clark's work explores a number of disparate but interrelated themes. many of these themes run against established wisdom in cognitive processing and representation. according to traditional computational accounts, the function of the mind is understood as the process of creating, storing and updating internal representations of the world, on the basis of which other processes and actions may take place. representations are updated to correspond with an environment in accordance with the function, goal-state, or desire of the system in question at any given time. thus, for example, learning a new route through a maze-like building would be mirrored in a change in the representation of that building. action, on this view, is the outcome of a process which determines the best way to achieve the goal-state or desire, based on current representations. such a determinative process may be the purview of a cartesian "central executive" or a distributed process like homuncular decomposition.