Andy Clark - General Themes

General Themes

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, learning a new route through a (presumably, 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.

According to Clark, the computational model, which forms the philosophical foundation of Artificial Intelligence, engenders several intractable problems. One of the most comptuationally salient of these problems is an informational bottleneck: if it is the job of the mind to construct detailed inner representations of the external world in order determine apposite action, and the world is constantly changing, the informational demands on the mental system will almost certainly preclude any action taking place. For Clark, we really need very little information about the world before we may act effectively upon it. We tend to be susceptible to a ‘grand illusion’ where our impression of a richly detailed world obscures a reality of minimal environmental information and quick action. We needn’t reconstruct the world within, as the world is able to serve as its own best model from which we extract information on a ‘just-in-time’ basis.