Being There by Andy Clark, MIT Press, 拢19.95/$25,
ISBN 0 262 03240 6
鈥淏LISS was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven!鈥�
said Wordsworth of the French Revolution. And I might perhaps feel similar
excitement if I were a young psychologist beginning a research career and I
received a copy of Andy Clark鈥檚 Being There.
Psychology has seen several revolutions in its short
lifetime鈥攂ehaviourism, Gestalt psychology, information theory, cognitive
science, neuroscience鈥攂ut no theoretical insight has ever seemed so likely
to change the landscape permanently as the one in this brilliant, although
technically demanding book.
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What exactly is this revolutionary insight? Quite simply, the realisation
that instead of treating cognition as a purely cerebral activity, psychologists
will have to begin thinking holistically and interactively. In particular, they
must abandon their obsession with disembodied rationality. Like all animals,
humans are bodies first and minds second, and their brains have evolved not so
much to think as to do. Natural selection has never cared about mental activity
as such, only about how it results in biologically successful engagements with
the external world. The mind is by its very nature an 鈥渆mbodied and embedded
mind鈥� whose role is to play 鈥渃atch and toss鈥� between the brain and the physical,
social or cultural environment.
The biological reality is, says Clark, that humans are 鈥済ood at Frisbee, bad
at logic鈥�. The very same mind that is so good at throwing and catching a Frisbee
is the mind people use for hunting, building, making love, bargaining and even
doing science. If we want to understand our minds at any of these levels, we had
better not forget how they evolved.
Though Clark is a professional philosopher, Being There is the most
unlikely philosophical text you can imagine. Rather than relying on fanciful
examples, Clark鈥檚 argument is almost disconcertingly practical and
down-to-earth鈥攂uilt around stories about slime moulds, termite mounds,
cockroach-emulating robots, tuna fish and master players of the computer game
Tetris. Philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn, in The Structure of Scientific
Revolutions, noted how revolutions are typically led by Young Turks in
revolt against the old guard. Clark comes across as the archetypal Young Turk,
engaging in a kind of punk philosophy, fresh and irreverent, but nonetheless
seriously committed to shedding new light on the big issues of mentality and
selfhood. His book is so good that, after recommending it, there is not much
more a reviewer can do but criticise it.
The writing is at times messy and repetitive. And there are still some major
problems with the theory that need to be resolved. In particular, with his
rejection of traditional ideas about human linear rationality, Clark fails to
deal adequately with the surprising fact that people actually are thinking
logically, that this may be precisely what makes the human mind so special
and鈥攄are I say it鈥攕uperior. Better at Frisbee than logic maybe, but
good enough at logic to make all the difference between being there and being
here.
Still, even if paradoxically it is our individually evolved logical minds
that are best placed to appreciate the ideas that Clark has thrown us, there can
be no question that they will be the better and bigger for it.