Learning about Life

Theme of the reading
In this reading, Mitch Resnick provides a discussion of the roots of centralized thinking and five heuristics for thinking in a decentralized way. These are powerful fundamental ideas that can free us from the chains of centralized thinking.

Getting ready to read
Definitions:
Heuristic: serving to discover. A technique that helps one understand something.

We will encounter the terms "Artificial life", "Neural networks", "Subsumption architecture", and "Cellular autonoma" later in the course. For now, if you don't know what these things mean, do a little web research and find out what they are. Wikipedia is an excellent source.

Orienting questions and issues to keep in mind:
In this article, Resnick coins the phrase "By lead or by seed" - what does this phrase mean?

What are the five heuristics for thinking about decentralized systems?

Cognition, Distributed

Theme of the reading
Professor Hutchins wrote this entry for the International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences. It is intended to be a brief overview of the main concepts of distributed cognition. You should read it carefully. It is likely that there are parts of this article that you will not understand today. Hopefully, you will understand it at the end of the quarter.

Note down any questions you have about the distributed cogition framework. Also, while you are reading you should be paying attention to the way that Professor Hutchins uses metaphors to describe the new framework. The use of metaphors is an important aspect of the framing of scientific arguments.

Orienting questions and issues to keep in mind:
What sorts of systems can be seen as distributed cognition systems?

Is distributed cognition a kind of cognition? If so, what kind? If not, then what is it?