A New Science Of The Mind By Mark Rowlands

Mark Rowlands in his book ‘A New Science of the Mind’ provides the basis of categorising non-cartesian understanding of cognition (Rowlands, 2010). Embodied, extended, emergent and extended cognitive science as an alternative research paradigm has been in the rise in the last few decades. Various empirical evidence and theoretical understanding of this paradigm has shown the validity for each of the four non-cartesian approach to cognition. In his introductory chapter, (page 3) Rowlands puts forth the argument that in spite of there being a growing body of research with this approach, not every understanding in this research paradigm is non-cartesian in nature. Each of the 4E, as the four principles of cognition are called, are often understood
For example, to understand how specifically, we get to hear certain sounds, the placement of our ears, the distance between them and other such physical and bodily details are crucial. the way our body is built becomes an important part of understanding how we compute distances or build spatial maps. However, Rowlands argues that in an epistemic approach to 4E cognition, the main process of cognition remains inside the brain. The structure of the body, how it acts in the environment and also how it uses certain objects and processes in the environment for the process of cognition are essentially components of understanding the actual neural processes for certain cognitive processes. An epistemic understanding, according to Rowlands, is most dominant in the embedded mind thesis. The role of the environment in the process of cognition has always been crucial in understanding any cognitive processes. In fact, according to the author, many aspects of the embedded hypothesis, especially when it comes to the functionality of a cognitive processes, only seem to operate at an epistemic
The work of Rodney Brooks is one such example of building robots with the underlying idea that a reductionist approach to building artificial intelligent agents is not a very effective strategy. In his work, “How to Build Complete Creatures Rather than Isolated Cognitive Simulators” (Brooks, 1991), what he has proposed is the notion of subsumption architecture, where in sensors and actuators are connected in a parallel and distributed manner. The architecture of a robot is to be multi-layered, where in each layer is an augmented finite state machine with particular action goals to be fulfilled in specific environmental conditions. The robot doesn’t have a memory storage of the information coming in from its various sensors or any particular algorithm which directs its actuators according to the storage of inputs from the sensors. In fact, communication between the different layers is a physiological process, as specified by a wired connection between them. The idea of a subsumption architecture is a direct critique of the traditional notion of artificial intelligence. The idea that an internal central processing mechanism needs to be fed all the information about the model of the world that it would operate in, is challenged by