Читать книгу Figure It Out - Stephen P. Anderson - Страница 23

The question before us then is twofold. First, how does this most exciting idea change our view of how the mind works? And second, what does it mean for how we create understanding from information?

We’ve long understood that Starbucks and Calvin Klein use marketing to influence what we think. But it is surprising, and intriguing when science finds that a cappuccino or a lab coat can influence how we think. The temperature of our morning coffee can make the grumpy bus driver seem friendlier? Wearing a long white jacket can help us focus on a task? It sounds a bit crazy.²⁴ In one sense, it’s not that controversial: of course, the outside world influences what happens in our head. Imagine taking a calculus test, not in a classroom, but outside, on a glorious day, at the beach. Who wouldn’t find it hard to concentrate when you could be lounging or surfing or reading a great book. But embodiment is making a much deeper claim: our ability to think depends on the world outside our head. We can never fully escape how the way we interact with our environment shapes our cognitive powers.

Embodiment is far from settled science. Just how far to take this idea is a matter of much debate and even more research. It is helpful to think of embodiment, not as a singular theory, but as an umbrella term that includes many different challenges to the computational theory of mind. You will find Clark’s extended mind under this umbrella, along with ecological psychology, distributed cognition, enactivism, activity theory, and something called radical embodied cognition, to name just a few. Although they each have various intellectual roots, and the distinctions between them are often fuzzy, they all share a belief that no robust theory of mind can come from studying neurons alone.

There is one topic, however, where there is a notable disagreement. Do mental representations exist or not? This is the big dividing line. Some groups under the embodiment umbrella, most notably radical embodied cognition, posit that we don’t need mental representations. To those who stand under this part of the embodiment umbrella, symbols in the brain are as mythical as unicorns. Since even the most advanced brain scanning technology has failed to observe even a single mental representation, this idea has an obvious allure. Experiments with creatures ranging from robots and crickets to children and baseball players have provided intriguing evidence for this position.²⁵ Even so, explaining the mind without mental representations is so difficult that Anthony Chemero opened his book Radical Embodied Cognitive Science with the following qualifier: “One of the things I try to make clear is that it is actually very difficult to reject internal representations, and that radical embodied cognitive science must be more radical than most of its proponents realize.”²⁶

The debate over mental representations means we can, and should, expand our brainbound vs. extended framework. Our revised diagram, shown in Figure 2.4, puts brainbound at one end of a spectrum (cognition is all about symbols in the head), radical at the other (cognition involves no mental representations whatsoever), and extended somewhere in the middle. Exactly where in the middle is not easy to say. It depends on where one stands under the embodiment umbrella. That middle area covers a lot of different ideas. The later chapters in this book, for example, often draw from distributed cognition, but for our purposes, it’s sufficient to overlook these differences since this is the region that accepts mental representations as part of an embodied view of the mind.

FIGURE 2.4 A spectrum of perspectives on the nature of human cognition.