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Complexity and the Function of Mind in Nature
Abstract
This book explains the relationship between intelligence and environmental complexity, and in so doing links philosophy of mind to more general issues about the relations between organisms and environments, and to the general pattern of 'externalist' explanations. The author provides a biological approach to the investigation of mind and cognition in nature. In particular he explores the idea that the function of cognition is to enable agents to deal with environmental complexity. The history of the idea in the work of Dewey and Spencer is considered, as is the impact of recent evolutionary theory on our understanding of the place of mind in nature.
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Citations
Cited by
The extended evolutionary synthesis: its structure, assumptions and predictions
Laland, K. N., Uller, T., Feldman, M. W., Sterelny, K., Müller, G. B., Moczek, A., Jablonka, E., & Odling-Smee, J. (2015) · Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences · doi:10.1098/rspb.2015.1019 · Cited by 1,399
Being a Beast Machine: The Somatic Basis of Selfhood
Seth, A. K., & Tsakiris, M. (2018) · Trends in Cognitive Sciences · doi:10.1016/j.tics.2018.08.008 · Cited by 371
Doris, J. M., & The Moral Psychology Research Group (2010) · doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001 · Cited by 227
The sense of should: A biologically-based framework for modeling social pressure
Theriault, J. E., Young, L., & Barrett, L. F. (2021) · Physics of Life Reviews · doi:10.1016/j.plrev.2020.01.004 · Cited by 201
Mikhalevich, I., Powell, R., & Logan, C. (2017) · Interface Focus · doi:10.1098/rsfs.2016.0121 · Cited by 76
Metadata
- Authors
- Godfrey-Smith, P.
- Venue
- Cambridge University Press eBooks
- Publisher
- Cambridge University Press
- Published
- 1996-03-29
- OpenAlex
- W1590557630
- Cited by
- 721
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 3.52
- Type
- book
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Complexity and the Function of Mind in Nature. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1017/cbo9781139172714
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- Godfrey-Smith, P. (1996). Complexity and the Function of Mind in Nature. Cambridge University Press eBooks. https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9781139172714
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
