Ants and robots, parlour games and steam drills 11
explaining the inner workings of the human mind, but they may help to practically,
and productively, undermine the very distinction between these ‘inner workings’
and their ‘outer’ environment, and they are likely to make a difference to how our
informational environments stand. In conclusion, I will offer an outlook on the
wider implications of my account on philosophical issues (Chapter 10).
In focusing on the role of the environment rather than the inner workings of
mind, I will appear to skirt the long-standing issues of qualia and propositional
content in the philosophy of mind. However, rather than merely cheating my way
around or flatly denying the importance of phenomenal qualities and the intentionality of the mental, I will seek to make a case for the relevance of what is
in the environment, and our interactions with it, to the existence and richness of
these phenomena.
Notes
1 The term “active externalism” was coined by Clark and Chalmers (1998), but see also
Hurley (1998), which was published together with Clark and Chalmers’s more famous
paper and provides a much more systematic account of externalist positions, and
Wilson (1994). The moniker “4E cognition” was later established as a generic term for
the class of extended, embedded, enactive and embodied cognition by Menary (2010c)
for the Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences Special Issue “4E Cognition: Embodied, Embedded, Enacted, Extended” which he edited.
2 It is interesting to observe that this possible historical source is rarely acknowledged
(but see Evans and Collins 2010, 60). Most scholars either take the game to be a proper
scientific test, whereas others focus on the gender rather than the game aspect of that
game; see, for example Saygin et al. (2000) and Sterrett (2000).
3 This direction of modelling from human being to machine is explicitly stated by Turing
(1950, 436) himself and highlighted in the reconstruction of Turing computability in
Copeland (2009). Also compare Ludwig Wittgenstein’s (1984, 197) observation:
“Turings ‘Maschinen’. Diese Maschinen sind ja die Menschen, welche kalkulieren.”
(“Turing’s ‘Machines’. These machines are humans who calculate.”) If there were a real
machine involved in the design of Turing’s machines, it was the mechanical typewriter,
suggests Turing’s biographer, Andrew Hodges (1983, 96–98).
explaining the inner workings of the human mind, but they may help to practically,
and productively, undermine the very distinction between these ‘inner workings’
and their ‘outer’ environment, and they are likely to make a difference to how our
informational environments stand. In conclusion, I will offer an outlook on the
wider implications of my account on philosophical issues (Chapter 10).
In focusing on the role of the environment rather than the inner workings of
mind, I will appear to skirt the long-standing issues of qualia and propositional
content in the philosophy of mind. However, rather than merely cheating my way
around or flatly denying the importance of phenomenal qualities and the intentionality of the mental, I will seek to make a case for the relevance of what is
in the environment, and our interactions with it, to the existence and richness of
these phenomena.
Notes
1 The term “active externalism” was coined by Clark and Chalmers (1998), but see also
Hurley (1998), which was published together with Clark and Chalmers’s more famous
paper and provides a much more systematic account of externalist positions, and
Wilson (1994). The moniker “4E cognition” was later established as a generic term for
the class of extended, embedded, enactive and embodied cognition by Menary (2010c)
for the Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences Special Issue “4E Cognition: Embodied, Embedded, Enacted, Extended” which he edited.
2 It is interesting to observe that this possible historical source is rarely acknowledged
(but see Evans and Collins 2010, 60). Most scholars either take the game to be a proper
scientific test, whereas others focus on the gender rather than the game aspect of that
game; see, for example Saygin et al. (2000) and Sterrett (2000).
3 This direction of modelling from human being to machine is explicitly stated by Turing
(1950, 436) himself and highlighted in the reconstruction of Turing computability in
Copeland (2009). Also compare Ludwig Wittgenstein’s (1984, 197) observation:
“Turings ‘Maschinen’. Diese Maschinen sind ja die Menschen, welche kalkulieren.”
(“Turing’s ‘Machines’. These machines are humans who calculate.”) If there were a real
machine involved in the design of Turing’s machines, it was the mechanical typewriter,
suggests Turing’s biographer, Andrew Hodges (1983, 96–98).