Andy Clark

Quotes From

“The Extended Mind” (1998)

• Without language, we might be much more akin to discrete Cartesian ‘inner’ minds, in which high-level cognition relies largely on internal resources. But the advent of language has allowed us to spread this burden into the world. Language, thus construed, is not a mirror of our inner states but a complement to them. It serves as a tool whose role is to extend cognition in ways that on-board devices cannot. Indeed, it may be that the intellectual explosion in recent evolutionary time is due as much to this linguistically-enabled extension of cognition as to any independent development in our inner cognitive resources.#

“Language, Embodiment, and the Cognitive Niche” (2006)

• Explicit ‘thinking about thinking’ appears to be a good candidate for a distinctively human capacity and one that might be directly dependent upon language for its very existence. To formulate a thought in words (or on paper) is to create an object available to ourselves and to others, and, as an object, it is the kind of thing we can have thoughts about. . . . The process of linguistic formulation thus creates the stable attendable structure to which subsequent thinkings can attach.#
• Language works its magic not (or not solely) by means of translation into appropriate expressions of ‘Mentalese’ or the ‘Language of Thought’ but by something more like a coordination dynamics in which words and structured linguistic encodings act to stabilize and discipline (or ‘anchor’) intrinsically fluid and context-sensitive modes of thought and reason.#

Mindware (2000)

• Why shouldn’t [Searle’s] Chinese Room, or Block’s Chinese population, actually have real, and qualitatively rich, mental states? Our discomfort, I suggest, flows not from the bedrock idea that the right formal structure could guarantee the presence of such states so much as from a nagging suspicion that the formal structures that will be implemented will prove too shallow.#
• It is not at all obvious that (nonhuman) animal thought is systematic in the Fodor and Pylyshyn sense. . . . It is our experiences with public language that equip is to think such an open-ended variety of thoughts and hence cognitive systematicity may be both nonpervasive and rather closely tied to our linguistic abilities themselves.#
• Precise, single-digit movements actually require more [brain] activity than some multidigit whole hand actions (such as grasping an object).#
• The neural representation of worldly events may be less like a passive data structure and more like a recipe for action. The driving force, once again, is computational economy. If the goal of perception and reason is to guide action (and it surely is, evolutionarily speaking), it will often be simpler to represent the world in ways rather closely geared to the kinds of actions we want to perform.#
• As users of words and texts, we command an especially cheap and potent means of off-loading data and ideas from the biological brain onto a variety of external media.#
• We transcend these limits [of being “good at frisbee, bad at logic”], in large part, by combining the internal operation of a connectionist, pattern-completing device with a variety of external operations and tools that serve to reduce the complex, sequential problems to an ordered set of simpler pattern-completing operations of the kind our brains are comfortable with.#
• Our imaginative (intrinsic) capacities do indeed support “synthetic transformations” in which components retain their shapes but are recombined into new wholes, but lack the “analytic” capacity to decompose an imagined shape into wholly new components. This is because the latter type of case (but not the former) requires us to first undo an existing shape interpretation.#
• Much of what matters about human-level intelligence is hidden not in the brain, nor in the technology, but in the complex and iterated interactions and collaborations between the two.#