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

by Andy Clark

The old opposition of matter versus mind stubbornly persists in the way we study mind and brain. In treating cognition as problem solving, Andy Clark suggests, we may often abstract too far from the very body and world in which our brains evolved to guide us. Whereas the mental has been treated as a realm that is distinct from the body and the world, Clark forcefully attests that a key to understanding brains is to see them as controllers of embodied activity. From this paradigm shift he advances the construction of a cognitive science of the embodied mind.

Genres: Philosophy, Psychology, Nonfiction, Science, Neuroscience, Research, Artificial Intelligence

292 pages, Paperback

First published November 30, 1996

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.

Reviews

[S]

I did the readings in this for a class I took as an undergrad. I remember nothing about it. I'm not even sure if was the class was the one taught by the extremely hot* man or some other class. I nearly got rid of it, but I think I saw it on the shelf of another teacher I had a crush on** and so I looked at the book again and none of the words made any sense. But now I'm out of school and married to a man who looked inside this and said, "Yeah, this guy wants to be Alan Watts" and closed it again.

I tried to read Alan Watts once. So, the only reasonable place for this book is in the donation box at work. So long, book! I'm glad I didn't marry an academic!

* Hot in both senses. Very handsome and constantly sweating.

** As God is my witness, there were only two. Why they should converge on this book is a mystery, SURELY.

[Jacob · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Hey Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty!! So glad you were able to make it! Huh? You weren't invited? Eh, well, nevermind that. Let me grab you two some beers and introduce you to my good ol' buddy over here, anglo-american philosophy of mind."

[Benjamin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Back in my other life as a philosophy student, this book was what got me interested in cognitive science. Clark was at Washington University at the time, and I had grand plans for driving to St. Louis and stalking him until he took me on as a grad student. Thankfully for my arrest record, this never happened. But I still think he's an important theorist--his work stands right at the gap between the meat-stuff and the mind-stuff. This book in particular, which looks at the way we use "off-board" computing--interacting with the world around us, then perceiving the results of that interaction--to augment the brain's own processing, has a lot of relevance to designing efficient robot manipulators.

[Val Delane · Rating 5 out of 5]

Cogscigasm! This book might be even _more_ relevant now than when it was published 14 years ago, given how the border is blurring between our carbon-based brains and silicon-based exocortex. Sure, the interface is still a bit clumsy, but really--would you let anyone take away your smartphone other than prying it from your cold, dead fingers? Although Clark makes it clear that intelligence extends into the environment, he also argues quite convincingly that our physical bodies are intrinsic to the process of learning and thinking--which implies that full consciousness upload to silicon (the Rapture of the Nerds) may be impractical, or at least require that a body be part of the model.

[Kate · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Language is the ultimate artifact."

"What is displayed is just a specially tailored summary of the results of certain episodes of internal activity."

"The 'good ideas' emerged as the fruits of these repeated little interactions between me and various external media."

"I am not one inner voice but many."

"I consist of multiple mindless streams of highly parallel and often relatively independent computational processes."

"My single voice is no more than a literary conceit."

[Zedder · Rating 4 out of 5]

Just re-read this in my phi. mind class. It's really good, and contains tons of examples of experiments with interestingly suggestive results.

[Marcelo Coelho]

"no intelligence without environment" is a good catch phrase for it~
jeevan

[Anna · Rating 4 out of 5]

winning

[Luis Miguel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Me ha dado una perspectiva radicalmente nueva de la mente. No me lo esperaba tan interesante.

[Daniel Martínez · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bien escrito y buena intro a la ciencia cognitiva corporizada. Creo que es poco concluyente al explicar la mente extendida y su enfoque representacionalista no le hace ningún favor. Pero buen libro

[seelishaugust · Rating 4 out of 5]

on to reading his other works!

[Georgia Bulgacov · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating. Loved the brain talking at the epilogue lol