A very informative read.
Clark stresses the importance of the environment for thinking, or actually for not-having-to-think. If you use the environment appropriately, you can get away with much less thinking than is generally assumed. As he himself states: “We use intelligence to structure our environment so that we can succeed with less intelligence. … we are smart after all – but our boundaries extend further out into the world than we might have initially supposed.”
His second thesis is that there are many ways to get organisms / structures / organisations working (& thinking) without the need for a CPU or any other centralised thinking-res. This to get away from the I-am-One perspective. Intelligence can be divided over multiple non-agents, appropriately coordinated so as to look / act as if there was a central thinker.
The only downside to this book is that Clark hasn’t given a lot of himself, the book looks more like a long description of secondary literature, in which Clark summarizes a lot of recent work on embodied cognition, integrating it in a big framework, which already exists, but hasn’t been given a proper place in the scientific firmament yet. Clark gives it a very proper place though.