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Wednesday, April 21 , 2004
Ford Motor Company Environmental Science
and Technology (ES&T) Building
Room L1205
4:00 PM

Featuring: Andy Clark, Indiana University
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"From Mere Embodiment to the Cyborg Mind”"

Abstract:
In the headlong rush to embrace embodiment, environmental embedding, and
situated reasoning, there is a danger of losing sight of one important sense in which
biological intelligence has the capacity for flexible embodiment. It is embodimentflexible
to the extent that it depends upon what Clark calls ‘ecological control systems’.
These are systems that are delicately specialized so as to learn, on the fly, what bodily,
informational, and environmental resources are robustly and reliably available, and to
factor them into problem-solving strategies. In this talk Clark examines the
implications of these notions of ecological control and of flexible embodiment. He
aims to show that - contrary to initial appearances – flexible embodiment
actually yields a much better understanding of the importance and very nature of
‘embodied, embedded cognition’