Supersizing the Mind

Andy Clark is Professor of Philosophy in the School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences, at Edinburgh University in Scotland. He is the author of several books including Being There: Putting Brain, Body and World Together Again (1997) and Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies and The Future Of Human Intelligence (OUP, 2003). His research interests include robotics and artificial life, the cognitive role of human-built structures, specialization and interactive dynamics in neural systems, and the interplay between language, thought and action.

an important book for all cognitive-science theorists of all stripes... Supersizing the Mind will set the terms for many of the coming debates

• Forward: By David Chalmers / Acknowledgements / Introduction: BRAINBOUND versus EXTENDED / I: From Embodiment to Cognitive Extension - 1. The Active Body: 1.1 A Walk on the Wild Side; 1.2 Inhabited Interaction; 1.3 Active Sensing; 1.4 Distributed Functional Decomposition; 1.5 Sensing for Coupling; 1.6 Information Self-Structuring; 1.7 Perception, Qualia, and Sensorimotor Expectations; 1.8 Time and Mind; 1.9 Dynamics and (Soft) Computation.; 1.10 Out from the Bedrock; 2. The Negotiable Body: 2.1 Where the Rubber Meets the Road; 2.2 What's in an Interface?; 2.3 New Systemic Wholes; 2.4 Substitutes; 2.5 Incorporation Vs Use; 2.6 Towards Cognitive Extension; 2.7 Three Grades of Embodiment; 3. Material Symbols: 3.1 Language as Scaffolding; 3.2 Augmenting Reality; 3.3 Sculpting Attention; 3.4 Hybrid Thoughts?;3.5 From Translation to Coordination; 3.6 Second-order Cognitive Dynamics; 3.7 Self-made Minds.;4. World, Incorporated: 4.1 Cognitive Niche Construction: A Primer; 4.2 Cognition in the Globe: A Cameo; 4.3 Thinking Space; 4.4 Epistemic Engineers; 4.5 Exploitative Representation and Wide Computation; 4.6 Tetris: The Update; 4.7 The Swirl of Organization; 4.8 Extending the Mind; 4.9 BRAINBOUND versus EXTENDED: The Case So Far.; II. Boundary Disputes - 5. Mind Re-bound?: 5.1 EXTENDED Anxiety; 5.2 Pencil Me In; 5.3 The Odd Coupling; 5.4 Cognitive Candidacy; 5.5 The Mark of the Cognitive?; 5.6 Kinds and Minds; 5.7 Perception and Development; 5.8 Deception and Contested Space; 5.9 Folk Intuition and Cognitive Extension; 5.10 Asymmetry and Lopsideness; 5.11 Similarity vs Complementarity; 5.12 Hippo-World; 6. The Cure for Cognitive Hiccups (HEMC, HEC, HEMC): 6.1 Rupert's Challenge; 6.2 HEC versus HEMC; 6.3 Parity and Cognitive Kinds (Again); 6.4 The Persisting Core; 6.5 Cognitive Impartiality; 6.6 A Brain Teaser; 6.7 Thoughtful Gestures; 6.8 Material Carriers; 6.9 Loops as Mechanisms; 6.10 Anarchic Self-Stimulation; 6.11Autonomous Coupling; 6.12 Why the HEC?; 6.13 The Cure; 7. Rediscovering the Brain: 7.1 Matter into Mind; 7.2.Honey, I Shrunk the Representations; 7.3 Change Spotting: The Sequel; 7.4 Thinking about Thinking: The Brain's Eye View.: 7.5 Born-Again Cartesians?; 7.6 Surrogate Situations; 7.7 Plug Points; 7.8 Brain Control; 7.9 Asymmetry Arguments; 7.10 Extended in a Vat; 7.11 The (Situated) Cognizer's Innards; III: The Limits of Embodiment - 8. Painting, Planning, and Perceiving: 8.1 Enacting Perceptual Experience; 8.2 The Painter and the Perceiver; 8.3 Three Virtues of the Strong Sensorimotor Model; 8.4 A Vice: Sensorimotor (Hyper) Sensitivity; 8.5 What Reaching Teaches; 8.6 (Tweaked)Tele-Assistance; 8.7 Sensorimotor Summarizing; 8.8 Virtual Content, Again; 8.9 Beyond the Sensorimotor Frontier; 9. Disentangling Embodiment: 9.1 Three Threads; 9.2 The Separability Thesis; 9.3 Beyond Flesh-eating Functionalism. ; 9.4 Ada, Adder, and Odder; 9.5 A Tension Revealed; 9.6 What Bodies Are; 9.7 Participant Machinery and Morphological Computation; 9.8 Quantifying Embodiment; 9.9 The Heideggerian Theatre / 10. Conclusions: Mindsized Bites / Appendix: The Extended Mind (Andy Clark and David Chalmers)