Environments of Intelligence

This book shares some key concerns with so-called 4E theories of cognition as being embodied, embedded, extended, and enactive in philosophy and the cognitive sciences, and addresses a twofold question: What is the role of the environment, and of the information it provides, in human cognition? More specifically, may there be a role for certain artefacts to play in this context? In response to the first part of the question, a concept of information as primarily natural, environmentally embedded in character is defended and refined. Natural information is an objective, strictly regular relation between world affairs. Precisely by virtue of this specifying character, it may enter into a broad variety of organism-environment interactions in which environments assume a shape that is specific to their respective inhabitants, and that are partly shaped by them. It will also help to carve out equally organism-specific informational environments. In response to the second part of the question, so-called intelligent environments are discussed as the candidate paradigm of constructing and modifying informational environments. These technologies are directly concerned with their users perception of, and interaction with, their environments, being designed to augment the latter with contextually relevant information in adaptive and partly autonomous fashion. With respect to human cognition, the most notable effect of these technologies is not that they might be able, or become able, to think but that they alter the way human beings perceive, think and act. In this fashion, they provide an indirect route to insights into the nature of human cognition as a primarily environment-bound activity.