Papers by Michael Wheeler
Routledge eBooks, Dec 3, 2015
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Routledge eBooks, Apr 29, 2014
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The Hand, an Organ of the Mind, 2013
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Consciousness, Creativity, and Self at the Dawn of Settled Life, 2020
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Distributed Cognition in Victorian Culture and Modernism, 2020
The general introduction, which is replicated across all four volumes, aims to orientate readers ... more The general introduction, which is replicated across all four volumes, aims to orientate readers unfamiliar with this area of research. It provides an overview of the different approaches within the distributed cognition framework and discussion of the value of a distributed cognitive approach to the humanities. A distributed cognitive approach recognises that cognition is brain, body and world based. Distributed cognition is a methodological approach and a way of understanding the actual nature of cognition. The first section provides an overview of the various competing and sometimes conflicting theories that make up the distributed cognition framework and which are also collectively known as 4E cognition: embodied, embedded, extended and enactive cognition. The second section examines the ways in which humanities topics and methodologies are compatible with, placed in question or revitalised by new insights from philosophy of mind and the cognitive sciences on the distributed nat...
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Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2015
According to the hypothesis of extended cognition (henceforth ExC), the machinery of mind sometim... more According to the hypothesis of extended cognition (henceforth ExC), the machinery of mind sometimes extends beyond the skull and skin. To put things another way, the defining claim of ExC is that, contra the neuro-centrism of most modern cognitive science and most modern naturalistic philosophy of mind, the parts of the physical world that instantiate or implement cognitive states and processes are sometimes spread out over the brain, the non-neural body and the beyond-the-skin environment. More precisely still, ExC is the view that there are actual (in this world) cases of intelligent thought and action, in which the material vehicles that realize the thinking and thoughts concerned are spatially distributed over brain, body and world, in such a way that certain external (beyond-the-skull-and-skin) factors are rightly accorded cognitive status. In this final formulation of the view, the term ‘cognitive status’ is really just a place-holder for ‘whatever status it is that we standar...
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1. We have the Technology In a widely reported article published recently in Science (Sparrow et ... more 1. We have the Technology In a widely reported article published recently in Science (Sparrow et al., 2011), a series of experimental results were described which together indicate that, in an era of laptops, tablets, and smartphones that come armed with powerful Internet search engines, our organic brains often tend to internally store not the information about a topic, but rather how to find that information using the available technology. For example, in one experiment the participants were each instructed to type, into a computer, forty trivia statements that might ordinarily be found online (e.g. ‚An ostrich's eye is bigger than its brain‛). Half the participants were told that their typed statements would be saved on the computer and half were told that their typed statements would be deleted. Within each of these groups, half of the individuals concerned were asked explicitly to try to remember the statements (where 'remember' signals something like 'store in ...
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Creativity and Philosophy, 2018
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Minds and Machines, 2020
The Turing Test is routinely understood as a behaviourist test for machine intelligence. Diane Pr... more The Turing Test is routinely understood as a behaviourist test for machine intelligence. Diane Proudfoot (Rethinking Turing’s Test, Journal of Philosophy, 2013) has argued for an alternative interpretation. According to Proudfoot, Turing’s claim that intelligence is what he calls ‘an emotional concept’ indicates that he conceived of intelligence in response-dependence terms. As she puts it: ‘Turing’s criterion for “thinking” is…: x is intelligent (or thinks) if in the actual world, in an unrestricted computer-imitates-human game, x appears intelligent to an average interrogator’. The role of the famous test is thus to provide the conditions in which to examine the average interrogator’s responses. I shall argue that Proudfoot’s analysis falls short. The philosophical literature contains two main models of response-dependence, what I shall call the transparency model and the reference-fixing model. Proudfoot resists the thought that Turing might have endorsed one of these models to t...
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Australasian Philosophical Review, 2018
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AI & SOCIETY, 2018
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The Southern Journal of Philosophy, 2015
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International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 2008
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Topoi, 2015
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Philosophy Compass, 2016
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The Extended Mind, 2010
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Kybernetes, 2010
PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to consider Turing's test and his objections to the idea ... more PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to consider Turing's test and his objections to the idea that a machine might eventually pass it. Discusses behavioural diversity in relation to the Turing test.Design/methodology/approachThe paper argues that this objection cannot be dismissed easily, taking the view that the diversity exhibited by human behaviour is characterised by a kind of context‐sensitive adaptive plasticity. Draws on Descartes' arguments and artificial intelligence to interpret the Turing test.FindingsIt is found that the distinctive context‐sensitive adaptive plasticity of human behaviour explains why the Turing test is such a stringent test for the presence of thought and why it is much harder to pass than Turing himself may have realised.Originality/valueThis paper provides an unique view of Turing's test that will assist researchers in assessing its value and its goals.
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The Bloomsbury Companion to Philosophy of Mind, 2015
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Andy Clark and His Critics, 2019
Andy Clark is the foremost architect of the extended cognition hypothesis (ExC), according to whi... more Andy Clark is the foremost architect of the extended cognition hypothesis (ExC), according to which the machinery of mind extends beyond the skull and skin. Advocates of ExC divide into several camps, the most prominent being the first-wave (parity-based) theorists and the second-wave (complementarity-based) theorists. These two groups are routinely at loggerheads. Given this, it is an intriguing fact that Clark’s work has been appealed to by both sides. By exploring Clark’s own treatment of the relationship between parity and complementarity, this chapter argues that neither of these phenomena can ground a compelling case for extended cognition, and neither can their simple conjunction. Against Clark, it argues that a better argument for extended cognition relies on the concept of a mark of the cognitive. This argument does not fit comfortably into either first-wave or second-wave ExC, although it is perhaps most naturally seen as a development of the former.
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Papers by Michael Wheeler