CLARK, Andy 1957–

PERSONAL: Born November 20, 1957, in London, England; son of James Henderson (a metropolitan police superintendent) and Christine (a homemaker; maiden name, Russell) Clark; married Fiona McEwen (marriage ended); married Josefa Toribio (a professor and philosopher), June 6, 1991. Ethnicity: "Caucasian." Education: Stirling University, B.A., 1981, Ph.D., 1984.

ADDRESSES: Office—Department of Philosophy, George Sq., Edinburgh EH8 9JX, Scotland. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: University of Glasgow, Glasgow, Scotland, temporary lecturer in philosophy, 1984–85; University of Sussex, Brighton, England, 1985–93, began as lecturer, became reader in philosophy and cognitive sciences; Washington University, St. Louis, MO, professor of philosophy and director of Philosophy/Neuroscience/Psychology Program, 1993–2000; University of Sussex, Brighton, England, professor of philosophy and cognitive sciences, 2000–02; Indiana University—Bloomington, professor of philosophy and director of Cognitive Science Program, 2002–2004; University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, Scotland, professor of philosophy and chair in logic and metaphysics. Visiting fellow at Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University, 1989; visiting fellow, Santa Fe Complex Systems Group, 1995; Distinguished Cognitive Scientist lecture, University of California—San Diego, May, 2000; lecturer at University of Reading, 1989, University of Iceland, 1992, and Institute of Advanced Studies, Sao Paulo, Brazil, 1992.

MEMBER: European Forum for Biophilosophy, European Society for Philosophy and Psychology, American Philosophical Society.

AWARDS, HONORS: Grant from Joint Council, Cognitive Science and Human Computer Interaction Initiative, 1992–93; faculty research grant, Washington University, summer, 1994.

WRITINGS:

Microcognition: Philosophy, Cognitive Science, and Parallel Distributed Processing, MIT Press (Cambridge, MA), 1989.

(Editor, with Rudi Lutz) Connectionism in Context, Springer-Verlag (New York, NY), 1992.

Associative Engines: Connectionism, Concepts, and Representational Change, MIT Press (Cambridge, MA), 1993.

(Editor, with Larry May and Marilyn Friedman, and contributor) Mind and Morals: Essays on Ethics and Cognitive Science, MIT Press (Cambridge, MA), 1996.

(Editor, with P. Millican) Essays in Honour of Alan Turing, Volume I: The Theory of Computation, Volume II: Connectionism, Concepts, and Folk Psychology, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1996.

(Editor, with Jesus Ezquerro and Jesus Larrazabal, and contributor) Philosophy and Cognitive Science: Categories, Consciousness, and Reasoning, Kluwer (Boston, MA), 1996.

Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again, MIT Press (Cambridge, MA), 1997.

(Editor, with Josefa Toribio) Cognitive Architectures in Artificial Intelligence: The Evolution of Research Programs, Garland (New York, NY), 1998.

(Editor, with Josefa Toribio) Consciousness and Emotion in Cognitive Science: Conceptual and Empirical Issues, Garland (New York, NY), 1998.

(Editor, with Josefa Toribio) Language and Meaning in Cognitive Science: Cognitive Issues and Semantic Theory, Garland (New York, NY), 1998.

(Editor, with Josefa Toribio) Machine Intelligence: Perspectives on the Computational Model, Garland (New York, NY), 1998.

Mindware: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Cognitive Science, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 2001.

Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 2003.

Contributor of more than sixty articles and reviews to periodicals, including New Scientist, Philosophical Quarterly, Journal of Consciousness Studies, Mind and Language, Edge, and Cognitive Science. Associate editor for philosophy, Connection Science; associate editor, Behavioral and Brain Sciences; guest editor, AI and Society, 1990, and Synthese, 1994; member of editorial board, Minds and Machines, Philosophy and Society, and Pragmatics and Cognition. Clark's books have been published in Italian, Japanese, and Hungarian.

SIDELIGHTS: Andy Clark is a professor of philosophy at the University of Edinburgh who focuses his research on cognitive science. Anthony Chemero explained in Psyche that "every few years Andy Clark writes a book designed to help philosophers of mind get up to speed with the most recent developments in cognitive science." Among Clark's books are Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again and Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence.

Piero Scaruffi explained in Thymos that in Associative Engines: Connectionism, Concepts, and Representational Change, "the British philosopher Andy Clark provides a philosophical introduction to the field of neural networks. In his preface, he correctly points out that the rebirth of this field signals a shift of perspective in the way we view the mind, away from a 'static' view of mental representations and towards a fluid view of the cognitive activity of the mind, towards the process, not just the structure. Concepts are continuously in flux, and neural networks are a computational device that seems able to capture that flux." Natika Newton and Dominic W. Massaro, reviewing Being There for the American Journal of Psychology, found it to be a "lucid and engaging book."

Natural-Born Cyborgs provides a continuation and expansion of the ideas about the relationships between the brain, body, and outside world put forward in Being There. In this book, Clark argues that human beings are already cyborgs, part-human and part-machine, because humans daily use technological enhancements. He cites eye glasses, pacemakers, and a host of other common devices that enhance a person's natural abilities. Nora Harris observed in the Library Journal that Clark's book "recognizes the positive and negative potential of human-machine interaction and gives excellent examples." The reviewer for the Futurist claimed that Natural-Born Cyborgs was a "compelling volume."

In an interview on the Future Now Web site, Clark spoke of the differences between the cyborgs found in science fiction and those one sees and will see in the real world: "By focusing on these rather scary images of machine-penetrated human flesh, the pop icon cyborg diverts attention from a deep and abiding truth about human nature. It diverts attention from what I see as the distinctive signature of our species, our ability to enter into profound and self-transforming relationships with our best tools and technologies, whether the interface proceeds via the direct wiring of flesh to silicon (the pop cyborg route), or via the less direct (but equally effective) interfaces of touch, sight, sound or smell. Used properly, these ancient interfaces can yield human machine hybrids as dramatic as any Terminator or Borg."

Clark once told CA: "My prevailing interest lies in the implications of cognitive scientific research for a wide variety of conceptual and philosophical issues. Work on connectionism, or artificial neural networks, challenges the more 'logicist,' rule-and-symbol image that prevailed in early work on artificial intelligence. Work on the role of body and local environmental structure in promoting adaptive success suggests, in addition, that natural intelligence is intrinsically embodied and involves a surprisingly intimate dance between neural and extra-neural factors. My most recent work investigates the relations between these twin foci (neural nets and embodied action). Other topics of special interest include the relation between thought and language (how language transforms the space of reason), the respective roles of computational, representational, and dynamical analyses in cognitive science, work on real-world robotics and animate vision, and the interplay between individual cognition and the wider webs of social structure and technological artifact."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

American Journal of Psychology, spring, 1998, Natika Newton and Dominic W. Massaro, review of Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again, p. 131.

Booklist, June 1, 2003, Donna Seaman, review of Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence, p. 1715.

Canadian Journal of Philosophy, June, 1999, Eric Saidel, review of Being There, p. 299.

Canadian Journal of Sociology, summer, 2004, Mark Erickson, review of Natural-Born Cyborgs, p. 471.

Choice, July-August, 1997, H. Storl, review of Being There, p. 1816.

Ethics, January, 1997, p. 349.

Futurist, September-October, 2003, review of Natural-Born Cyborgs, p. 61.

Library Journal, June 15, 2003, Nora Harris, review of Natural-Born Cyborgs, p. 97.

Metascience, 1998, Gerard O'Brien, "The Mind: Embodied, Embedded but Not Extended," p. 78.

Mind, April, 1991, Terence Horgan, review of Microcognition: Philosophy, Cognitive Science, and Parallel Distributed Processing, p. 290; October, 1994, Andrew Pessin, review of Associative Engines: Connectionism, Concepts, and Representational Change, p. 538; January, 1999, Jack Copeland and Diane Proudfoot, "The Legacy of Alan Turing," p. 187; January, 2000, Sean Kelly, review of Being There, p. 138.

Nature, March 15, 1990, Stuart Sutherland, review of Microcognition, p. 207; March 20, 1997, Margaret Boden, review of Being There, p. 237.

New Scientist, January 18, 1997, Nicholas Humphrey, "How the Mind Works Out," p. 37.

Philosophical Quarterly, January, 1994, James Higginbotham, review of Microcognition, p. 112; April, 1995, Robert McCauley, review of Associative Engines, p. 241.

Philosophical Review, July, 1992, Dan Lloyd, review of Microcognition, p. 706; October, 1998, p. 647.

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, July, 2000, Kim Sterelny, "Roboroach or, the Extended Phenotype Meets Cognitive Science," p. 207.

Psyche: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Consciousness, October, 1998, Anthony Chemero, "A Stroll through the Worlds of Animats and Humans."

Quarterly Review of Biology, December, 1990, Kathleen Akins, review of Microcognition, p. 526

Times Literary Supplement, March 9, 1990, Amahl Smith, review of Microcognition, p. 259; May 16, 1997, Daniel Dennett, review of Being There, p. 5.

ONLINE

Future Now Web site, http://future.iftf.org/ (May 18, 2004), interview with Andy Clark.

Thymos Web site, http://www.thymos.com/ (September 21, 2004), Piero Scaruffi, review of Associative Engines: Connectionism, Concepts, and Representational Change.