# Being_There_by_Andy_Clark  ## Metadata - Author: [[readwise.io]] - Full Title: Being_There_by_Andy_Clark - Category: #articles - Summary: insert summary - My notes: - Summary: The text discusses the concept of embodied, environmentally embedded cognition, contrasting it with traditional views of cognition as an internal, representational process. It emphasizes the importance of considering the interactions between the body, mind, and environment in problem-solving and adaptive behaviors. The text also touches on the challenges and implications of rethinking traditional notions of representation, computation, and mind in the context of embodied cognition. It highlights the dynamic interplay between the brain, body, and world in shaping cognitive processes and proposes a reconception of representation and computation that incorporates action-oriented inner states and continuous analog processing. The text further explores the idea of the brain interacting with external structures to simplify problem-solving tasks and the mutual modulation between biological brains and external artifacts. - URL: https://readwise.io/reader/document_raw_content/156136593 ## LLM Chats ## NotebookLM ## LLM Audio ## Highlights > Ninety Percent ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hszq34sta66kv6ayqxda53y5)) > A related contrast, introduced in some detail in previous chapters, con- cerns the use of representations that are not personalized or partial so much as action-oriented. These are internal states which (as described in section 2.6) are simultaneously encodings of how the world is and spec- ifications for appropriate classes of action. The internal map that is already a specification of the motor activity needed to link different loca- tions (section 2.6) is a case in point. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hszqg017pmxzs0rgxx7rcxww)) > This, of course, is not to say that the solutions had nothing in common. What they have in common, Thelen and Smith plausibly suggest, is a learning routine in which the arm-and-muscle system is treated like an assembly of springs and masses, and in which the job of the central nervous system is to learn to control that assembly by adjusting parameters such as the ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hszqkh6nvjx1ya833dey2h1m)) > initial stiffness of the springs. It is thus to coopt the intrinsic dynamics of the system in the service of some current goal. There are thus "no explic- it a priori instructions or programs for either the trajectory of the hand, joint-angle coordinations, or muscle firing patterns" (ibid., p. 264). Instead, we are said to learn to manipulate a few basic parameters (such as the initial stiffness conditions) so as to sculpt and modulate the behav- ior of a changing physical system with rich and developing intrinsic dynamics. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hszqkca13ff06z1b2w8jd9v8))