The paper will discuss the extended mind thesis with a view to the notions of “agent” and of “mind”, while helping to clarify the relation between “embodiment” and the “extended mind”. I will suggest that the extended mind thesis constitutes a reductio ad absurdum of the notion of ‘mind’; the consequence of the extended mind debate should be to drop the notion of the mind altogether – rather th...

After an introduction (1) the article analyzes the evolution of the embodied mind (2), the innovation of embodied robotics (3), and finally discusses conclusions of embodied robotics for human responsibility (4). Considering the evolution of the embodied mind (2), we start with an introduction of complex systems and nonlinear dynamics (2.1), apply this approach to neural self-organization (2.2)...

GLAIR (Grounded Layered Architecture with Integrated Reasoning) is a multi-layered cognitive architecture for embodied agents operating in real, virtual, or simulated environments containing other agents. The highest layer of the GLAIR Architecture, the Knowledge Layer (KL), contains the beliefs of the agent, and is the layer in which conscious reasoning, planning, and act selection is performe...

Embodied theories of mind tend to be theories of the cognitive half of the mind and to ignore its emotional half while a complete theory of the mind should account for both halves. Robots are a new way of expressing theories of the mind which are less ambiguous and more capable to generate specific and non-controversial predictions than verbally expressed theories. We outline a simple robotic m...

There is a seductive image of intelligent action that sometimes gets labelled Cartesian. According to this image, as I shall present it here, the psychological understanding of the operating principles by which an agent’s mind contributes to the generation of reliable and flexible, perceptually guided intelligent action remains conceptually and theoretically independent of the details of that a...

What does creativity produce? A concept is ‘a mental representation of a class of things’ Murphy (2002, p.5), and concepts are the primary output of a creative process. In other words, creativity is the process in which a creative agent recognises a new kind of thing, or modifies their understanding of a kind of thing, changing their view of the world in some valuable way. The visible output of...

This paper describes a catalytic theory that grounds cognition in biology, building on the proposals of (a) Gibson and ecological psychologists concerning the role of invariance and (b) Shepard, Gestaltists and neuroscientists concerning the role of ‘resonating’ neural waves. Enzyme catalysis increases the speed of a molecular reaction, perhaps via a type of wave, a soliton, whose formation, pe...