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About 'Mindware' Andy Clark 1 *

Guido Vallejos

Center for Cognitive Studies
Department of Philosophy Faculty of Humanities University of Chile

Mindware , published by Oxford University Press in 2001, is the fourth book by Andy Clark . E l term mindware - difficult to translate the Castilian, like their close cousins \u200b\u200b hardware and software - , portrays the diversity of views related about the mind and behavior which currently holds an important part of the community of cognitive scientists opposed to the classical computer vision and representational. Despite their diversity, the establishment of explanatory fields for each one of these alternative views can lead to a conception more or less unitary mind. If so, the mind may be conceived as a sort of bag of tricks that contains no regimented a series of concepts and models without a clear grouping criteria, but still well together to manage the complex nature of the mind and its functioning.
The book does not develop, at least explicitly, a defense of this alternative conception of the mind, but concludes with an outline the same after exposure and detailed critical analysis of some of the central issues that have characterized development of cognitive science in the last fifty years. That is why the main thrust of the book, as its subtitle points out, is to introduce the reader to the philosophical discussion of the central ideas that have guided the work of cognitive science in recent decades. The discussion leads to consider the view of cognitive science I have outlined above as the most suitable to the requirements explaining the cognitive scientists today, leaving aside the limitations that this approach exhibits.
The book consists of eight chapters, each of which begins with a section that outlines a particular approach to human cognition. In the sections that follow each initial outline discusses some philosophical points or methodologically problematic topic that has been exposed. Each of the chapters end with a useful annotated bibliography specific proposals and discussions of the chapter.
The common assumption shared by the concepts presented and critical considerations for each of them is that the elements of mindware is a party or at least are in some kind of continuing relationship with the material world. Thus mindware or material property consists of some kind or is some kind of organization that has a material and, ultimately, physical, making it continuous, or integrated into the natural order world.

science programs cognitive philosophically Clark introduces and discusses in his book, consider mindware as

1. or there is a pattern imposed by the hardware structure of cognition and where what matters to set properties of the mind are not the characteristics of matter but the structure that it imposes the standard - as is the case of the classical serial cognitive architecture, discussed in Chapters 1, 2 and 3 -;


2. or mental properties are emergent properties of activation patterns of neural network computing and, therefore, physically implementable - As in the case of the connectionist or parallel distributed processing or neural networks discussed in Chapter 4 -;


3. or, if we consider that 1 and 2 emphasize different abstract modes of organization and structure of the mental, the mindware can also be conceived as the orchestration of physical elements that make up a complex system coupled internal neurophysiological variables, physical and environmental complex causal relationships (ie, reciprocal and often circular), thus enabling the emergent properties that could be associated, by way of description and explanation, the scope of cognitive behavior of organisms - such as artificial life and cognition as dynamical systems, which are discussed in chapters 6 and 7 -;


4. Finally, given that research programs discussed in 3 could account for the lower-level cognitive behaviors of organisms, higher cognition based on reason would be the product of extended action of these lower-level systems which relationships emerge coordination among agencies and the creation of cognitive tools and technologies, among which is the language that would allow the development of expressions cultural complex, including not only has science and art, but also any kind of coordinated collective behavior aimed at a purpose and mediated by instruments - such as the approach of the theories of situated cognition and distributed, reviewed in the final chapter.

The book also has two appendices. Each issue in greater detail major topics under discussion in the philosophy of mind today. In the first of them, Clark makes a mapping of the positions held by philosophers and cognitive scientists on the problem of the nature of the mental, also often called the ontological problem. There are presented and discussed concepts such as dualism, logical behaviorism, materialism of the identities of the types, functionalism and eliminative materialism . The second appendix is \u200b\u200ba discussion topic of the topic of the possibility of explanation of consciousness.
Clark's conclusion is that the mind is a system that has an inevitable tendency to leak and confused in other systems that are not usually considered mentally - the words of Clark is "... the human mind ... is a constitutively leaky system "(p. 160 --. With this characterization to view Clark tries to highlight the difficulties they face should a science of the mind. On the one hand, it could be said to have an explanatory level which is critical to structure or other levels, if they exist - such as the computational level, in the classical and connectionist cognitive architecture, or the level of physical dynamics in complex systems. In accordance, neither can be said to have a disciplinary perspective or theoretical approach to prevail over another, since none of them alone can explain this sort of ontological cascading, which is not even reducible to complex. This system is 'scattered' "in the sense that many crucial features and properties of the interactions depend precisely between processes and events that occur at different organizational levels and in different time scales. "(p. 160)
The positions presented by the author in the last three chapters, in particular, what emerges from critical review show, according to Clark, that the mind (mindfulness ), being blind and unwilling to limit or specify any domain, can only be a matter of scientific study "requires an interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary cooperation on a scale completely new, investigating the adaptive response at multiple levels of organization, including those incorporating the apparatus body, cultural and environmental " (p. 161).

(Continúa...)

* Clark, Andy (2001). Mindware: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Cognitive Science . Oxford: Blackwell. (XII + 210)