| Clark, A. An embodied cognitive science? Trends in Cognitive Sciences 1999 (3)9:345-351 [html] |
| The last ten years have seen an increasing interest, within cognitive science, in issues concerning the physical body, the local environment, and the complex interplay between neural systems and the wider world in which they function. Yet many unanswered questions remain, and the shape of a genuinely physically embodied, environmentally embedded science of the mind is still unclear. In this article I will raise a number of critical questions concerning the nature and scope of this approach, drawing a distinction between two kinds of appeal to embodiment: (1) 'Simple' cases, in which bodily and environmental properties merely constrain accounts that retain the focus on inner organization and processing; and (2) More radical appeals, in which attention to bodily and environmental features is meant to transform both the subject matter and the theoretical framework of cognitive science. |
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| Brooks, R., L.A. Stein, Building Brains for Bodies Autonomous Robots 1994 (1)1:pp. 7-25 [pdf] |
| We describe a project to capitalize on newly available levels of computational resources in order to understand human cognition. We are building an integrated physical system including vision, sound input and output, and dextrous manipulation, all controlled by a continuously operating large scale parallel MIMD computer. The resulting system will learn to "think" by building on its bodily experiences to accomplish progressively more abstract tasks. Past experience suggests that in attempting to build such an integrated system we will have to fundamentally change the way artificial intelligence, cognitive science, linguistics, and philosophy think about the organization of intelligence. We expect to be able to better reconcile the theories that will be developed with current work in neuroscience. |
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| Thompson, E., Varela, F.J. Radical embodiment: neural dynamics and cosnciousness Trends in Cognitive Sciences 2001 (5)10:418-425 [pdf] |
| Manifeste de la position 'enactive': la conscience n'est pas basé sur les épiphénomènes que sont les NCC, mais sur des interactions dynamiques de grande échelles, avec une causalité montante et descendante vis-à-vis des propriétés émergentes du système. D'autre part, critique de la position internaliste: le système dynamique implique le corps et l'environnement et il n'est pas donné que le decoupage en sous-système ne doivent pas se faire au travers de ces frontières plutot que selon ces frontières. |
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| Varela, F.J. The Embodied Mind: Cognitive science and human experience 1991 |
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| Ziemke, T. What's that thing called embodiment? 2003 [pdf] |
| Embodiment has become an important concept in many areas of cognitive science. There are, however, very different notions of exactly what embodiment is and what kind of body is required for what type of embodied cognition. Hence, while many nowadays would agree that humans are embodied cognizers, there is much less agreement on what kind of artifact could be considered embodied. This paper identifies and contrasts six different notions of embodiment which can roughly be characterized as (1) structural coupling between agent and environment, (2) historical embodiment as the result of a history of struct ural coupling, (3) physical embodiment, (4) organismoid embodiment, i.e. organismlike bodily form (e.g., humanoid robots), (5) organismic embodiment of autopoietic, living systems, and (6) social embodiment. |
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