Andy Clark

Offering a radical re-evaluation of current approaches to performer training, this is a text that equips readers with a set of new ways of thinking about and ultimately 'doing' training. Stemming from his extensive practice and incorporating a review of prevailing methods and theories, Frank Camilleri focuses on how material circumstances shape and affect processes of training, devising, rehearsing and performing. Frank Camilleri puts forward the 'post-psychophysical' as a more extended form of psychophysical discussion and practice that emerged and dominated in the 20th century. The 'post-psychophysical' updates the concept of an integrated bodymind in various ways, such as the notion of a performer's bodyworld that incorporates technology and the material world. Offering invaluable introductions to a wide range of theories around which the book is structured-including postphenomenological, sociomaterial, affect and situated cognition-this volume provides readers with an enticing array of approaches to training and creative processes.

How do cultural artifacts influence the ways we experience and act? In this paper I propose that habits provide a central link between human organisms and the socio- cultural environment and that cognition is cultural tout court. I will defend an enactive account of habits that sees them as expansive in the temporal (they relate us to a history of socio-cultural interactions) and spatial sense (they are co-constituted by cultural artifacts and our enculturated bodies). This account is based on Dewey’s pragmatist- organicist concept of habits that rigorously anchors experience in culture. I will trace cultural factors in Dewey’s philosophy and 4E (embodied, embedded, enacted, extended) cognitive science with a focus on pervasive artifacts – such as architecture, pictures, and moving images – which have become part of our habits of perceiving. I finally situate such habits within recent predictive coding theories that claim to provide the corresponding neuroscientific theory to our cultural minds.

This thesis presents work toward a novel theory of human thinking. I argue that through ontogenesis the origins of cognition in situated-action are scaffolded by language and, in the process, the functional architecture of cognition, through a series of developmental changes, becomes dramatically restructured. 

The theory is developed with reference to several existing attempts to come to terms with this process, in cognitive modelling, philosophy and theoretical psychology. To test and develop these theories a novel approach to cognitive modelling is developed that allows current thinking in this area to be tested with greater clarity than was previously possible.

My approach builds upon the work of Andy Clark, Daniel Dennett, Merlin Donald and, ultimately, Lev Vygotsky, but it goes further in developing a detailed model of the process by which language (speech) is internalised in order to play a functionally restructuring role in human cognition. In particular I emphasize how the internal and external dimensions of language interact over different time scales. Further I argue it can be used to help explain how truly human thinking is born, and some of what is unique about that thinking.

An extensive historical survey is undertaken of the context in which some of the major previous theories of thinking have been developed and I use this to assess the reasons these models have only entertained a minor role for natural language in cognitive architecture. I also use this historical backdrop to explain why only limited previous work has been done with cognitive models in this area. Two cognitive robotics models are presented and discussed that shed light on how language may be internalised. These are used to develop a theoretical model of language internalisation more generally, and the stages of cognitive reorganisation this entails.

The thesis is completed by the use of the new model to tackle some significant problems in recent literature on the scientific understanding of consciousness. I argue this model can also help to explain findings about certain disorders of thought from the psychopathological literature.

In "Psychopower and Ordinary Madness" my ambition, as it relates to Bernard Stiegler's recent literature, was twofold: 1) critiquing Stiegler's work on exosomatization and artefactual posthumanism-or, more specifically, nonhumanism-to problematize approaches to media archaeology that rely upon technical exteriorization; 2) challenging how Stiegler engages with Giuseppe Longo and Francis Bailly's conception of negative entropy. These efforts were directed by a prevalent techno-cultural qualifier: the rise of Synthetic Intelligence (including neural nets, deep learning, predictive processing and Bayesian models of cognition). This paper continues this project but first directs a critical analytic lens at the Derridean practice of the ontologization of grammatization from which Stiegler emerges while also distinguishing how metalanguages operate in relation to object-oriented environmental interaction by way of inferentialism. Stalking continental (Kapp, Simondon, Leroi-Gourhan, etc.) and analytic traditions (e.g., Carnap, Chalmers, Clark, Sutton, Novaes, etc.), we move from artefacts to AI and Predictive Processing so as to link theories related to technicity with philosophy of mind. Simultaneously drawing forth Robert Brandom's conceptualization of the roles that commitments play in retrospectively reconstructing the social experiences that lead to our endorsement(s) of norms, we compliment this account with Reza Negarestani's deprivatized account of intelligence while analyzing the equipollent role between language and media (both digital and analog).

One of the most difficult concept in Sellars's philosophy of mind is what he called "picturing." I argue that Friedman's idea of "philosophy as meta-science" and argue that picturing is a meta-scientific concept in Friedman's sense: it is the meta-scientific anticipation of cognitive science. After showing how this makes sense of relevant Sellarsian texts I then turn to predictive processing in cognitive science and suggest that picturing is basically a proto-scientific anticipation of predictive processing.

In this paper, I will critically consider Clark and Chalmers' hypothesis of the «extended mind» in order to sketch a possible phenomenological account of active externalism, by following three steps: (i) I will consider Clark and Chalmers' hypothesis within the broader context of the so-called «physical symbol system hypothesis» theorized by Herbert A. Simon; (ii) I will connect the problem of the «extended mind» to that of the «extended self», with particular regard to the context of digitalization; (iii) I will take into account an explanatory dimension that has been fundamentally underrated by externalist theories: the dimension of the human body and its relationship to mind, which I understand from a phenomenological perspective. My ultimate goal is to show how phenomenology could provide the missing theoretical framework to develop a more complex and comprehensive theory of the (digitally) extended self.

The last thirty years have presented us with technology that has had a profound impact on how we produce, socialize with others, and consume culture. Today most of these actions are linked to a computational setup which involves a screen representing our options in two dimensions and a hand-operated controller for manipulating the screen environment, a hardware setup that has not changed considerably the last 50 years. The dominant interface for personal computers—the graphical user interface—is highly ocularcentric, where only parts of the body apparatus (eyes and hands) are addressed in the interface directly. As an increasing amount of information, life experience and human contact is channeled through it, the desktop computer system, becomes increasingly inadequate to fully represent these actions. Any prosthesis added to or used in conjunction with the body and any part of the sensory apparatus neglected will define our interaction with information. Information gathered by the somesthetic—the touch and proprioceptic senses—constitute a significant component in the way we form hypotheses about what an object is, and how it can be manipulated. By addressing the somesthetic senses in computer interfaces, we can achieve richer and more intuitive interactive experiences.

This paper aims to identify the key components of a general purpose computational environment that foreground multimodal interaction by 1) investigating the significant qualities of the somesthetic senses from a phenomenological and neurophysiological point of view, 2) pointing to successful principles of human computer interaction (coupling), and tools for designing embodied interactions (physical metaphors, interface agents, affordances, and visual and haptic feedback), 3) evaluating the components of current mobile phone technology, surface computing, responsive environments, and wearable computing. Strategies and plans of dominant technology companies strongly influence what interfaces and devices are available via the commercial market, turning many of us into passive users accepting the default setup made available to us. But if we can move beyond current ideas of what a computer is, re-invent and retell the stories of what we want living with a computer to be like, users are in a unique position to initiate and engage in discussions that influence artists, programmers, developers and engineers into trying something new.

This paper addresses the concept of semiotic scaffolding by considering it in light of questions arising from the contemporary challenge to the humanities. This challenge comes from a mixture of scientistic demands, opportunism on the part of Western governments in thrall to neo-liberalism, along with crass economic utilitarianism. In this paper we attempt to outline what a theory of semiotic scaffolding may offer to an understanding of the humanities' contemporary role, as well as what the humanities might offer to the elucidation of semiotic scaffolding. We argue that traditional humanist positions adopted in defence of the humanities fail to articulate the enhancement of humanity that semiotic scaffolding represents. At the same time, we note that the concept of scaffolding is sometimes in danger of taking on a functionalist perspective which understanding the humanities modus operandi is likely to dispel. Putting forward these arguments, we draw on the work of Peirce, Cassirer and Sebeok in elucidating the structural and 'future-orientated' benefits of the scaffolding process as it suffuses the humanities. The challenge to the humanities in the contemporary conjuncture is twofold. On one side, the humanities are charged with the task of achieving – and proving that they have achieved – immediate economic use-value. On the other side, the three hundred year-long rise of the natural sciences, and particularly their relation to technological development, have effectively thrown down the gauntlet to the humanities and challenged them to prove their worth. In what follows, we will argue that some of the responses to these challenges to the humanities uncritically fall back on traditional humanist positions derived from the very traditions of thought that are ultimately challenging the legitimacy of the humanities in the present. We suggest that an alternative perspective on the humanities – one that is critical of crass utilitarianism but is nonetheless unwilling to dismiss use-value – is

The specific relationship that living individuals have to their surroundings is often explained in terms of their boundary. Two basic variants of this can be distinguished. While in the first variant the spatial boundary of living individuals, as opposed to merely material bodies, has special function that is essential to the life process, according to the second variant living individuals have a boundary that extends beyond their spatial boundary. The thesis of an extended boundary has been defended in different scientific fields, for instance in recent theoretical biology (R. Dawkins, J. S. Turner) or in recent philosophy of cognition (A. Clark/ D. Chalmers). However, that the thesis in its entire range was already developed in the first half of the 20th century by Nicolai Hartmann is largely unknown. The essay shows how Hartman’s ontology of layers and levels can be used to acquire a conception of the extended boundary of living individuals that integrates organisms in general, animals and human persons in a unified way.

Książka poniższa jest próbą wskazania, jak wraz z rozwojem empirycznych nauk o systemach poznawczych zmienia się filozoficzne rozumienie istoty i działania ludzkiego umysłu ze szczególnym uwzględnieniem zmian kategorii reprezentacji mentalnej. Analizowane w niej są zatem problemy związane z reprezentowaniem wiedzy w koncepcjach ucieleśnionego, usytuowanego, rozproszonego i dynamicznego poznania rozszerzonego. Trzy podstawowe kwestie problemowe to zagadnienie nabywania treści przez reprezentacje (treści umysłu w perspektywie internalizmu i eksternalizmu), zagadnienie architektury umysłu, czyli form reprezentacji mentalnych (komputacjonizm, koneksjonizm a stanowisko dynamiczne) oraz kwestia reprezentacji ucieleśnionych, postulowanych jako kluczowe elementy procesów rozumowania umysłu rozszerzonego.

Autorka jest psychologiem i filozofem. Naukowo zajmuje się badaniem zagadnień z pogranicza obu tych dyscyplin, obecnie zaś przede wszystkim problemami psychologii moralności. Wykłada na Politechnice Wrocławskiej.

The Hypothesis of Extended Cognition (HEC) have been criticized as committing what is called the coupling/constitution fallacy, but it is the critic’s use of this concept which is fallacious. It is true that there is no reason to deny that the line between the self and the world should be drawn at the skull and/or the skin. But the data used to support HEC reveal that there was never a good enough reason to draw the line there in the first place. The burden of proof has fallen on the Mind/Brain identity theory, now that our intuitions/prejudices no longer support it. One of those “intuitions” is the Aristotelian assumption that the world can be neatly divided into objects that possess intrinsic causal powers, and the causal relations that connect those objects. In modern science, however, the concept of intrinsic causal powers is only a temporary stopgap that makes it possible to begin research in a particular area. It therefore seems best to assume that the line between mind and world is both pragmatic and dynamic. Consequently, the mind might best described as a fluctuating field, rather than an object or structur

ABSTRACT: Courtesy of its free energy formulation, the hierarchical predictive processing theory of the brain is often claimed to be a grand unifying theory. To test this claim, we consider a central case: reward-related activity of mesocorticolimbic dopaminergic (DA) systems. After reviewing the three most prominent hypotheses of DA activity—the anhedonia, incentive salience, and reward prediction error hypotheses—we conclude that current evidence vindicates explanatory pluralism, while leaves unwarranted the grand unifying claims of the predictive processing theory of the brain. More generally, we suggest that scientific progress in the cognitive sciences is unlikely to come in the form of a single overarching grand unifying theory.

L'obiettivo di questo saggio è indagare la nozione di osservabilità nella filosofia di van Fraassen, prestando particolare attenzione alle problematiche introdotte in questa prospettiva dall'ipotesi cyborg. Un'epistemologia attenta non può procedere prescindendo da uno sguardo riflessivo in grado di interrogare costantemente le condizioni concrete dell'attività scientifica nella corporeità. Pur condividendo tale preoccupazione, l'empirismo costruttivo mostra esitazioni non trascurabili in presenza di tecnologie di perceptual enhancement. Nell'elaborato compiremo una disamina delle critiche suscitate dall'impostazione fraasseniana e concluderemo la trattazione riconoscendo nella lettura effettuata da Adam Toon dell'extended mind thesis una possibile via d'uscita dalle difficoltà evidenziate.

Elaborato per il corso di Filosofia della Scienza (LM) tenuto dalla professoressa Raffaella Campaner presso l'Università di Bologna.

Some posthumanists see the potential in forthcoming enhancement technologies to alter human beings so much that we would no longer recognize them as members of our species. One sort of enhancement technology are prosthetic devices that would replace or increase normal human functioning, for example computer chips implanted in the brain or robotic arms controlled with our minds. On account of neuroplasticity, our brains would gradually reconfigure themselves so that we may use the prosthesis as though it were biologically a part of us. And, if our bodily organs can be replaced by mechanical counterparts, then piece-by-piece, as our body ages and its malfunctioning parts are replaced, one might gradually become less a human and more a machine, and one with extraordinary non-human abilities. There are even developments in brain simulation that could allow a computer to handle the functioning of large parts of one’s brain, opening the possibility that one’s whole brain might be “uploaded” to continue performing its functions on a computer connected to a robotic body. If the process of body-part replacement were slow and gradual enough that our minds and bodies always have ample opportunity to adjust to the new prosthetic devices, is it not conceivable that we could make a complete and continuous transition from human to machine using these technologies? Andy Clark’s and David Chalmers’ “extended mind hypothesis” provides a theoretical account for our bodily and cognitive extension into external technologies, and Clark as well as therapeutic prosthetic researchers draw from Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of the body to explain how such devices become a part of our body schemas. But, is Merleau-Ponty’s “organic” view of the body really the best theoretical framework to explain how our bodies are becoming more and more robotic? I will argue instead that Deleuze’s and Guattari’s “machinic” model is a more promising theoretical basis for the notion of posthuman enhancement and also for successful therapeutic prosthesis usage.

Towards the end of the 1990s, two new forms of externalism about mental states were proposed. Both went beyond the earlier semantic externalism of Putnam and Burge in arguing that environmental factors are relevant to more than just the contents of mental states. One was Williamson’s (1995, 2000) externalism about the attitudes to mental contents;  the other was Clark and Chalmers’ (1998) externalism about the realizers of mental states.  These two positions are logically distinct, and have generated entirely separate research programmes. Williamson’s externalism is part of his ‘knowledge-first’ epistemological programme which aims to get past Gettier-style problems for the analysis of knowledge by taking knowledge to be fundamental and unanalysable. Clark and Chalmers’ externalism raises issues for philosophy of mind and cognitive science: they suggest that the boundaries of the mind need not map on to the boundaries of the human organism.
The purpose of this paper is to explore hitherto unconsidered parallels between these two forms of externalism. The argument that Williamson uses to establish the indispensability of externalist propositional attitudes is, I suggest, the same argument used by Clark and Chalmers to establish the indispensability of externally-realized mental states. If one is persuaded of the existence of externalist propositional attitudes by Williamson’s argument then, ceteris paribus, one should also be persuaded of the existence of externally-realized mental states by Clark and Chalmers’ argument – and vice versa.

Over the past two decades, the predictive processing (PP) framework has emerged as an immensely influential research paradigm in cognitive science and beyond. This article analyzes the critical role that the notion of 'pattern' plays in the agenda-setting work of philosopher and cognitive scientist Andy Clark on PP and considers the project to develop the framework into a unified theory of the embodied mind. It argues that pattern contributes to this project not primarily as a full-fledged concept but rather as a figure of knowledge that shapes PP theory at a rhetorical and aesthetic level. The article offers a definition of figures of knowledge as a critical concept and suggests to apply it more broadly to the study of pattern as "keyword of our times" (Franco Moretti).

The extended mind thesis claims that some mental states and cognitive processes extend onto the environment. Items external to the organism or exploratory actions may constitute in part mental states and cognitive processes. In Clark and Chalmers’ original paper, ‘The Extended Mind’, this thesis receives support from the parity principle and from the active externalism. In their paper, more emphasis is given to the parity principle, which is presented as neutral regarding the nature of cognition. It would be advantageous to maintain that extended mental states and processes do not require a reform of our pre-theoretical view of cognition. In the present paper, I submit that we should give more emphasis on the active externalism, which, I argue, is not neutral regarding the nature of cognition. Cognition is viewed as successful adaptation to a specific task. Although this move may seem at first disadvantageous, it is necessary for the correct understanding and justification of Otto case as an example of extended mental state. Additionally, the parity principle cannot handle Weiskopf’s criticism that information registered in Otto’s notebook is not responsive to reasons. In order to address this criticism, we need to appeal to active externalism and its corresponding view of cognition.

Contemporary scientific and philosophical literature on perception often focuses on the relationship between perception and action, emphasizing the ways in which perception can be understood as geared towards action. Research in psychology, philosophy, robotics, computer science, and neuroscience, for example, sometimes characterizes perception as “action-specific”, “of affordances for action”, “active”, “enactive”, “for action”, or “action-oriented”. I’ll use the term ‘action-oriented’ as an umbrella-term to include approaches like these that share the idea of perception as oriented or geared towards action, in some sense.

My first aim in this paper is to provide a framework within which to classify approaches to action-oriented perception, and to highlight important differences between distinct approaches.  I will show that each approach within the framework is logically independent of the others: none of the approaches can be derived from the others without further justificatory assumptions.

This paper also has a second aim, which is to use this framework to explore the role of action-oriented perception in embodied cognitive science. In particular, I will focus on the claim that perceptual representations can be action-oriented (Clark 1997, Wheeler 2008), and show that it is committed to both the representational mechanisms of perception being action-oriented, and to their contents being action oriented. But given that neither of these claims can be derived from the other, proponents of action-oriented representation owe us separate justification for each claim. I will argue that such justifications are not forthcoming in the literature, and that attempts to reconstruct them run into trouble: the sorts of arguments offered for the representational mechanisms being action-oriented seem to undermine the sorts of arguments offered for the representational content being action-oriented, and vice-versa.

Giving up the unity and the wholeness of self refers to a whole philosophical phylum which relates to continental and analytical thinking, and has been addressed by cinema and media studies. Such philosophical movement claims the lack of a central core of consciousness, conceiving the self as a distributed by-product of brain, body and environment coupling. In the contemporary debate, much attention is given to optical technical media as a model or metaphor for understanding human mind, as well as an epistemic tool for thinking. By combining strands from continental phenomenology, radical thought, embodied cognitive science and media theory my article will address topics of mind, awareness and subjectivity in regard of audiovisual experience. Starting from Michel Foucault’s notion of technology of self, my claim is that cinema and optical apparatuses represent a paradigmatic “dispositifs” for scaffolding and attuning conscious experiences. In this perspective, the daily use of moving-images is an epistemic tool for mind extension and the distribution of human cognition. As this continuous shifting of awareness and presence among environments attunes our very sense of what-is-likeness, an alternative archaeology of mind through media is thus proposed.

A theory of cognitive systems individuation is presented and defended. The approach has some affinity with Leonard Talmy's Overlapping Systems Model of Cognitive Organization, and the paper's first section explores aspects of Talmy's view that are shared by the view developed herein. According to the view on offer -- the conditional probability of co-contribution account (CPC) -- a cognitive system is a collection of
mechanisms that contribute, in overlapping subsets, to a wide variety of forms of intelligent behavior. Central to this approach is the idea of an integrated system. A formal characterization of integration is laid out in the form of a conditional-probability-based measure of the clustering of causal contributors to the production of intelligent behavior. I relate the view to the debate over extended and embodied cognition and respond to objections that have been raised in print by Andy Clark, Colin Klein, and Felipe de Brigard.

We live in a wired town, in which humans and machines mutually generate new forms of ‘beings.’ This is called a transhuman age, in which humans and machines are hybridized as digitally connected to each other. In fact, we humans entered into this transhuman realm a long time ago. Humans are the beings to use tools, with which humans extended bodily capacities and overcame predators. The paper traces the idea of transhumanism back to the notions of philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, who showed that being or all beings living and non-living are organisms. In his philosophy, the paper senses a scent of transhumanism. The mutual prehension is like a mutual hybridization. The theory of extended mind by Andy Clark and David Chalmers witnesses this hybridization of human and machine. The future
orientation of this hybridized world is totally up to us in the present, depending on how we understand and take steps to prepare for the future. However, our commonsensical and dyadic understandings of nature/culture, human/nonhuman and living/nonliving become significant stumbling blocks on the road. This paper just tries to show how we, humans and machines together, are after all one, to sink or swim together. However, Clark’s idea of human beings as natural-born cyborgs still contains a modern error of anthropocentrism. Thus, a trans-human philosophy for new beings needs to be a philosophy in which all beings, living and nonliving, are equally prehended. This article argues that this is Whitehead philosophy of organism.

Keywords: trans-humanism, A. N. Whitehead, organism, A. Clark, the
theory of the extended mind, hybridization

Contemporary debates about epistemic luck and its relation to knowledge have traditionally proceeded against a tacit background commitment to cognitive internalism, the thesis that cognitive processes play out inside the head. In particular, safety-based approaches (e.g., reveal this commitment by taking for granted a traditional internalist construal of what I call the cognitive fixedness thesis—viz., the thesis that the cognitive process that is being employed in the actual world is always 'held fixed' when we go out to nearby possible worlds to assess whether the target belief is lucky in a way that is incompatible with knowledge. However, for those inclined to replace cognitive internalism with the extended mind thesis (e.g., Clark and Chalmers 1998), a very different, 'active externalist' version of the cognitive fixedness thesis becomes the relevant one for the purposes of assessing a belief's safety. The aim here will be to develop this point in a way that draws out some of the important ramifications it has for how we think about safety, luck and knowledge.

According to the "Embodied Cognition" entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, the three landmark texts in the 4E cognitive science tradition are Lakoff and Johnson's Metaphors We Live By, Varela, Thompson, and Rosch's The Embodied Mind, and Andy Clark's Being There. In my first section, I offer a phenomenological interpretation of these three texts, identifying recuring affirmations of the figure of dance alongside explicit marginalization of the practice of dance, perhaps in part due to cognitive science's overemphasis on cognition to the exclusion of affect. In my second section, drawing on my previous interpretations of proto-affect theorists (including Spinoza, Deleuze, and Fanon), I channel this tension in 4E cognitive science into a dancing partnership with human science psychology, suggesting three "choreographic provocations" for therapeutic practice and psychological research, namely (1) treating clients/ subjects as dancers, (2) reimagining research and therapy as improvised duets between practitioners and clients/subjects, and (3) pursuing an ideal of freer movement and an emergent flourishing singularity for clients/subjects. Finally, I reformulate these three choreographic provocations in terms of my new theoretical method of "dancing-with," as well as the four psychological prerequisites for flourishing posited by my figuration philosophy of dance.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse in how far the new field of embodied cognitive science is compatible with the traditional cognitive science program, with a side view on possible differences in the explanatory power between the two different programs.
Two conclusions are drawn. First, the various approaches in embodied cognitive science should be classified into two versions ‐ one of which is compatible with traditional approaches, the second of which is not. In particular, weak embodied theories are still compatible with the core of the traditional
program because they still share the latterʹs computational strategies. By contrast, radical embodied theories are not compatible with the traditional program since they completely abandon the computational approach in favour of the complex interactions between the system, its body and the world.
Second, weak and radical embodiment have different status. Weak embodied cognitive science seems likely to exceed the traditional program in explanatory power, because it can extend the pool of traditional concepts in interesting ways. By contrast, radical embodiment at current seems to be a theoretical position rather than a mature experimental research program, because it is in a process of conceptual and methodological clarification that predates substantial empirical research.

The sum of Andy Clark's theory of extended cognition — argued in research papers and books such as Natural-Born Cyborgs, Supersizing the Mind, and Surfing Uncertainty — now impacts the theory and practice of advanced generative design in emergent realms of biointelligent, bioremedial architectures. This is especially true for biodigital and genetic-architectures where design-by-research sources technology and biology for computational simulations and AI. For my own writing, designing (Fig. 1), and teaching Clark has provided a philosophical and theoretical logic I redeploy to connect cross-specie biointelligence, bioAI, and synthetic biology for justifying metabolically autonomous buildings. Consequently, Clark's philosophy underpins the theoretical integration of metabolic architectures designed to biologically remove carbon from the atmosphere. Biointelligent structures and biochemical materials thus theoretically testify to Clark's vision that nature/environment/cognition are inseparable from the designer's processing of data from urban and wild organisms and phenomenal matter for ecological performative architectural duties. Figure 1. Metabolic Tower. Barcelona. Algorithmic plant-grown structure, microbe panels. Dennis Dollens As I explain in the last chapter of Metabolic Architectures (devoted to Clark's extended cognition), architects can derive analogies appropriate to the interchange of design/nature/technology — pathways for understanding and integrating a designer's visualization-inaction with theories of how environments (including cities, objects, infrastructures) hold, exchange, and generate data/information. This is literally a

Cuando nos programamos o nos coordinamos, nos ponemos de acuerdo o en simbiosis. En otra escala y en cierto sentido, el homeostasis es también una simbiosis de partes que hace el cuerpo en su totalidad sistémica. Esta coordinación requiere la supresión de la tendencia entrópica hacia la equilibridad a través de una minimización de lo llamativo. En el esquema bayesiano, lo llamativo es nada más que las percepciones que contradicen los priors (parámetros predictivos) y producen una respuesta (bottom-up) requiriendo alguna modificación de los priors (top-down) que figuran el modelo predictivo. Este modelo es la experiencia en sí mientras los prediction-errors son sus adaptaciones. Entonces, se entiende la cognición predictiva como producida antes que se experiencia
y la experiencia en sí como ensayos experimentales de ella para reinscribir sus priors. Esta tesis tratará la cuestión ética del poder cambiarse dentro del cerebro bayesiano.

Mettiamo subito le cose in chiaro. Alla fine di questo ipertesto ti darò la risposta a una semplice domanda: ci sono facoltà umane indispensabili? Se non ami gli spoiler, salta il resto di questo capoverso, perché sto per darti in anticipo la risposta: no, le proprietà umane sono in quanto tali dispensabili. Sono anzi le cose di cui ci circondiamo e con cui ci intratteniamo a essere indispensabili: il nostro “dentro” è assai meno importante del nostro “fuori”.

Ora che ti ho rivelato il finale (sempre che tu non abbia davvero saltato lo spoiler), ti spiego come ci si arriva. Si tratterà di affrontare tre livelli. Il primo è storico-filosofico, roba più da accademici, e può essere saltato se non sei un filosofo di professione, o non sei in generale interessato alla storia del pensiero. Il secondo è più strettamente concettuale: si vedrà che cosa significa “dispensabilità”. Il terzo è fatto di esempi, e servirà o a rovinarti definitivamente la vita o a regalarti gloria eterna: starà a te.

A case study in historical cognitive science, this paper addresses two claims made by radical proponents of new dynamical approaches. It queries their historical narrative, which sees embodied, situated cognition as correcting an individualist, atemporal framework originating in Descartes. In fact, new Descartes scholarship shows that 17th-century animal spirits neurophysiology realized a recognizably distributed model of memory; explicit representations are patterns of spirit flow, and memory traces are changes left by experience in connections between brain pores. This historical sketch supports the second dynamicist claim, that connectionists' stress on the cognitive importance of pattern-recreation needs supplementing by dynamicists' real-time focus and attention to the active roles of body and environment. Animal spirits theory exhibits just the 'continuous reciprocal causation' between brain, body, and environment which Andy Clark sees as dynamicism's central contribution, and allows for the embedding of brains in culture as well as the physical world.

I introduce the seven papers in this special issue, by Andy Clark, Jerome Dokic, Richard Menary, Jenann Ismael, Sue Campbell, Doris McIlwain, and Mark Rowlands. This paper explains the motivation for an alliance between the sciences of memory and the extended mind hypothesis. It examines in turn the role of worldly, social, and internalized forms of scaffolding to memory and cognition, and also highlights themes relating to affect, agency, and individual differences.