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Notes
- 1.
I am referring to Walter’s (1953) creation of the first autonomous robotic devices (machina speculatrix) baptised as Elsie and Elmer (for ElectroMechanical Robot, Light-Sensitive) later nicknamed after an “Alice in Wonderland” character as “tortoise”. The devices though primitive from a mechanical and electronic point of view were capable of displaying unusual and unexpected forms of complex behaviour in the absence of any representational content. On the basis of their primitive circuitry, the tortoises were in a way structured to perform only two actions: (a) to avoid obstacles, retreating when they hit one and (b) to seek a light source. However, engaged with the environment, they were capable to produce emergent properties and in some cases what appeared as meaningful behaviour that could not be determined by their system components. Primitive as they might seem in the light of recent developments in the domain of AI the tortoise’s managed to effect in practice a cybernetic transgression of the mind-body-world divide, materially exemplifying an embodied, performative cognitive system, one in which the mind-body-world components are continuous and equally necessary, with none hierarchically controlling the others. A premise that resonates well and to some extent anticipates the perspective of embodied and situated cognition as developed the last two decades in the works of Clark (1997), Hutchins (1995), Brooks (1991) and Van Gelder (1995).
- 2.
“The world is inseparable from the subject, but from a subject which is nothing but a project of the world, and the subject is inseparable from the world, but from a world which the subject itself projects” (Merleau-Ponty 1962, 430).
- 3.
We are engaged in what Searle (1983) himself recognises as “Networks of Intentional states”, but with the requirement that those networks should be better perceived as actor-networks and as such irreducible to any of the constitutive elements in isolation.
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Malafouris, L. (2008). At the Potter’s Wheel : An Argument for Material Agency. In: Knappett, C., Malafouris, L. (eds) Material Agency. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-74711-8_2
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