“Clark, A. (1999). An embodied cognitive science? Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 3(9), 345–351. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1364-6613(99)01361-3”
Summary
The author describes the difference between two different approaches to facts about embodiment, which involves the physical relationship between an intelligent system and bodily and environmental properties. In “simple” embodiment, properties of the physical world provide rules to constrain cognitive science theories. “Radical” embodiment sees the representational theories of cognition as inadequate, and seeks to develop a new framework for cognitive science.
Atomic notes
- Representation-hungry systems maintain complex internal states and perform offline computations linearly
- Dynamic coupling model of cognition
- Human cognition depends on artifact and culture
Key terms
- Adaptive coupling = when a system develops a mechanism to track the behavior of another system (typically an evolved mechanism in animals).
- Simple embodiment = approaching facts about embodiment as rules for a theory about information processing.
- Radical embodiment = an approach where the mind cannot be meaningfully studied in isolation from the physical world
- Deictic pointer = a physical action that has the functional role of binding computational memory/output to a feature of the external world.
Selected concepts and passages
Embodied behavior
The roboticist Rodney Brooks has coined the slogan ‘The world is its own best model’.
Behavioral success involves locking on to simple (but often far from obvious) properties of the environment made available in the perceptual array.
Embodiment and computation
- Representation-hungry systems use linear processing: In the traditional model, the brain takes in data, performs a complex computation that solves the problem (where will the ball land?) and then instructs the body where to go. This is a linear processing cycle: perceive, compute and act.
- The dynamic coupling model performs “live“ adjustments in response to the environment: “In the second model, the problem is not solved ahead of time. Instead, the task is to maintain, by multiple, real-time adjustments to the run, a kind of co-ordination between the inner and the outer worlds.”
- “Such co-ordination dynamics constitute something of a challenge to traditional ideas about perception and action: they replace the notion of rich internal representations and computations, with the notion of less expensive strategies whose task is not first to represent the world and then reason on the basis of the representation, but instead to maintain a kind of adaptively potent equilibrium that couples the agent and the world together.”
Cognition and adaptive coupling
One reason for thinking [that adaptive coupling is not cognition] is that cognition has been taken to involve the capacity to relate to an ‘intentional object’42 – and this means, in part, an object that might not be present-at-hand or that might not even exist.
The mark of the cognitive, then, is the capacity to engage in something like off-line reason43 – reasoning in the absence of that which our thoughts concern. Classical (‘disembodied’) cognitive science accounted well for this, by positing an inner realm richly populated with internal tokens that stood for external objects and states of affairs.
One promising advance is the suggestion that embodied cognitive science might treat off-line reason as something like simulated sensing and acting, thus preserving the special flavor of embodied problem-solving alongside a high degree of ability to decouple from the environment.
Simple and radical embodiment
These accounts of radical embodiment all involve one or more of the following claims: (I) that understanding the complex interplay of brain, body and world requires new analytic tools and methods, such as those of dynamical systems theory; (II) that traditional notions of internal representation and computation are inadequate and unnecessary; (III) that the typical decomposition of the cognitive system into a variety of inner neural or functional subsystems is often misleading, and blinds us to the possibility of alternative, and more explanatory, decompositions that cut across the traditional brain–body–world divisions.
Closely related to these three points is the idea that even the subject matter of cognitive science needs to be re-thought. A mature science of the mind, it now seems, targets not (or not only) the individual, inner organization of intelligence but the bodily and environmentally extended organizations responsible for adaptive success.
Radical embodiment and advanced cognition
- Radical embodiment suggests alternative ways to decompose cognitive systems: “In thinking about ‘higher’ cognition and advanced human reason, it might likewise prove fruitful to consider the literal extension of the cognitive system to include aspects of the local environment.”
- “Wideware” are external items that enhance cognition by complementing biological processing: The external environment, actively structured by us, becomes a source of cognition-enhancing ‘wideware’ – external items (devices, media, notations) that scaffold and complement (but usually do not replicate) biological modes of computation and processing, creating extended cognitive systems whose computational profiles are quite different from those of the isolated brain.
- Human cognition depends on artifact and culture: “Human brains, raised in this sea of cultural tools, might develop strategies for advanced problem solving that ‘factor in’ these external resources as profoundly and deeply as the bodily motions of the tuna factor in and maximally exploit the reliable properties of the surrounding water.”