New Releases by Andy Clark

When historian Charles Weiner found pages of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman''s notes, he saw it as a "record" of Feynman''s work. Feynman himself, however, insisted that the notes were not a record but the work itself. In Supersizing the Mind, Andy Clark argues that our thinking doesn''t happen only in our heads but that "certain forms of human cognizing include inextricable tangles of feedback, feed-forward and feed-around loops: loops that promiscuously criss-cross the boundaries of brain, body and world." The pen and paper of Feynman''s thought are just such feedback loops, physical machinery that shape the flow of thought and enlarge the boundaries of mind. Drawing upon recent work in psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, robotics, human-computer systems, and beyond, Supersizing the Mind offers both a tour of the emerging cognitive landscape and a sustained argument in favor of a conception of mind that is extended rather than "brain-bound." The importance of this new perspective is profound. If our minds themselves can include aspects of our social and physical environments, then the kinds of social and physical environments we create can reconfigure our minds and our capacity for thought and reason.

Cover crops slow erosion, improve soil, smother weeds, enhance nutrient and moisture availability, help control many pests and bring a host of other benefits to your farm. At the same time, they can reduce costs, increase profits and even create new sources of income. You¿ll reap dividends on your cover crop investments for years, since their benefits accumulate over the long term. This book will help you find which ones are right for you. Captures farmer and other research results from the past ten years. The authors verified the info. from the 2nd ed., added new results and updated farmer profiles and research data, and added 2 chap. Includes maps and charts, detailed narratives about individual cover crop species, and chap. about aspects of cover cropping.

About the effects of modern technology on human intelligence.

Summarizes and illuminates two decades of research Gathering important papers by both philosophers and scientists, this collection illuminates the central themes that have arisen during the last two decades of work on the conceptual foundations of artificial intelligence and cognitive science. Each volume begins with a comprehensive introduction that places the coverage in a broader perspective and links it with material in the companion volumes. The collection is of interest in many disciplines including computer science, linguistics, biology, information science, psychology, neuroscience, iconography, and philosophy. Examines initial efforts and the latest controversies The topics covered range from the bedrock assumptions of the computational approach to understanding the mind, to the more recent debates concerning cognitive architectures, all the way to the latest developments in robotics, artificial life, and dynamical systems theory. The collection first examines the lineage of major research programs, beginning with the basic idea of machine intelligence itself, then focuses on specific aspects of thought and intelligence, highlighting the much-discussed issue of consciousness, the equally important, but less densely researched issue of emotional response, and the more traditionally philosophical topic of language and meaning. Provides a gamut of perspectives The editors have included several articles that challenge crucial elements of the familiar research program of cognitive science, as well as important writings whose previous circulation has been limited. Within each volume the papers are organized to reflect a variety of research programs and issues. The substantive introductions that accompany each volume further organize the material and provide readers with a working sense of the issues and the connection between articles.

Brain, body, and world are united in a complex dance of circular causation and extended computational activity. In Being There, Andy Clark weaves these several threads into a pleasing whole and goes on to address foundational questions concerning the new tools and techniques needed to make sense of the emerging sciences of the embodied mind. Clark brings together ideas and techniques from robotics, neuroscience, infant psychology, and artificial intelligence. He addresses a broad range of adaptive behaviors, from cockroach locomotion to the role of linguistic artifacts in higher-level thought.

Clark charts a fundamental shift from a static, inner-code-oriented conception of the subject matter of cognitive science to a more dynamic, developmentally rich, process-oriented view.

Abstract: "The paper considers the problems involved in getting neural networks to learn about highly structured task domains. A central problem concerns the tendency of networks to learn only a set of shallow (non-generalizable) representations for the task i.e. to ''miss'' the deep organizing features of the domain. Various solutions are examined including task specific network configuration and incremental learning. The latter strategy is the more attractive since it holds out the promise of a task-independent solution to the problem. Once we see exactly how the solution works, however, it becomes clear that it is limited to a special class of cases in which (1) statistically driven undersampling is (luckily) equivalent to task decomposition, and (2) the dangers of unlearning are somehow being minimized. The technique is suggestive nonetheless, for a variety of developmental factors may yield the functional equivalent of both statistical and ''informed'' undersampling in early learning."

Connectionism is currently one of the most flourishing and interdisciplinary areas of cognitive science. Drawing on research in neural computation and networks it has found applications in areas such as psychology and animal intelligence. By using types of network which attempt to mirror our own cognitive architecture, connectionism is making breakthroughs in the understanding of the human mind a real possibility.

This sampler shows some of the activities contained in the Calendar Math kits.

We show that a popular class of connectionist models (which we label ''first order connectionism'') looks unlikely to provide the kind of resources required by the hypothesis. We examine some alternative hybrid models that seem more promising. Finally, we raise a more purely philosophical issue concerning the conditions under which a being can count as a genuine believer or cognizer."

Microcognition provides a clear, readable guide to parallel distributed processing from a cognitive philosopher''s point of view.

Abstract: "Dennett''s treatment of belief and Smolsnsky''s [i.e. Smolensky''s] description of cognition are united by a common lacuna. Each seeks to accomodate troublesome facts by augmenting a basic cognitive system with a language manipulating device. In Dennett, this surfaces as the distinction between belief and opinion. In Smolensky, it surfaces as the Conscious Rule Interpreter. But neither author comments on the architectural conditions necessary for the development of such a device. In the present paper I first exhibit this lacuna, and try to make it pressing. I then sketch a possible solution based on some of the computational architecture which it seems to require. The upshot of this is a two factor theory of belief in which broadly architectural constraints must be met before a system is even a candidate for having beliefs. But the fuzziness and indeterminacy of the latter no longer commit us (as they commit Dennett) to treating the distinction between believers and non-believers in an instrumental or quasi-instrumental fashion."