Reconstructing The Cognitive World: The Next Step First Edition

This book requires some philosophical sophistication but not necessarily technical knowledge of robotics or artificial intelligence. It discusses the relevance of a Heideggerian approach to cognition, making the claim that recent work in what Wheeler calls "embodied and embedded" cognitive science is much more consistent with Heidegger's ontology than it is with the dualistic Descartian perspective that underpins much of thinking in cognitive science. Readers of Dreyfus will recall his earlier critiques: "Why computers can't think," or "Why computers still can't think." These two volumes were preceded by a paper in the 1960's called "Computers and Alchemy," one of the first attacks on the early attempts at artificial intelligence advocates to model human thought and action by means of digital computers employing a representational framework ("Good old-fashioned AI", this has been called). Wheeler discusses Dreyfus and convincingly adds support to the position that human intelligence is better explained with Heideggerian underpinnings than dualistic Descartian principles. There is interesting material concerning recent work in dynamic representational systems and robotics. The treatment of Heidegger is fairly cursory, and interested readers are directed to Dreyfus' books on "Being and Time."