought, and use language depend on neocortical structures. Indeed, the human neocortex can actually destroy itself if it wishes, as when a severely depressed individual uses a gun to put a bullet through his or her skull.”

“Second, there was trend toward encephelization, that is, a concentration of neurons and sense organs at one end of the organism. By concentrating neural and sensory equipment in one general location, transmission time from sense organs to brain was minimized. Third, the size, number, and variety of elements of the brain increased. Finally, there was an increase in plasticity, that is, the brain’s ability to modify itself as a result of experience to make memory and the learning of new perceptual and motor abilities possible.” Cziko, Gary. Without Miracles: Universal Selection Theory and the Second Darwinian Revolution. 1995. MIT Press. Pps. 54-5.


"Ekmman, Friesen, and another colleague, Robert Levenson decided to try to document this effect. They gathered a group of volunteers and hooked them up to monitors measuring their heart rate and body temperature -- the physiological signals of such emotions as anger, sadness, and fear. Half of the volunteers were told to try to remember and relive a particularly stressful experience. The other half were simply shown how to create, on their faces, the expressions that corresponded to stressful emotions, such as anger, sadness, and fear. The second group, the people who were acting, showed the same physiological responses, the same heightened heart rate and body temperature, as the first group."

"A few years later, a German team of psychologists conducted a similar study. They had a group of subjects look at cartoons, either while holding a pen between their lips -- an action that made it impossible to contract either of the two major smiling muscles, the risorius and the zygomatic major -- or while holding a pen clenched between their teeth, which had the opposite effect and forced them to smile. The people with the pen between their teeth found the cartoons much funnier. These findings may be hard to believe, because we take it as a given that first we experience an emotion, and then we may -- or may not -- express that emotion on our face. We think of the face as the residue of emotion. What this research showed, though, is that the process works in the opposite direction as well. Emotion can also start on the face. The face is not a secondary billboard for our internal feelings. It is an equal partner in the emotional process." Gladwell, Malcolm. Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. 2005. Little, Brown and Co. Pp. 207-8.


“... the fact of multiple realizability guarantees that the physical story cannot be the whole story.” Rockwell, W. Teed. Neither Brain nor Ghost: A Nondualist Alternative to the Mind-Brain Identity Theory. 2005. MIT Press. P. 4.


“Descartes believed that the soul contacted the body through the brain. Cartesian materialists made only a relatively slight modification to this position by saying the soul is the brain. For Descartes, the brain was the turnstile that knowledge had to pass through to get to the soul; for the Cartesian materialists the brain was knowledge’s final resting place. Both positions, however, were lumbered with the same doomed epistemological question: ‘How does the world get into the brain?’ The only answer available, given these presuppositions, is ‘a piece at a time, by means of sense data that are carried through the body to the brain by means of message cables.’ On closer inspection, even this answer doesn’t really work. The world itself does not get into the brain, only an impression or copy of the world. We thus are compelled to accept idealism, and conclude that we never get to see the real world, only a world of appearances. This position is so irritatingly counterintuitive that it is eventually rejected even when no one can find any good arguments against it.” Rockwell, W. Teed. 2005. Neither Brain nor Ghost: A Nondualist Alternative to the Mind-Brain Identity Theory. MIT Press. P. 84.


“To understand the alternative I am proposing, it is essential to remember that this is not the way I am using the word ‘environment.’ Environment, as I have defined it, is not mind independent. Its borders and qualities are constituted by its relationship to the mind (goals, projects, functions) of the organism that dwells in that environment. My alternative to these two positions might be called a theory of middle-sized content, because I claim that intentional content supervenes on the environment, the umwelt, of the thinker or the speaker, and not on either the isolated brain or on mind-independent reality.” Rockwell, W. Teed. 2005. Neither Brain nor Ghost: A Nondualist Alternative to the Mind-Brain Identity Theory. MIT Press. P. 93.


“If Dewey is right, experience is not the sort of thing that can enter the brain in the form of sense data. Instead, it is constituted by neurological activity that interacts with extraneurological factors to create what Millikan calls intentional icons. For language-using creatures, some of these intentional icons acquire a flexibility in multitasking that prompts Millikan to call them fact-icons. Words and/or sentences are clearly the prototypical fact-icons, and perhaps there are others. But the important point for our purposes is that intentional icons are constituted by their relationship to the environment even more than fact-icons are. Fact-icons, by definition, have some measure of independence from each of the various organism-environment relationships that they participate in. Intentional icons are far more closely bound up with a single relatively reflexive body-world relationship. Consequently, there is far less reason with intentional icons to privilege some partricular activity in the skull as being somehow distinct and independent from the rest of the causal nexus that embodies that relationship.

“The paradigmatic example of an intentional icon is the neurological activity triggered by the light stimulus that causes a frog to extend its tongue when it ‘sees’ a fly.” Rockwell, W. Teed. 2005. Neither Brain nor Ghost: A Nondualist Alternative to the Mind-Brain Identity Theory. MIT Press. P. 98.


“At any given time, there is a region within my world in which I am engaged with my tools; the region within which everything is ready-to-hand for me and thus not observable. And this region, I maintain, is me in the most unambiguous sense possible. The pattern of activity that occurs within that region is primarily what embodies me: it includes, but is not limited to, the activity in my brain and body. When I observe something, or relate to it in any other way, it becomes part of that region of activity, and thus, in a nontrivial sense, part of me.” Rockwell, W. Teed. 2005. Neither Brain nor Ghost: A Nondualist Alternative to the Mind-Brain Identity Theory. MIT Press. Pp. 106-7.


“To determine what we know and what we don’t, we have to separate the subjective from what can be communicated in what Sellars calls the ‘space of reasons.’ If we can’t tell the difference between the subjective and the verbally expressible, it would be impossible to communicate to other conscious beings. The primary purpose of the concept of the subjective is to aid us in making this distinction...” Rockwell, W. Teed. 2005. Neither Brain nor Ghost: A Nondualist Alternative to the Mind-Brain Identity Theory. MIT Press. P. 121. Subquote is Wilfrid Sellars, 1963, “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind” from Science, Perception, and Reality.


“Searle specifically says, ‘in order to have one belief or desire, I have to have a whole network of other beliefs and desires.’ This means that he must also reject the existence of intrinsic properties. If we assume that at least some of our beliefs express facts about the world, then there must be a similar relationship that exists between those facts, that is, in order for one fact to be true, a network of other facts must also be true, and no one fact can be intrinsically true in and of itself.” Rockwell, W. Teed. 2005. Neither Brain nor Ghost: A Nondualist Alternative to the Mind-Brain Identity Theory. MIT Press. Pp. 143-4. Subquote is from John Searle, 1992, The Rediscovery of the Mind, MIT Press, P. 176.


“The belief in the uniquely intrinsic quality of physical properties can only be justified by saying something like 'When everyone else talks about the world, the concepts that they use are dependent on their goals and purposes. But when physicists talk about the world, their concepts touch reality itself, unsullied by any goals or provincial perspective.’ There is simply no reason to privilege the discourse of physicists in this manner. Physics like any other human activity, requires dividing the world up into categories that enable the goals of that activity to be achieved. If you want to track the behavior of the planets, or predict how light will disperse, there is no other set of concepts that you can use and still achieve those goals with maximum effectiveness. But that does not grant intrinsicness to these concepts, any more than the fact that the concept of heart is necessary to zoology makes the concept of heart intrinsic.” Rockwell, W. Teed. 2005. Neither Brain nor Ghost: A Nondualist Alternative to the Mind-Brain Identity Theory. MIT Press. Pp. 144-5.


“We Deweyans claim that even the so-called physical stance is a point of view that we take because it frequently serves our purposes to do so, and therefore the physical stance is less ontologically fundamental than the intentional stance.” Rockwell, W. Teed. 2005. Neither Brain nor Ghost: A Nondualist Alternative to the Mind-Brain Identity Theory. MIT Press. P. 154.


“Dewey is saying that rather than dividing experience up into a stimulus and a response, we should think of the reflex arc as being a continuous circle. It becomes divided into stimulus and response only when we are thinking about it, not when we are experiencing it.” Rockwell, W. Teed. 2005. Neither Brain nor Ghost: A Nondualist Alternative to the Mind-Brain Identity Theory. MIT Press. P. 179.


“Reality, Dewey claimed, was fundamentally a continuity, and most philosophical problems arise from artificially dividing this continuity into absolute dualisms. Stimulus and response, mind and matter, subject matter and method, are but moments in a flux that we define only by their relationship to each other within that flux.” Rockwell, W. Teed. 2005. Neither Brain nor Ghost: A Nondualist Alternative to the Mind-Brain Identity Theory. MIT Press. P. 180.


“Consequently, it seems sensible to conclude that the supervenience base for all mental events, including subjective experiences, includes not only brain events, but events in the rest of the body and in those parts of the environment with which the conscious organism maintains a synergetic relationship. At any given moment, there will be a distinction between those processes that constitute the subject and those that constitute the environment. But there is good reason to think that this distinction does not have a constant and enduring borderline.” Rockwell, W. Teed. 2005. Neither Brain nor Ghost: A Nondualist Alternative to the Mind-Brain Identity Theory. MIT Press. P. 206.

“In the four-dimensional universe of space and time, we are confined to a three-dimensional surface. Only one moment exists in our reality; the existence of other moments is evident only through the constructs of our mind. We breathe one lifetime at a time within a thin atmosphere condensed out of the surrounding sequence of events. All our devices for translating between sequence and structure serve to extend this atmospheric depth–the history of life on earth is compressed within sequential strands of DNA; culture is accumulated in the form of language; somehow our brains preserve the sequence of our lives from one moment to the next. As far as we know mind and intelligence exist on an open-ended scale. Perhaps mind is a lucky accident that exists only at our particular depth of field, like some alpine flower that blooms between ten thousand and twelve thousand feet. Or perhaps there is mind at elevations both above and below our own.” Dyson, George. Darwin among the Machines: The Evolution of Global Intelligence. 1997. Perseus Books. P. 217.


“The loop through pen and paper is part of the physical machinery responsible for the shape of the flow of thoughts and ideas that we take, nonetheless, to be distinctively those of Richard Feynman [in speaking of his notes as a theoretical physicist]. It reliably and robustly provides a functionality which, were it provided by goings-on in the head alone, we would have no hesitation in designating as part of the cognitive circuitry. Such considerations of parity, once we put our bioprejudices aside, reveal the outward loop as a functional part of an extended cognitive machine. Such body- and world-involving cycles are best understood, or so I shall argue, as quite literally extending the machinery of mind out into the world–as building extended cognitive circuits that are themselves the minimal material bases for important aspects of human thought and reason. Such cycles supersize the mind.” Clark, Andy. Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension. 2008. Oxford University Press. Pp. xxv-xxvi.


“Once the body itself is ‘equipped’ with the right kind of passive dynamics, powered walking can be brought about in a remarkably elegant and energy-efficient way. In essence, the tasks of actuation and control have now been massively reconfigured so that powered, directed locomotion can come about by systematically pushing, damping, and tweaking a system in which passive-dynamic effects still play a major role.” Clark, Andy. Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension. 2008. Oxford University Press. P. 5.


“The ‘matching’ of sensors, morphology, motor system, materials, controller, and ecological niche yields a spread of responsibility for efficient adaptive response in which ‘not all the processing is performed by the brain, but certain aspects of it are taken over by the morphology, materials, and environment [yielding] a ‘balance’ or task-distribution between the different aspects of an embodied agent’. In such cases, the details of embodiment may take over some of the work that would otherwise need to be done by the brain or the neural network controller, an effect that Pfeifer and Bongard aptly describe as ‘morphological computation.’” Clark, Andy. Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension. 2008. Oxford University Press. P. 7. Subquote is from Pfeifer, R. and J. Bongard. 2007. How the body shapes the way we think. MIT Press. P. 100.


“Nontrivial causal spread occurs whenever something we might have expected to be achieved by a certain well-demarcated system turns out to involve the exploitation of more far-flung factors and forces.” Clark, Andy. Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension. 2008. Oxford University Press. P. 7.


“As Ballard et al. comment, ‘Changing gaze is analogous to changing the memory reference in a silicon computer’. (These uses of fixation are thus described using the term ‘deictic pointers.’)” Clark, Andy. Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension. 2008. Oxford University Press. P. 12. Subquote is from Ballard, Hayhoe, Pook and Rao. “Deictic codes for the embodiment of cognition.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 20:723-767. 1997. P. 725.


“You simply run so that the optical image of the ball appears to present a straight-line constant speed trajectory against the visual background [in order to run and catch something like a fly ball]. This solution (the so-called LOT, for Linear Optical Trajectory, model) exploits a powerful invariant in the optic flow,...” Clark, Andy. Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension. 2008. Oxford University Press. P. 16.


“Instead of using sensing to get enough information inside, past the visual bottleneck, so as to allow the reasoning system to ‘throw away the world’ and solve the problem wholly internally, they use the sensor as an open conduit allowing environmental magnitudes to exert a constant influence on behavior. Sensing is here depicted as the opening of a channel, with successful whole-system behavior emerging when activity in this channel is kept within a certain range. What is created is thus a kind of new, task-specific agent-world circuit.” Clark, Andy. Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension. 2008. Oxford University Press. P. 16.


“In work implemented on the famous COG robot, Fitzpatrick and Arsenio show that the cross-modal binding of incoming signals that display common rhythmic signatures can aid a robot in learning about objects and, by including proprioception as a modality, about the nature of its own body. The robot first detects rhythmic patterns in the individual modalities (sight, hearing, and proprioception) and then deploys a binding algorithm to associate signals that display the same kind of periodicity.” Clark, Andy. Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension. 2008. Oxford University Press. P. 18. Reference is to Fitzpatrick and Arsenio. 2004. “Feel the beat: Using cross-modal rhythm to integrate perception of objects, others, and self.” Proceedings of the fourth International Workshop on Epigenetic Robotics. From Berthouze, Kozima, Prince, Sandini, Stojanov, Metta & Balkenius (Eds). Lund University Cognitive Studies.


“Finally, the active structuring of an information flow is also a potent between-agent tool, as demonstrated in striking studies by Yu, Ballard, and Aslin. In these studies, a subject, fitted with eye tracker, head-mounted camera, microphone, and hand and body trackers describes, as if to a child (slowly, with clear enunciations) their current actions. The verbal descriptions, along with the time-locked stream of multimodal training data recorded by the eye, head, hand, and body trackers, are fed to an artificial neural network. The task of the network is to learn visually grounded ‘meaning’ for words for some actions solely by exposure to the time-locked stream of multimodal training data created by the active ‘caregiver.’ In the presence of this critical active structuring, the net can learn image-sound associations using ‘raw’ visual and auditory data (an unsegmented sound stream and an un-preprocessed video stream) and without the benefit of any inbuilt ‘language model.’” Clark, Andy. Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension. 2008. Oxford University Press. P. 20. Reference is to Yu, Ballard & Aslin. 2005. “The role of embodied intention in early lexical acquisition.” Cognitive Science 29, no. 6: 961-1005.


“We can now formulate the next feature of recent work that I want to highlight: attention to the possibility that the substrate (the ‘vehicles’) of specific perceptual experiences may involve whole cycles of world-engaging activity.” Clark, Andy. Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension. 2008. Oxford University Press. P. 23.


“Continuous reciprocal causation (CRC) occurs when some system S is both continuously affecting and simultaneously being affected by activity in some other system O.” Clark, Andy. Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension. 2008. Oxford University Press. P. 24.


The crucial upshot of the emphasis on constant mutual interaction is a corresponding emphasis on what Van Gelder and Port usefully term total state. Because we assume that there is widespread and complex interanimation among multiple system factors, the dynamicist chooses to focus on changes in total system state over time.” Clark, Andy. Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension. 2008. Oxford University Press. P. 25. Reference is to Van Gelder & Port. “It’s about time: An overview of the dynamical approach to cognition.” From Mind as motion: Explorations in the dynamics of cognition. Port and Van Gelder, Eds. MIT Press. 1995. P. 14.


“Total state explanations do not fare well as a means of understanding systems in which complex information flow plays a key role.” Clark, Andy. Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension. 2008. Oxford University Press. P. 26.


“The point for present purposes, is that to the extent that neural control systems exhibit such complex and information-based articulation, the sole use of total state explanations would tend to obscure explanatorily important details, such as the various ways in which substate x may vary independently of substate y and so on.” Clark, Andy. Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension. 2008. Oxford University Press. Pp. 26-7.


“According to Haugeland, the notions of component, system, and interface are all interdefined and interdefining. Components are those parts of a larger whole that interact through interfaces. Systems are ‘relatively independent and self-contained’ composites of such interfaced components. And an interface itself is ‘a point of interactive ‘contact’ between components such that the relevant interactions are well-defined, reliable and relatively simple.” Clark, Andy. Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension. 2008. Oxford University Press. P. 32. Subquotes are from Haugeland. 1998. “Mind embodied and embedded.” From Having thought: Essays in the metaphysics of mind. Haugeland, J. Ed. Harvard University Press. P. 213.


“Creatures capable of this kind of deep incorporation of new bodily structure are examples of what I shall call ‘profoundly embodied agents.’ Such agents are able constantly to negotiate and renegotiate the agent-world boundary itself.

“Although our own capacity for such renegotiation is, I believe, vastly underappreciated, it really should come as no great surprise, given the facts of biological bodily growth and change. The human infant must learn (by self-exploration) which neural commands bring about which bodily effects and must then practice until skilled enough to issue those commands without conscious effort. This process has been dubbed ‘body babbling’ and continues until the infant body becomes transparent equipment.” Clark, Andy. Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension. 2008. Oxford University Press. Pp. 34-5.


“A quick illustration is provided by recent work on so-called change blindness. In this work, simple experimental manipulations, involving the masking of motion transients while various changes are made to a visually presented scene, reveal the surprising sparseness of the change-specifying information easily available to conscious reflection. Subjects seldom spot quite large and important changes, even when the changes are made in focal vision. Subjects are frequently amazed when they realize just how much has changed without their noticing it. How should we reconcile the limitations of such conscious change spotting with out strong sense of rich visual contact with our surroundings? Part of the answer may be that the strong feeling of rich visual contact is really a reflection of something implicit in the larger overall problem-solving organization in which moment-by-moment vision merely participates. That larger organization ‘assumes’ the (ecologically normal) ability to retrieve, via saccades or head and body movements, more detailed information as and when needed. Given such ‘availability on demand,’ we feel that we are fully in command of the detail.” Clark, Andy. Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension. 2008. Oxford University Press. P. 41.


“When, for example, you group your groceries in one bag and mine in another, or when the cook places washed vegetables in one location and unwashed ones in another, the effect is to use spatial organization to simplify problem solving by using spatial proximity to reduce descriptive complexity. It is intuitive that once descriptive complexity is thus reduced, processes of selective attention, and of action control, can operate on elements of a scene that were previously too ‘unmarked’ to define such operations over. Experience with tags and labels may be a cheap way of achieving a similar result. Spatial organization reduces descriptive complexity by means of physical groupings that channel perception and action toward functional or appearance-based equivalence classes. Labels allow us to focus attention on all and only the items belonging to equivalence classes (the red shoes, the gree apples, etc.). In this way, both linguistic and physical groupings allow selective attention to dwell on all and only the items belonging to the class. And the two resources are seen to work in close cooperation. Spatial groupings are used in teaching children the meanings of words, and mentally rehearsed words may be used to control activities of spatial grouping.”

“Simple labeling thus functions as a kind of augmented reality trick by means of which we cheaply and open-endedly project new groupings and structures onto a perceived scene. Labeling is cheap because it avoids the physical effort of putting things into piles. And it is open-ended insofar as it can group in ways that defeat simple spatial display–for example, by allowing us to selectively attend to the four corners of a tabletop, and exercise that clearly cannot be performed by physical reorganization! Linguistic labels, on this view, are tools for grouping and in this sense act much like real spatial reorganization. But in addition (and unlike mere physical groupings), they effectively and open-endedly add new ‘virtual’ items (the recalled labels themselves) to the scene. In this way, experience with tags and labels warps and reconfigures the problem spaces for the cognitive engine.” Clark, Andy. Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension. 2008. Oxford University Press. Pp. 46-7.


“A vast amount of contemporary human cognitive niche construction likewise involves the active exploitation of space. David Kirsh, in his classic treatment ‘The Intelligent Use of Space,’ divides these uses into three broad and overlapping categories. The first is ‘spatial arrangements that simplify choice,’ such as laying out cooking ingredients in the order you will need them or putting your groceries in one bag and mine in another. The second is ‘spatial arrangements that simplify perception,’ such as putting the washed mushrooms on the right of the chopping board and the unwashed ones on the left or the color green dominated jigsaw puzzle pieces in one pile and the red dominated ones in another. The third is ‘spatial dynamics that simplify internal computation,’ such as repeatedly reordering the Scrabble pieces so as to prompt better recall of candidate words or the use of instruments such as slide rules, which transform arithmetical operations into perceptual alignment activities.” Clark, Andy. Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension. 2008. Oxford University Press. Pp. 64-5.


“No other animal uses space as an open-ended cognitive resource, developing spatial offloadings for new problems on a day-by-day basis.

“It is perhaps noteworthy, then, that the majority of these spatial arrangement ploys work, as Kirsh himself notes at the end of his long treatment, by reducing the descriptive complexity of the environment. Space is often used as a resource for grouping items into equivalence classes for some purpose (e.g., washed mushrooms, red jigsaw pieces, my groceries, etc.). It is intuitive that once descriptive complexity is thus reduced, processes of selective attention, and of action control, can operate on elements of a scene that were previously too ‘unmarked’ to define such operations over. Human language is itself notable both for its open-ended expressive power and for its ability to reduce the descriptive complexity of the environment. Reduction of descriptive complexity, however achieved, makes new groupings available for thought and action. In this way, the intelligent use of space and the intelligent use of language form a mutually reinforcing pair, pursuing a common cognitive agenda.” Clark, Andy. Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension. 2008. Oxford University Press. P. 65.


“Instead of an innate ‘folk psychology’ module, in the form of a domain-specific adaptation for ‘mind-reading,’ Sterelny offers a niche-construction-based account according to which

‘selection for interpretative skills could lead to a different evolutionary trajectory: selection on parents for actions which scaffold the development of the interpretative capacities. Selection rebuilds the epistemic environment to scaffold the development of those capacities.

“Basic perceptual adaptations (e.g., for gaze monitoring, etc.) are thus supposed to be bootstrapped up to a full-blown mind-reading ability via the predictable effects of intense social scaffolding: The child is surrounded by exemplars of mind-reading in action, she is nudged by cultural inventions such as the use of simplified narratives, prompted by parental rehearsal of her own intention, and provided with a rich palate of linguistic tools such as words for mental states.” Clark, Andy. Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension. 2008. Oxford University Press. P. 67. Subquote is from K. Sterelny. Thought in a Hostile World: The Evolution of Human Cognition. 2003. Blackwell. P. 221.


“Epistemic actions–physical actions that make mental computation easier, faster or more reliable–are external actions that an agent performs to change its own computational state.” Kirsh, D., and P. Maglio. “On distinguishing epistemic from pragmatic action.” Cognitive Science. 18: 513-549. 1994. P. (51)3. Quoted in: Clark, Andy. Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension. 2008. Oxford University Press. P. 71.


“Once we conceive the agent environment relation to be a dynamic one where agents are causally coupled to their environments at different temporal frequencies with less or more conscious awareness of the nature of their active perceptual engagement, we are moving in a direction of seeing agents more as managers of their interaction, as coordinators locked in a system of action reaction, rather than as pure agents undertaking actions and awaiting consequences.” Kirsh, D. “Metacognition, distributed cognition and visual design.” From Cognition, education and communication technology. Ed. P. Gardinfors and P. Johansson. Erlbaum. 2004. P. 7. Quoted in Clark, Andy. Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension. 2008. Oxford University Press. P. 73.


“Mental spaces are small conceptual packets constructed as we think and talk, for purposes of local understanding and action. In the Buddhist monk network [riddle about whether a monk spending two different whole days walking up and then down a mountain will be in the same spot at the same time on both days], we have a mental space for the ascent and another mental space for the descent. Mental spaces are connected to long-term schematic knowledge called ‘frames,’ such as the frame of walking along a path, and to long-term specific knowledge, such as a memory of the time you climbed Mount Rainier in 2001. The mental space that includes you, Mount rainier, the year 2001, and your climbing the mountain can be activated in many different ways and for many different purposes. ‘You climbed Mount Rainier in 2001' sets up the mental space in order to report a past event. ‘If you had climbed Mount Rainier in 2001' sets up the same mental space in order to examine a counterfactural situation and its consequences. ‘Max believes that you climbed Mount Rainier in 2001' sets it up again, but now for the purpose of stating what Max believes. ‘Here is a picture of you climbing Mount Rainier in 2001' evokes the same mental space in order to talk about the content of the picture. ‘This novel has you climbing Mount rainier in 2001' reports the author’s inclusion of a possibly fictional scene in a novel. Mental spaces are very partial. They contain elements and are typically structured by frames. They are interconnected, and can be modified as thought and discourse unfold. Mental spaces can be used generally to model dynamic mappings in thought and language.” Fauconnier, Gilles & Mark Turner. The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities. 2002. Basic Books. P. 40.


“Conceptual integration network. Blends arise in networks of mental spaces. In the network illustrated in the Basic Diagram, there are four mental spaces: the two inputs, the generic space, and the blend. This is a minimal network. Conceptual integration networks can have several input spaces and even multiple blended spaces.” Fauconnier, Gilles & Mark Turner. The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities. 2002. Basic Books. P. 47.


“Emergent structure. Emergent structure arises in the blend that is not copied there directly from any input. It is generated in three ways: through composition of projections from the inputs, through completion based on independently recruited frames and scenarios, and through elaboration (‘running the blend’).” Fauconnier, Gilles & Mark Turner. The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities. 2002. Basic Books. P. 48.


“Wide application. Though uniform in their dynamics, integration networks can serve many different goals. In the examples we have seen so far, these goals include transfer of emotions (Image Club [Japanese brothel with school girl theme]) and inferences (Buddhist Monk and Computer Desktop), counterfactual reasoning (Iron Lady [reasoning about the reaction of US labor unions in a hypothetical election featuring Maggie Thatcher]), conceptual change and creativity in science (Complex Numbers), integrated action (Computer Desktop and Skiing Waiter [ski like a waiter carrying champagne on a tray above his head]), and construction of identity through compression (Graduation).” Fauconnier, Gilles & Mark Turner. The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities. 2002. Basic Books. Pp. 49-50.


“... a mathematical truth can seem striking and even mysterious, but the method of proof breaks the mystery down into a sequence of logical steps, each seemingly simple and obvious, and each leading to the subsequent step until the conclusion is reached. This was Aristotle’s insight, which also drives modern computers.

“... this step-by-step understanding is only one side of the coin. The breaking down of an event into a set of smaller events, each understood consciously and separately, can paradoxically give us a feeling of less understanding, because we feel we have not grasped the essential whole. It is a strength of human understanding to be able to do both, and our greatest assurance comes when we feel we understand the same event both ways.” Fauconnier, Gilles & Mark Turner. The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities. 2002. Basic Books. Pp. 75-6.


“Let us take another look at the Bypass [Poster of three kids dressed as doctors at an operating table where the message is that we must educate kids now for medical work later - “Joey, Katie and Todd will be performing your bypass”]. We have talked generally about cross-space links between the inputs. The finer-grained structure of these links is extremely interesting. It includes links from cause to effect, links through time and through space, links through change, and links through identity. The input with the children in school and the quality of their education is causal for the input with doctors of a certain level of competence. This is a Cause-Effect link between the inputs. There is an interval of at least a couple of decades between the children and the doctors. This is a Time link between the inputs. There is a displacement between the physical space of the schoolroom in one input and the physical space of the operating room in the other. This is a Space link, where in this instance we mean physical space. There is a counterpart link between the children at one stage of life and the doctors later. This is an Identity link. And, finally, there is a transformation of the children into the doctors. This is a Change link.

“Blending plays marvelous and imaginative tricks with these links. Look once more at the blended space in the Bypass. Every one of these ‘outer-space’ links between the inputs to the conceptual integration network has a compressed counterpart in the blend! There is still cause-effect in the blend, but now the children must learn all at one shot. There is still a time interval between now and the surgery, but it has been compressed from over twenty years into the few minutes between the time on the clock and the time of the surgery. In the blend, the schoolroom is the operating room. This is space compression. In the blend, the children are the doctors. The ‘outer-space’ link of personal Identity running over thirty years between people whose appearance, experience, and belief are very different is compressed into what we call ‘uniqueness’ in the blended space. The ‘outer-space’ protracted change of the youngsters into employed adults is also compressed in the blend into uniqueness.” Fauconnier, Gilles & Mark Turner. The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities. 2002. Basic Books. P. 92.


“Spaces have elements and, often, relations between them. When these elements and relations are organized as a package that we already know about, we say that the mental space is framed and we call that organization a ‘frame.’ So, for example, a mental space in which Julie purchases coffee at Peet’s coffee shop has individual elements that are framed by commercial transaction, as well as by the subframe–highly important for Julie–of buying coffee at Peet’s.” Fauconnier, Gilles & Mark Turner. The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities. 2002. Basic Books. P. 102.


“Mental spaces are built up dynamically in working memory, but they can also become entrenched in long-term memory. For example, frames are entrenched mental spaces that we can activate all at once. Other kinds of entrenched mental spaces are Jesus on the Cross, Horatio at the bridge, and the rings of Saturn. An entrenched mental space typically has other mental spaces attached to it, in an entrenched way, and they quickly come along with the activation. Jesus on the Cross evokes the frame of Roman crucifixion, of Jesus the baby, of Jesus the son of God, of Mary and the Holy women at the foot of the Cross, of styles of painting the crucifixion, of moments of the liturgy that refer to it, and many more.

“We will see that entrenchment is a general possibility not just for individual mental spaces but for networks of spaces. In particular, integration networks built up dynamically can become entrenched and available to be activated all at once. Indeed, much of our thinking consists of activating entrenched integration networks for dealing with present subjects.

For our present purpose–namely, to characterize sources of variation in networks–the most pertinent features of mental spaces are the degree of specificity of the elements, the degree to which they are framed, our familiarity with the space, the degree to which it is entrenched, and the degree to which it is tied to our experiences.” Fauconnier, Gilles & Mark Turner. The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities. 2002. Basic Books. P. 103.


“A readily available frame of human kinship is the family, which includes roles for father, mother, child, and so on. This frame prototypically applies to human beings. Suppose an integration network has one space containing only this frame, and another space containing only two human beings, Paul and Sally. When we conceive of Paul as the father of Sally, we have created a blend in which some of the structure of the family frame is integrated with the elements Paul and Sally. In the blended space, Paul is the father of Sally. This is a simplex network. The cross-space mapping between the input spaces is a Frame-to-values connection–that is, an organized bundle of role connectors. In this case, the role father connects to the value Paul and the role daughter connects to the value Sally.

“In a simplex network, the relevant part of the frame in one input is projected with its roles, and the elements are projected from the other input as values of those roles within the blend.” Fauconnier, Gilles & Mark Turner. The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities. 2002. Basic Books. P. 120.


“A mirror network is an integration network in which all spaces–inputs, generic, and blend–share an organizing frame.” Fauconnier, Gilles & Mark Turner. The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities. 2002. Basic Books. P. 122.


“A mirror network can integrate many different spaces, provided they share the same organizing frame. On July 8, 1999, the New York Times reported that Hicham el-Guerrouj had broken the world record for the mile, with a time of 3:43:13. An illustration accompanying the article shows a quarter-mile race-track with six figures running on it, representing el-Guerrouj in a race against the fastest milers from each decade since Roger Bannister broke the 4-minute barrier in 1954. El-Guerrouj is crossing the finish line as Bannister, trailing everyone, is still 120 yards back. This illustration prompts us to construct a conceptual packet that blends structure from six separate input mental spaces, each with a 1-mile race in which the world record is broken by a runner. The blend places all six runners on a single racetrack, with a single starting time.” Fauconnier, Gilles & Mark Turner. The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities. 2002. Basic Books. P. 123.


“Clashes. In a mirror network, there are no clashes between the inputs at the level of organizing frame, because the frames are the same. But there will be clashes at more specific levels below the frame level. In Regatta [news story in 1993 of a catamaran trying to break the 140-year old record of a clipper sailing from San Francisco to Boston], the centuries and the kinds of boats in the two spaces clash. In the Buddhist Monk [riddle about whether a monk spending two different whole days walking up and then down a mountain will be in the same spot at the same time on both days], the directions and times of travel in the two spaces clash.” Fauconnier, Gilles & Mark Turner. The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities. 2002. Basic Books. P. 125.


“A single-scope network has two input spaces with different organizing frames, one of which is projected to organize the blend. Its defining property is that the organizing frame of the blend is an extension of the organizing frame of one of the inputs but not the other.” Fauconnier, Gilles & Mark Turner. The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities. 2002. Basic Books. P. 126.


“Suppose a man tells his older sister about his present troubles, and she responds,

“‘Do you remember how when you were little you were so intent upon hiding your treasures that you hid them so well even you could not find them again? Do you remember that you hid your new penny when you were four and we never found it? That’s just what you have done with Angela. You’ve been talking for two hours about all your troubles, but what they boil down to is that you have hidden away your love for her so deeply that you can’t see it. Once again, you’ve hidden your penny, even from yourself.’

“This is an example of a single-scope network. The frame that is exploited in the blend for purposes of understanding is the frame of one input (hiding the cherished penny too well), and the point of the blend is to cast light on the other input (the adult brother’s troubled life). Hiding the Penny is the framing input and the Troubled Life is the focus input. When there is such a vital relation between the two inputs, the effect of the network goes far beyond analogy. It adds to the temporal connection in the overall history a comprehensive pattern of causality.” Fauconnier, Gilles & Mark Turner. The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities. 2002. Basic Books. Pp. 127-8.


“A double-scope network has inputs with different (and often clashing) organizing frames as well as an organizing frame for the blend that includes parts of each of those frames and has emergent structure of its own. In such networks, both organizing frames make central contributions to the blend, and their sharp differences offer the possibility of rich clashes. Far from blocking the construction of the network, such clashes offer challenges to the imagination; indeed, the resulting blends can be highly creative.” Fauconnier, Gilles & Mark Turner. The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities. 2002. Basic Books. P. 131.


“Double-scope networks can also operate on strong clashes between the inputs. Consider the familiar idiomatic metaphor ‘You are digging your own grave.’ It typically serves as a warning that (1) you are doing bad things that will cause you to have a very bad experience, and (2) you are unaware of this causal relation. A conservative parent who keeps his money in his mattress may express disapproval of an adult child’s investing in the stock market by saying ‘You are digging your own grave.’

“At first glance, this conventional expression looks like a straightforward single-scope network, where the organizing frame of graves, corpses, and burial is projected to organize the blend–a blend in which someone unwittingly does the wrong things, and ultimately fails. Failing is being dead and buried; bad moves that precede and cause failure are digging one’s own grave. It is foolish to bring about one’s own burial or one’s own failure. And it is foolish not to be aware of one’s own actions, especially those that may lead to one’s very extinction.

“A closer look, however, reveals that this cannot be a single-scope network, because in a single-scope network this cross-input mapping aligns the topologies of the inputs and that topology appears in the blend. But in Digging Your Own Grave, the topologies of the inputs clash on causality, intentionality, participant roles, temporal sequence, identity, and internal event structure. In all these cases, the blend takes its topology from the ‘unwitting failure’ input, not from the ‘digging the grave’ input! The causal structure in the blend comes from the ‘unwitting failure’ input, not the ‘digging the grave’ input. Foolish actions cause failure, but grave digging does not cause death.” Fauconnier, Gilles & Mark Turner. The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities. 2002. Basic Books. Pp. 131-2.


“... mind is paradigmatically manifested in informed engagement in action-feedback-evaluation-action loops in the environment.” Murphy, Nancey & Warren Brown. Did My Neurons Make Me Do It?: Philosophical and Neurobiological Perspectives on Moral Responsibility and Free Will. 2007. Oxford Univ. Press. P. 11.


“Philosopher of science Donald Campbell has crafted an account of how a larger system of causal factors can exert downward efficacy on selection in producing the remarkably efficient jaw structures of worker termites and ants:

“‘Consider the anatomy of the jaws of a worker termite or ant. The hinge surfaces and the muscle attachments agree with Archimedes’ laws of levers, that is, with macromechanics. They are optimally designed to apply maximum force at a useful distance from the hinge ... This is a kind of conformity to physics, but a different kind than is involved in the molecular, atomic, strong and weak coupling processes underlying the formation of the particular proteins of the muscle and shell of which the system is constructed. The laws of levers are one part of the complex selective system operating at the level of whole organisms. Selection at that level has optimised viability, and has thus optimised the form of parts of organisms, for the worker termite and ant and for their solitary ancestors. We need the laws of levers, and organism-level selection... to explain the particular distribution of proteins found in the jaw and hence the DNA templates guiding their production ... Even the hence of the previous sentence implies a reverse-directional ‘cause’ in that, by natural selection, it is protein efficacy that determines which DNA templates are present, even though the immediate micro determination is from DNA to protein.’

“Campbell provides this example to illustrate the following set of theses:

“(1) All processes at the higher levels are restrained by and act in conformity to the laws of lower levels, including the levels of subatomic physics.

“(2) The teleonomic achievements at higher levels require for their implementation specific lower-level mechanisms and processes. Explanation is not complete until these micromechanisms have been specified.

“But in addition:

“(3) (The emergentist principle) Biological evolution in its meandering exploration of segments of the universe encounters laws, operating as selective systems, which are not described by the laws of physics and inorganic chemistry, and which will not be described by the future substitutes for the present approximations of physics and inorganic chemistry.

“(4) (Downward causation) Where natural selection operates through life and death at a higher level of organisation, the laws of the higher-level selective system determine in part the distribution of lower-level events and substances. Description of an intermediate-level phenomenon is not completed by describing its possibility and implementation in lower-level terms. Its presence, prevalence or distribution (all needed for a complete explanation of biological phenomena) will often require reference to laws at a higher level of organisation as well. Paraphrasing Point 1, all processes at the lower levels of a hierarchy are restrained by and act in conformity to the laws of the higher levels.” Murphy, Nancey & Warren Brown. Did My Neurons Make Me Do It?: Philosophical and Neurobiological Perspectives on Moral Responsibility and Free Will. 2007. Oxford Univ. Press. Pp. 57-8. Subquote is from Campbell, Donald. 1974. “‘Downward Causation’ in Hierarchically Organised Biological Systems,” from Ayala, F. & T. Dobzhansky (eds), Studies in the Philosophy of Biology, Pp. 179-186, P. 181.


“... nature can tangle causal chains into complex knots. Emergence is about the topology of causality” Deacon, Terrence. “Three Levels of Emergent Phenomena.” Murphy, Nancey and W. Stoeger (eds.). Evolution and Emergence: Systems, Organisms, Persons. Oxford University Press. 2007. P. 94. Quoted in: Murphy, Nancey & Warren Brown. Did My Neurons Make Me Do It?: Philosophical and Neurobiological Perspectives on Moral Responsibility and Free Will. 2007. Oxford Univ. Press. P. 80.


“Note that the reductionist’s question is: if you take all the components and place them in exactly the same positions in the environment and allow the system to run again, will the entire system follow exactly the same path? The reductionist assumes that it must do so unless there is some source of genuine indeterminacy involved at the bottom level. The systems theorist asks a different question: given that no two complex systems (e.g., two ant colonies) are ever identical, why is it the case that, starting from so wide a variety of initial conditions, one finds such similar patterns emerging?” Murphy, Nancey & Warren Brown. Did My Neurons Make Me Do It?: Philosophical and Neurobiological Perspectives on Moral Responsibility and Free Will. 2007. Oxford Univ. Press. P. 98.


“Research has shown that merely perceiving the actions of others increases the likelihood of performing the same acts.” Murphy, Nancey & Warren Brown. Did My Neurons Make Me Do It?: Philosophical and Neurobiological Perspectives on Moral Responsibility and Free Will. 2007. Oxford Univ. Press. P. 119.


“Behavioral goals are elicited automatically in situations on the basis of previous experiences in similar situations. A simple example can be seen in what happens when a student enters a classroom. The goal of finding a place to sit is automatically activated.” Murphy, Nancey & Warren Brown. Did My Neurons Make Me Do It?: Philosophical and Neurobiological Perspectives on Moral Responsibility and Free Will. 2007. Oxford Univ. Press. P. 119.


“Mental states are essentially contextualized and, a fortiori, a mental property should not be expected to reduce to the brain processes that realize it.” Murphy, Nancey & Warren Brown. Did My Neurons Make Me Do It?: Philosophical and Neurobiological Perspectives on Moral Responsibility and Free Will. 2007. Oxford Univ. Press. P. 194.


In Alicia Juarrero’s terms, conditioning changes the probability matrix for spreading neural activation.” Murphy, Nancey & Warren Brown. Did My Neurons Make Me Do It?: Philosophical and Neurobiological Perspectives on Moral Responsibility and Free Will. 2007. Oxford Univ. Press. P. 204. Reference is to Juarrero, Alicia. Dynamics in Action: Intentional Behavior as a Complex System. 1999. MIT Press.


“Let us restrict attention to properties that reduce in the sense of having a physical realization, as in the cases of being a calculator, having a certain temperature, and being a piece of money. Whether or not an object counts as having properties such as these will depend, not only on the physical properties of that object, but on various circumstances of the context. Intensions of relevant language users constitute a plausible candidate for relevant circumstances. In at least many cases, dependence on context arises because the property constitutes a functional property, where the relevant functional system (calculational practices, heat transfer, monetary systems) are much larger than the property-bearing object in question. These examples raise the question of whether many and perhaps all mental properties depend ineliminably on relations to things outside the organisms that have the mental properties.” Teller, Paul. “Reduction.” From Audi (editor). Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy. Pp. 679-680. P. 680. Quoted in Murphy, Nancey & Warren Brown. Did My Neurons Make Me Do It?: Philosophical and Neurobiological Perspectives on Moral Responsibility and Free Will. 2007. Oxford Univ. Press. P. 208.


“If we are right about the inherent action-relevance of (much of) mental life, then the problem of mental causation must be illusory.” Murphy, Nancey & Warren Brown. Did My Neurons Make Me Do It?: Philosophical and Neurobiological Perspectives on Moral Responsibility and Free Will. 2007. Oxford Univ. Press. Pp. 215-6.


“As we have argued, the primary causal role of consciousness is to provide information relevant to an organism’s action. Consciousness provides flexibility in modulating one’s behavior that is not available to more primitive organisms.” Murphy, Nancey & Warren Brown. Did My Neurons Make Me Do It?: Philosophical and Neurobiological Perspectives on Moral Responsibility and Free Will. 2007. Oxford Univ. Press. P. 219.


“Many take the problem of mental causation to be intrinsically insoluble because of the traditional understanding that acting for a reason is necessarily to be contrasted with being caused to act. Notice, though, that much of the technological scaffolding upon which our higher cognitive processes depend is designed so that its causal processes realize rational transitions. A calculator, for example, is built so that its deterministic internal processes produce true answers.” Murphy, Nancey & Warren Brown. Did My Neurons Make Me Do It?: Philosophical and Neurobiological Perspectives on Moral Responsibility and Free Will. 2007. Oxford Univ. Press. Pp. 229-30.


“Michael Lewis reports on the development in children of ‘self-evaluative emotions’ – shame, pride, guilt, and embarrassment. These emotions occur later in life than more basic emotions such as fear and joy (at 2 ½ to 3 years of age) since they require a sense of self and recognition of standards.” Murphy, Nancey & Warren Brown. Did My Neurons Make Me Do It?: Philosophical and Neurobiological Perspectives on Moral Responsibility and Free Will. 2007. Oxford Univ. Press. P. 253. Reference is to Lewis. “Emergence of Consciousness and its Role in Human Development.” From LeDoux et al (eds.) The Self: From Soul to Brain. Annals of the NY Academy of Sciences. 1001. 2003. Pp. 121-125.


“A propensity is defined as ‘an irregular or non-necessitating causal disposition of an object or system to produce some result or effect ... usually conceived of as essentially probabilistic in nature.’ Karl Popper regarded the existence of propensities as a metaphysical hypothesis needed to interpret probability claims about single cases.” Murphy, Nancey & Warren Brown. Did My Neurons Make Me Do It?: Philosophical and Neurobiological Perspectives on Moral Responsibility and Free Will. 2007. Oxford Univ. Press. P. 276. Reference is to Popper, K. A World of Propensities. 1990.


“In all but the most rudimentary organisms, the success or failure of an action changes the probability matrix according to which future behaviors will be emitted. This is a downward effect, from the system that is the whole organism acting in its environment, to the components of the nervous system that channel behavioral options.” Murphy, Nancey & Warren Brown. Did My Neurons Make Me Do It?: Philosophical and Neurobiological Perspectives on Moral Responsibility and Free Will. 2007. Oxford Univ. Press. Pp. 276-7.


“Both of Juarrero and Alwyn Scott favor reinstating all of Aristotle’s four causes. Scott identifies triggering causes as efficient, structuring causes and boundary conditions as formal causes. Juarrero describes an attractor as a rudimentary precursor of a final cause.” Murphy, Nancey & Warren Brown. Did My Neurons Make Me Do It?: Philosophical and Neurobiological Perspectives on Moral Responsibility and Free Will. 2007. Oxford Univ. Press. Note on P. 290. A. Scott’s reference is listed as a personal communication while Juarrero’s is from her book Dynamics in Action. MIT Press. 1999. P. 127.


“According to active externalism, it is that very interaction between organism and environment from which ‘mind’ emerges.

“A wide adoption of this externalist concept of mind would have profound and far-reaching consequences for society. Much more than just reshaping the theories and experimental methods of cognitive psychology and cognitive science, externalism legitimates the concepts of distributed cognition, transactive memory systems, intersubjectivity manifolds, and the collective mind. Moreover, externalism promises new and different applied understandings of social behavior, group decision making, and even personal relationships. For example, when you spend time with a group from a different demographic background, you don’t just wind up acting like someone else, you are someone else. For a couple to ‘be one’ becomes more than a pleasing metaphor, it becomes a scientifically viable statement of fact. Externalism also has implications for treatments of culture, explaining how a tradition or fashion or sociological pattern might literally ‘have a mind of its own.’” Spivey, Michael. The Continuity of Mind. 2007. Oxford University Press. Pp. 304-5.


“Yet although embodied cognitive scientists do call on representations to explain behavior, they call on them in such a way that the need for mental gymnastics is reduced. The representations they call on are indexical-functional, pushmi-pullyu, action-oriented, or emulator representations. In what follows, I will refer to these collectively with Clark’s term action-oriented representations. Action-oriented representations differ from representations in earlier computationalist theories of mind in that they represent things in a nonneutral way, as geared to an animal’s actions, as affordances.” Chemero, Anthony. Radical Embodied Cognitive Science. 2009. MIT Press. P. 26.


“The products of perceptual activity, it seems, are not always action-neutral descriptions of external reality. They may instead constitute direct recipes for acting and intervening. We thus glimpse something of the shape of what Churchland et al describe as a framework that is ‘motocentric’; rather than ‘visuocentric.’” Clark, Andy. “Where Brain, Body and World Collide.” 2008. Pp. 1-18. From Knappet, Carl & L. Malafouris, Ed. Material Agency: Towards a Non-Anthropocentric Approach. Springer. P. 9. Reference is to Churchland, P., Ramachandran, V., & Sejnowski, T. 1994. “A critique of pure vision.” In Koch & Davis (Eds.). Large-Scale Neuronal Theories of the Brain. MIT Press.


“The external world is analogous to computer memory. When fixating a location the 19 neurons that are linked to the fovea refer to information computed from that location. Changing gaze is analogous to changing the memory reference in a silicon computer.” Clark, Andy. “Where Brain, Body and World Collide.” 2008. Pp. 1-18. From Knappet, Carl & L. Malafouris, Ed. Material Agency: Towards a Non-Anthropocentric Approach. Springer. P. 12.


“The human mind, viewed through this special lens [the “work on embodiment, action, and cognitive extension”], emerges at the productive interface of brains, body, and social and material world.” Clark, Andy. Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension. 2008. Oxford University Press. Pp. 218-19. [the word “through” is actually printed in the original as “though” but I have chosen to ignore this apparent typo.]


“Normally what is generated by a brain is a single, well-unified conscious subject, but under special conditions, as seen in commissurotomy and multiple personality, the consciousness can divide or fragment.”

“Stating the proposed view in this way signals immediately that the view is a form of emergentism. But emergentism comes in many different varieties, and this is one of the stronger ones, holding that a new individual, not composed of previously existing ‘stuff,’ is what emerges from the right configuration of the brain and nervous system....”

“... Kim has also stated that emergentism has really been the predominant view in philosophy of mind for several decades, though not always under that name.” Hasker, William. “Persons and the Unity of Consciousness.” Pp. 175-190. From Koons, Robert & George Bealer, Editors. The Waning of Materialism. 2010. Oxford University Press. Pp. 184-5.


“For the emergentist, the seeds of every emergent property and the behavior it manifests are found within the world’s fundamental elements, in the form of latent dispositions awaiting only the right context for manifestation.” O’Connor, Timothy & John Churchill. “Nonreductive Physicalism or Emergent Dualism? The Argument from Mental Causation.” Pp. 261-279. From Koons, Robert & George Bealer, Editors. The Waning of Materialism. 2010. Oxford University Press. P. 278.


“Thus, certain mental properties appear to be (1) resistant to analysis in terms of physical structural properties and so plausibly ontologically basic; (2) causally efficacious; and (3) borne only by highly organized and complex systems. Though we cannot argue the matter at length here, we find extant materialist attempts to overcome this prima facie case to be implausible. (It goes without saying that we take the grounds for an emergentist account of the mental to be defeasible.)” O’Connor, Timothy & John Churchill. “Nonreductive Physicalism or Emergent Dualism? The Argument from Mental Causation.” Pp. 261-279. From Koons, Robert & George Bealer, Editors. The Waning of Materialism. 2010. Oxford University Press. P. 279.


“The meanings of elements of multimodal interactions are not properties of the elements themselves, but are emergent properties of the system of relations among the elements. [Example here is of gestures in the air with talking for lines of position over a chart]” Hutchins, Edwin. “The Distributed Cognition Perspective on Human Interaction.” Pp. 375-398. From Enfield, N. & S. Levinson. 2006. Roots of Human Sociality: Culture, Cognition and Interaction. Berg. P. 381.


“Our folk theories assume that thought precedes action. I have tried to show that in some activity settings, acting in the world is thinking. Finally, processes of cultural evolution can produce activity settings in which simple courses of action can produce powerful cognitive processes.” Hutchins, Edwin. “The Distributed Cognition Perspective on Human Interaction.” Pp. 375-398. From Enfield, N. & S. Levinson. 2006. Roots of Human Sociality: Culture, Cognition and Interaction. Berg. P. 391.


“Projecting the image of complex, multimodal, environmentally coupled interaction into the past illuminates new possibilities for development. Change can take place anywhere in the complex interaction system. This means that one need not imagine that all mechanisms of change are lodged inside individual organisms. Just as the image of complex multimodal environmentally coupled interaction gives us a new place to look for the sources of organization of ongoing behavior; it also gives a new place to look for the developmental changes across phylogenetic time.” Hutchins, Edwin. “The Distributed Cognition Perspective on Human Interaction.” Pp. 375-398. From Enfield, N. & S. Levinson. 2006. Roots of Human Sociality: Culture, Cognition and Interaction. Berg. P. 393.


“It is commonly assumed that genetic adaptations must produce a brain that is capable of the hypothesized new functional abilities. What evolves, however, is not the brain alone, but the system of brains, bodies, and shared environments in interaction.” Hutchins, Edwin. “The Distributed Cognition Perspective on Human Interaction.” Pp. 375-398. From Enfield, N. & S. Levinson. 2006. Roots of Human Sociality: Culture, Cognition and Interaction. Berg. P. 393.


“The study of human evolution remains committed to a Cartesian model of cognition and consciousness in which the process of thinking is abstracted from its real-world context.” Coward, Fiona & C. Gamble. “Big brains, small worlds: material culture and the evolution of the mind.” 2008. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B. 363: 1969-1979. P. 1969.


“When two people join together in a task, they often act as one functional unit, and the dyad that they form often has a different range of behavioral possibilities than either individual alone. The decision to engage in a joint action, including the means by which to carry it out, may depend on each individual’s ability to perceive the affordances for the resulting dyad, including the boundaries between actions that the dyad can and cannot perform.” Davis, Tehran, M. Riley, K. Shockley & S. Cummins-Sebree. “Perceiving affordances for joint actions.” 2010. Perception. Vol. 39: 1624-44. P. 1639.


“Findings from a number of recent studies have established that people are indeed able to make perceptual judgments of what the environment affords others with a high degree of accuracy.... “ Davis, Tehran, M. Riley, K. Shockley & S. Cummins-Sebree. “Perceiving affordances for joint actions.” 2010. Perception. Vol. 39: 1624-44. P. 1642.


Authors & Works cited in this section:

Aristotle. Psychology
Chemero, Anthony. Radical Embodied Cognitive Science.
Clark, Andy & Chalmers, David. "The Extended Mind."
Clark, Andy, Being There: Putting brain, Body, and World Together
Clark, Andy. Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension
Clark, Andy. "Where Brain, Body and World Collide."
Coward, Fiona & C. Gamble. “Big brains, small worlds: material culture and the evolution
Cziko, Gary. Without Miracles: Universal Selection Theory and
Davis, Tehran et al. “Perceiving affordances for joint actions.
Dennett, Daniel, Consciousness Explained
Donald, Merlin. Origins of the Modern Mind
Dyson, George. Darwin among the Machines: The Evolution of Global Intelligence
Edelman, Gerald and Tononi, Giulio. A Universe of Consciousness
Edelman, Gerald, Bright Air, Brilliant Fire; on the Matter of
Fauconnier, Gilles & Mark Turner. The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities
Gladwell, Malcolm. Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking
Godfrey-Smith, Peter. Complexity and the Function of Mind in Nature
Griffin, David Ray. Unsnarling the World-Knot: Consciousness,
Griffiths, Paul E. What Emotions Really Are
Hutchins, Edwin. “The Distributed Cognition Perspective on Human Interaction.”
Johnson, Mark & George Lakoff. Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied
Kant, I., Preface to the Critique of Pure Reason
Koons, Robert & George Bealer, Editors. The Waning of Materialism
Murphy, Nancey & Warren Brown. Did My Neurons Make Me Do It?
Plotkin, Henry. The Imagined World Made Real: Towards a Natural
Reed, Edward S. Encountering the World: Toward an Ecological
Rockwell, W. Teed. Neither Brain nor Ghost: A Nondualist Alternative
Samson, Paul and David Pitt. The Biosphere and Noosphere Reader
Spivey, Michael. The Continuity of Mind.
Taylor, Mark C. The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture
Tomasello, Michael. The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition
Wallace, B. Alan. The Taboo of Subjectivity: Toward a New Science
Wilson, Robert A. Boundaries of the Mind: The Individual in the