The big idea in Being There, one with lasting impact in embodied cognitive science, is that minds are not for thinking, traditionally conceived, but for doing, for getting things done in the world in real time. Rather than developing “walking encyclopedias”, robotics in the late 1980s and early 1990s was starting to focus on the dynamic interaction between body and world. Clark drew out affinities between this shift in the conception of intelligent action in computational systems and the emergence of the idea that cognition was scaffolded, embedded, and extended.
Available from http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2011/entries/embodied-cognition
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