beasts and angels

Are our thoughts real or virtual? Biology demonstrates that mental life has physical basis in the synapses of the brain; but is a thought a thing? If so, what kind of thing exactly?

What do advances in Robotics and Artificial Intelligence tell us about the relationship between Mind and Body? As the increase in power and complexity of computers continue to accelerate, how likely is the emergence of self-aware machines? What is the role of learning from real-life experience and the development of intelligence? Can we imagine a truly disembodied person?

The epiphet “Mind on the Hoof” is a poetic reminder of our embodiment.

The evolution of the brain and the senses has been driven by the immediate needs of embodied creatures hungry for information and inseparable from their immediate environments.

Recognizing that we own our bodies, and that our bodies own us, raises intriguing questions.

Andrew Brown (1989) Whale. Acrylic on wood.

One of the great obstacles to understanding our embodied selves is the self referential problem of using our brains to understand how our brains work. We are both the subject and object of any epistemological and ontological quest.

Andrew Brown (2007) Figure. Acrylic on canvas.

ANDY CLARK

Chair in Logic and Metaphysics, University of Edinburgh

SOURCES FOR MIND ON THE HOOF

Andy Clark (1998: 35) advocates a “New Roboticists’ vision of mind on the hoof.” He proposes (1998: 1) “that we simply may have misconstrued the nature of intelligence itself.” He refers to insights gained from his own field of real world robotics where, for example, research teams attempt to get “a robot cockroach to walk, seek food and avoid dangers.” From this viewpoint, “the biological mind is “first and foremost, an organ for controlling the biological body” rather than “a kind of logical reasoning device coupled with an extensive store of explicit data” The mind has “evolved to make things happen” rapidly, in the moment, “before the predator catches you, or before your prey gets away from you.” Clark playfully asserts (1998: 220, 222) that:

Ours are not the brains of disembodied spirits conveniently glued into ambulant, corporeal shells of flesh and blood. Rather, they are essentially the brains of embodied agents capable of creating and exploiting structure in the world.

Like Humpty Dumpty, brain, body, and world are going to take a whole lot of putting back together again. But it’s worth persevering because until these parts click into place we will never see ourselves aright or appreciate the complex conspiracy that is adaptive success.

Clark, Andy (1998) Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again. A Bradford Book The MIT Press. Cambridge, Massachusetts.

SIR JONATHAN MILLER

British polymath: opera director, physician, writer and broadcaster [1934- ]

Jonathan Miller maintains (1978: 14) that “it is hard to give any intelligible sense to the idea of the disembodied person.” According to Miller:

Of all the objects in the world, the human body has a peculiar status: it is not only possessed by the person who has it, it also possesses and constitutes him.

Miller assets that the body is both medium of experience and instrument of action. It is not something we merely have, rather:

It is a large part of what we actually are: it is by and through our bodies that we recognise our existence in the world, and it is only by being able to move in and act upon the world that we can distinguish it from ourselves. Without a body, it would be difficult to claim sensations and experiences as our own. Who or what would be having them, and where would they be happening?

Emphasizing embodiment, Miller (1978: 338) reminds us that “[t]he purpose of perception is to guarantee as far as possible that all actions pay off.” He concludes his book with an explicit parallel between active perception and the sciences:

In the last two decades scientist and philosophers have noticed the striking similarity between the way in which the brain spontaneously perceives reality and the way in which the scientist deliberately explains it. Nowadays the process of perception and the method of science are both seen to depend on making creative conjectures about the nature of reality, and upon testing and remodeling these fictions until they self-evidently coincide with the outlines of the world’s facts. In science observation would dwindle into haphazard impotence unless guided by a theory which determines what will count as a relevant fact. In the same way, perception would be blind without a background of fiction to sharpen and direct its curiosity. Natural science is the native idiom of the brain made explicit. With the circular generosity of The Three Graces, the human brain has handed back to its owner the most fruitful method of elucidating its own nature.

Miller, Jonathan (1978) The Body in Question. Random House. New York.

DANIEL C. DENNETT

American Philosopher of Mind [1942- ]

Inspired by psychologist George Miller’s coinage, Dennett (1996: 82) views animals as “informavores” rather than mere herbivores or carnivores:

[T]hey get their epistemic hunger from the combination in exquisite organization, of the specific epistemic hungers of millions of microagents, organized into dozens or hundreds or thousands of subsystems. Each of these tiny agents can be conceived of as an utterly minimal intentional system, whose life project is to ask a single question, over and over and over ― “is my message coming in NOW?” “Is my message coming in NOW?” ― and springing into limited but appropriate action whenever the answer is YES. Without the epistemic hunger there is no perception, no uptake.

Dennett, Daniel C. (1996) Kinds of Minds: Towards an Understanding of Consciousness. Basic Books of Harper Collins, New York.