Beyond a??Error-Correctiona??

摘要

Building upon Ashby’s claim that “The whole function of the brain is summed up in: error-correction,” Clark elaborates an integrative “hierarchical generative model” of the mind/brain. A Helmholtzian worldview permeates Clark’s model insofar as it presupposes an inherently ambiguous relationship between mind and world; a relation that calls for an inferential treatment of perception and action. In this short paper, we note that embodied cognition offers a wider range of approaches to cognition and perception than error-correction alone. Two areas of research – the synthetic approach to embodied cognition (Pfeifer et al., 2008) and direct learning (Jacobs and Michaels, 2007) – serve to highlight what exclusive attention to error-correction misses. Our view is that perception and action are not reducible to error-correction.