Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again

Back in my other life as a philosophy student, this book was what got me interested in cognitive science. Clark was at Washington University at the time, and I had grand plans for driving to St. Louis and stalking him until he took me on as a grad student. Thankfully for my arrest record, this never happened. But I still think he's an important theorist--his work stands right at the gap between the meat-stuff and the mind-stuff. This book in particular, which looks at the way we use "off-board" computing--interacting with the world around us, then perceiving the results of that interaction--to augment the brain's own processing, has a lot of relevance to designing efficient robot manipulators.