Where does the mind end and the world begin? Is the mind locked inside its skull, sealed in with skin, or does it expand outward, merging with things and places and other minds that it thinks with? What if there are objects outsideâa pen and paper, a phoneâthat serve the same function as parts of the brain, enabling it to calculate or remember?
In their famous 1998 paper âThe Extended Mind,â philosophers Andy Clark and David J. Chalmers posed those questions and answered them provocatively: cognitive processes âainât all in the head.â The environment has an active role in driving cognition; cognition is sometimes made up of neural, bodily, and environmental processes.
From where he started in cognitive science in the early nineteen-eighties, taking an interest in A.I., professor Clark has moved quite far. âI was very much on the machine-functionalism side back in those days,â he says. âI thought that mind and intelligence were quite high-level abstract achievements where having the right low-level structures in place didnât really matter.â
Each step he took, from symbolic A.I. to connectionism, from connectionism to embodied cognition, and now to predictive processing, took Clark farther away from the idea of cognition as a disembodied language and toward thinking of it as fundamentally shaped by the particular structure of its animal body, with its arms and its legs and its neuronal brain. He had come far enough that he had now to confront a question: If cognition was a deeply animal business, then how far could artificial intelligence go?
Clark knew that the roboticist Rodney Brooks had recently begun to question a core assumption of the whole A.I. project: that minds could be built of machines. Brooks speculated that one of the reasons A.I. systems and robots appeared to hit a ceiling at a certain level of complexity was that they were built of the wrong stuffâthat maybe the fact that robots were not flesh made more of a difference than heâd realized.
Clark couldnât decide what he thought about this. On the one hand, he was no longer a machine functionalist, exactly: he no longer believed that the mind was just a kind of software that could run on hardware of various sorts. On the other hand, he didnât believe, and didnât want to believe, that a mind could be constructed only out of soft biological tissue. He was too committed to the idea of the extended mindâto the prospect of brain-machine combinations, to the glorious cyborg futureâto give it up. In a way, though, the structure of the brain itself had some of the qualities that attracted him to the extended-mind view in the first place: it was not one indivisible thing but millions of quasi-independent things, which worked seamlessly together while each had a kind of existence of its own.
What is extended mind? How does the mind work? Itâs not obvious. Where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin? What is extended mind? What is embodied mind? Featuring interviews with David Chalmers, Andy Clark, and Raymond Tallis.
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Microbial life may have resided within the first four kilometers of Marsâs porous crust.
Four billion years ago, the solar system was still young. Almost fully formed, its planets were starting to experience asteroid strikes a little less frequently. Our own planet could have become habitable as long as 3.9 billion years ago, but its primitive biosphere was much different than it is today. Life had not yet invented photosynthesis, which some 500 million years later would become its main source of energy. The primordial microbes â the common ancestors to all current life forms on Earth â in our planetâs oceans, therefore, had to survive on another source of energy. They consumed chemicals released from inside the planet through its hydrothermal systems and volcanoes, which built up as gas in the atmosphere.
Some of the oldest life forms in our biosphere were microorganisms known as âhydrogenotrophic methanogensâ that particularly benefited from the atmospheric composition of the time. Feeding on the CO2 (carbon dioxide) and H2 (dihydrogen) that abounded in the atmosphere (with H2 representing between 0.01 and 0.1% of the atmospheric composition, compared to the current approximate of 0.00005%), they harnessed enough energy to colonize the surface of our planetâs oceans. we explore Mars, it is becoming clearer that similar environmental conditions were developing on its surface at the same time as those that enabled methanogens to flourish in the oceans back on Earth.
Could energy efficiency be quantum computersâ greatest strength yet?
Quantum computers have attracted considerable interest of late for their potential to crack problems in a few hours where they might take the age of the universe (i.e., tens of billions of years) on the best supercomputers. Their real-life applications range from drug and materials design to solving complex optimization problems. They are, therefore, primarily intended for scientific and industrial research.
Traditionally, âquantum supremacyâ is sought from the point of view of raw computing power: we want to calculate (much) faster.
## Why focus on the energy consumption of quantum computers?
Since a quantum computer can solve problems in a few hours, whereas a supercomputer might take several tens of billions of years, it is natural to expect it will consume much less energy. However, manufacturing such powerful quantum computers will require that we solve many scientific and technological challenges, potentially over one to several decades of research.
