Andy Clark
| Andy Clark | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1957 |
| Era | 21st-century philosophy |
| Region | Western philosophy |
| School | Analytic philosophy |
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Main interests
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Philosophy of mind |
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Notable ideas
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Extended mind |
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Influences
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Andy Clark (born 1957) is a professor of philosophy and Chair in Logic and Metaphysics at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. Before this, he was director of the Cognitive Science Program at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana and previously taught at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri and the University of Sussex in England. Clark is one of the founding members of the CONTACT collaborative research project whose aim is to investigate the role environment plays in shaping the nature of conscious experience. Clark's papers and books deal with the philosophy of mind and he is considered a leading scientist in mind extension. He has also written extensively on connectionism, robotics and the role and nature of mental representation.
Clark’s work explores a number of disparate but interrelated themes. Many of these themes run against established wisdom in cognitive processing and representation. According to traditional computational accounts, the function of the mind is understood as the process of creating, storing and updating internal representations of the world, on the basis of which other processes and actions may take place. Representations are updated to correspond with an environment in accordance with the function, goal-state, or desire of the system in question at any given time. Thus, for example, learning a new route through a maze-like building would be mirrored in a change in the representation of that building. Action, on this view, is the outcome of a process which determines the best way to achieve the goal-state or desire, based on current representations. Such a determinative process may be the purview of a Cartesian "central executive" or a distributed process like homuncular decomposition.
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