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In his book, ''Existential Cognition: Minds in the World'', McClamrock argued for the extreme importance of the external environment (both social and physical) in the determination of almost all varieties of human and animal behavior. His position is that the Methodological Individualism inherent in many contempory forms of computational theories of the mind are completely inadequate and that we must look to the interactions between organism and world in order to find "external mechanisms that mediate behavior" as well as the usual internal mechanisms. Borrowing from Herbert Simon and also influenced by the ideas of Existential Phenomenologists such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Martin Heidegger , McClamrock suggests that man's condition of being-in-the-world makes it impossible for him to understand himself by abstracting away from it and examining it as if it were a detached experimental object of which he himself is not an integral part. However, unlike the continental philosophers, McClamrock relies upon results from modern information sciences, biology and cognitive science to support his conclusions about the ''bounded and embedded'' nature of consciousness and the mind as a whole. One of his examples, taken from David Marr , discusses the exploitation of local environmental regularities in the control mechanisms of the common fly. :"Flies, it turns out, don't quite know that to fly they should flap their wings. They don't take off by sending some signal from the brain to the wings. There is a direct control link from the fly's ''feet'' to its wings such that when the feet cease to be in contact with a surface, the fly's wings begin to flap. To take off, the fly simply jumps and then lets the signal from the feet trigger the wings. The local surface mediates the signal from brain to wings, illustrating the point that the human nervous system may be said, in a certain sense, to extend to parts of its external environment. In another example, McClamrock cites the case of a man driving from one destination to another. On the way, he encounters various external signals and stimuli (street names, direction signs, people who provide information when asked, landmarks, etc..) and all of these help him, in many cases are indispensable to, his successfully finding his way from point A to point B. The path he ends up traveling to get to point B from point A is, in any case, partially determined by his environment. In the case of ants, this is even clearer. When we look at the tracks that ants make as a result of their movements, they seemed to be highly ordered and preplanned. But, in fact, an ant will usually encounter unforeseen and unforseeable obstacles as it makes its way along from one point to another. At each obstacle, it will be constrained to make a choice that it otherwise wouldn't. The path that it ultimately travels will therefore be heavily determined by its exterior environment, as will its behavior. ARGUMENT AGAINST KIM In an article entitled ''Emergence Unscathed: Kim on Non-Reducible Types'' McClamrock took on Jaegwon Kim 's famous "causal powers" argument that multiple realizability makes higher-level science impossible. Kim argued against multiple realizability that it conflicts with some fundamental constrants on the definition of kinds and with general rules of scientific taxonomy. Kim's argument is based on two essential premises: : ''The Causal Inheritance Principle'': if mental property M is realized in a system at time t in virtue of physical realization base P, the causal powers of M are identical with the causal powers of P. From this it follows that: :Instances of M that are realized by the same physical base must be grouped under one kind, since the physical base is a causal kind, and instances of M with different realization bases must be grouped under distinct kinds. The second premise is : ''The Principle of the Causal Individuation of Kinds'' : kinds in science are individuated on the basis of their causal powers. From all of this, it follows, according to Kim, that "if mental kinds are multiplly realizable, then they are disqualified as proper scientific kinds...because they are realized by diverse physical causal kinds." McClamrock responds that the claim that "instances of M that are realized by the same physical base must be grouped under one kind..." is "simply false". The fact that a complete specification of the causal powers of a mental kind at a certain time will be a complete specification of the causal powers of the physical state which implements it follows as a logical consequence of token materialism. But Kim's assertion only follows if we assume that the ''only'' specification of causal kinds can be in terms of causal powers of tokens. He suggests understanding higher-level causal powers as simply more general and abtract ''characterizations'' of the lower-level causal powers implemented in the physical structure of a system. There are many varieties of causal taxonomies which classify things according to various kinds of causal powers they possess. The taxonomy of orbiting bodies, e.g., will probably specify the causal powers of objects in terms of mass, position and velocity and will abstract away from such considerations as the body's chemical composition, geology or microbiotic agglomerations. This is a more abstract and less complete characteriztion of the causal powers of a system which allows for the possibility of grouping together physically type-distinct instances of the higher-level kind (in this case, planets, stars and other orbiting bodies). Moreover, taxonomies in computer science are typically characterized by such abstractions. What is of interest at the level of information processing is such things as registers and microprogramming operations not the causal powers of the material structure of semiconductors. WORKS
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