Ron Mc Clamrock - Existential Cognition

Existential Cognition

In his book, Existential Cognition: Minds in the World, McClamrock argued for the extreme importance of the external environment (both social and physical) in the determination of almost all varieties of human and animal behavior. His position is that the methodological individualism inherent in many contemporary forms of computational theories of the mind are completely inadequate and that we must look to the interactions between organism and world in order to find "external mechanisms that mediate behavior" as well as the usual internal mechanisms. Borrowing from Herbert A. Simon and also influenced by the ideas of existential phenomenologists such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Martin Heidegger, McClamrock suggests that man's condition of being-in-the-world makes it impossible for him to understand himself by abstracting away from it and examining it as if it were a detached experimental object of which he himself is not an integral part.

However, unlike the continental philosophers, McClamrock relies upon results from modern information sciences, biology and cognitive science to support his conclusions about the bounded and embedded nature of consciousness and the mind as a whole. One of his examples, taken from David Marr, discusses the exploitation of local environmental regularities in the control mechanisms of the common fly.

"Flies, it turns out, don't quite know that to fly they should flap their wings. They don't take off by sending some signal from the brain to the wings. There is a direct control link from the fly's feet to its wings such that when the feet cease to be in contact with a surface, the fly's wings begin to flap. To take off, the fly simply jumps and then lets the signal from the feet trigger the wings.

The local surface mediates the signal from brain to wings, illustrating the point that the human nervous system may be said, in a certain sense, to extend to parts of its external environment.

In another example, McClamrock cites the case of a man driving from one destination to another. On the way, he encounters various external signals and stimuli (street names, direction signs, people who provide information when asked, landmarks, etc..) and all of these help him, in many cases are indispensable to, his successfully finding his way from point A to point B. The path he ends up traveling to get to point B from point A is, in any case, partially determined by his environment. In the case of ants, this is even clearer. When we look at the tracks that ants make as a result of their movements, they seemed to be highly ordered and preplanned. But, in fact, an ant will usually encounter unforeseen and unforeseeable obstacles as it makes its way along from one point to another. At each obstacle, it will be constrained to make a choice that it otherwise wouldn't. The path that it ultimately travels will therefore be heavily determined by its exterior environment, as well its behavior.