Paper Info
Title
The Dynamically Extended Mind A Minimal Modeling Case Study
Abstract
The extended mind hypothesis has stimulated much interest in cognitive science. However, its core claim, i.e. that the process of cognition can extend beyond the brain via the body and into the environment, has been heavily criticized. A prominent critique of this claim holds that when some part of the world is coupled to a cognitive system this does not necessarily entail that the part is also constitutive of that cognitive system. This critique is known as the "coupling-constitution fallacy". In this paper we respond to this reductionist challenge by using an evolutionary robotics approach to create a minimal model of two acoustically coupled agents. We demonstrate how the interaction process as a whole has properties that cannot be reduced to the contributions of the isolated agents. We also show that the neural dynamics of the coupled agents has formal properties that are inherently impossible for those neural networks in isolation. By keeping the complexity of the model to an absolute minimum, we are able to illustrate how the coupling-constitution fallacy is in fact based on an inadequate understanding of the constitutive role of nonlinear interactions in dynamical systems theory.
Year
Venue
Keywords
2013
2013 IEEE CONGRESS ON EVOLUTIONARY COMPUTATION (CEC)
philosophy of mind, cognitive science, dynamical approach, extended mind hypothesis, evolutionary robotics
Field
DocType
Volume
The Extended Mind,Fallacy,Evolutionary robotics,Computer science,Minimal model,Reductionism,Dynamical systems theory,Artificial intelligence,Artificial neural network,Cognition
Journal
abs/1305.1958
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
2
0.54
8
Authors
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Tom Froese118424.76
Carlos Gershenson239242.34
David A. Rosenblueth312221.97