Reclaiming Cognition The Primacy of Action, Intention & Emotion (Paperback)
| Author: Rafael Nunez | Editor: Rafael Nunez Walter J. Freeman Rafael Nunez Walter J. Freeman |
| Format: | Paperback |
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| For hundreds of years people have assumed that body and mind are two separate things. That view is now being challenged left right and centre, with a welter of 'holistic' remedies and approaches in every aspect of life. The old idea was that the body -- including the brain -- is just a machine in which our minds or souls live as a ghostly presence. This has led to the idea that the brain is just a computer, and the 'mind' no more than a program that runs on it. It has turned thinking (cognition) into something for computers rather than humans. It has resulted in Artificial Intelligence and the 'cognitive science' that lies behind it. The writers in Reclaiming Cognition will have none of this. They insist on treating the thinking person as an embodied whole. The contributors -- some twenty of them -- come from all disciplines from philosopher Andy Clark (Being There, MIT, 1997) to biologist Brian Goodwin (How the Leopard Changed Its Spots, 1994) This collection of essays hits firmly on the head any idea that the computer model of the brain is the only one in town. |
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From the Publisher: Traditional cognitive science ('cognitivism') is Cartesian in the sense that it takes as fundamental the distinction between the mind and the world. This leads to the claim that cognition is representational and best explained by classical AI and computational theory. The authors in this volume develop a critique of cognitivism and introduce an alternative approach -- which owes more to evolutionary biology, embodied robotics, phenomenology and dynamical systems. |
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