Extended mind thesis

Last updated
"Seneca [had an] anecdote about a wealthy freedman who wished to make himself appear cultured by reciting poetry at dinner parties but was hampered by a bad memory. So he bought educated slaves and had one memorise Homer, another Hesiod, and so on, on the theory that what his slaves knew, he knew too." Lucio Anneo Seneca, Mateo Inurria Lainosa (Cordoba) AGuichot1110 0944.jpg
“Seneca [had an] anecdote about a wealthy freedman who wished to make himself appear cultured by reciting poetry at dinner parties but was hampered by a bad memory. So he bought educated slaves and had one memorise Homer, another Hesiod, and so on, on the theory that what his slaves knew, he knew too.”

In philosophy of mind, the extended mind thesis says that the mind does not exclusively reside in the brain or even the body, but extends into the physical world. [3] The thesis proposes that some objects in the external environment can be part of a cognitive process and in that way function as extensions of the mind itself. Examples of such objects are written calculations, a diary, or a PC; in general, it concerns objects that store information. The hypothesis considers the mind to encompass every level of cognition, including the physical level.

Contents

It was proposed by Andy Clark and David Chalmers in "The Extended Mind" (1998). They describe the idea as "active externalism, based on the active role of the environment in driving cognitive processes."

For the matter of personal identity (and the philosophy of self), the EMT has the implication that some parts of a person's identity can be determined by their environment.

"The Extended Mind"

"The Extended Mind" by Andy Clark and David Chalmers (1998) [4] is the paper that originally stated the EMT. Clark and Chalmers present the idea of active externalism (not to be confused with semantic externalism), in which objects within the environment function as a part of the mind. They argue that the separation between the mind, the body, and the environment is an unprincipled distinction. Because external objects play a significant role in aiding cognitive processes, the mind and the environment act as a "coupled system" that can be seen as a complete cognitive system of its own. In this manner, the mind is extended into the physical world. The main criterion that Clark and Chalmers list for classifying the use of external objects during cognitive tasks as a part of an extended cognitive system is that the external objects must function with the same purpose as the internal processes.

Clark and Chalmers present a thought experiment to illustrate the environment's role in connection to the mind. The fictional characters Otto and Inga are both travelling to a museum simultaneously. Otto has Alzheimer's disease, and has written all of his directions down in a notebook to serve the function of his memory. Inga is able to recall the internal directions within her memory. The argument is that the only difference existing in these two cases is that Inga's memory is being internally processed by the brain, while Otto's memory is being served by the notebook. In other words, Otto's mind has been extended to include the notebook as the source of his memory. The notebook qualifies as such because it is constantly and immediately accessible to Otto, and it is automatically endorsed by him. They also suggest Otto's notebook should be considered an extension of himself; the notebook in a way becomes a "fragile biological limb or organ" that Otto wants to protect from harm.

The thought experiment has been criticised with the notion that what happens with Otto is not very similar to what happens with Inga. This criticism is addressed by Clark in Supersizing the Mind:

"[the] claim was not that the processes in Otto and Inga are identical, or even similar, in terms of their detailed implementation. It is simply that, with respect to the role that the long-term encodings play in guiding current response, both modes of storage can be seen as supporting dispositional beliefs. It is the way the information is poised to guide reasoning ... and behavior that counts." [5]

Empirical evidence

The Shared intentionality hypothesis yields another perspective to the idea of extended mind. Based on evidence in neuroscience [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] and psychophysiological research, [12] [13] [14] [15] [16] Research Professor Igor Val Danilov proposed that an embryo's nervous system (being a part of the external environment to the mother's nervous system) can take part in the mother's cognitive process and function as an extension of the mother's mind. [17] [18] This neuronal coupling provides social learning during the embryonal period. [19] From this perspective, the Shared intentionality approach provides empirical evidence of the extended mind thesis.

Criticism

Philosophical arguments against the extended mind thesis include the following. [20]

  1. When focusing on cognition, the thesis confuses claims about what is constitutive about the concept of cognition with claims about causal influences on cognition (the "causal-constitutional fallacy"). For example, Adams and Aizawa (2010) write, "Question: Why did the pencil think that 2 + 2 = 4?, Clark’s Answer: Because it was coupled to the mathematician."
  2. It stretches the limits of our ordinary concept of cognition too far ("cognitive bloating"), potentially implying that everything on the Internet is part of individual cognitive systems.
  3. It uses coarse-grained functionalism about the mind that ignores plausible differences between internal and external processes, such as differences between beliefs and external props and devices; or for creating a notion of cognition too heterogeneous to make up a scientific natural kind.

Each of these arguments is addressed in Clark (2008), in which he notes: [21]

  1. While coupling is important for cognition, that is not to say that it is sufficient – coupling must play a functional role in cognition. Many couplings do not do so and thus would not be 'extensions' (and this is consistent with a strong extended mind thesis).
  2. Any putative part of a system – internal or external – is unlikely to yield "cognition" on its own. Thus, examples such as calculators, and pencils, should be considered in parallel with neural regions. Simply looking at the part is not enough for cognition.
  3. One can imagine circumstances under which a biological being might retain information in non-neural ways (a hypothetical Martian with a bitmap-based memory, or humans with prosthetics to support memory). Thus, being neural cannot be a necessary condition for being cognitive.

While in Supersizing the Mind Clark defends a strong version of the hypothesis of extended cognition (contrasted with a hypothesis of embedded cognition) in other work, some of these objections have inspired more moderate reformulations of the extended mind thesis. Thus, the extended mind thesis may no longer depend on the parity considerations of Clark and Chalmers' original argument but, instead, emphasize the "complementarity" of internal and external elements of cognitive systems or processes. This version might be understood as emphasizing the explanatory value of the extended mind thesis for cognitive science rather than maintaining it as an ontological claim about the nature of mind or cognition. [21]

Vincent C. Müller argues that the extended mind "sounds like a substantive thesis, the truth of which we should investigate. But actually the thesis turns about to be just a statement on where the demarcations for the 'mental' are to be set" and that "this discussion about demarcation is merely verbal and thus to be avoided". [22]

Relation to embodied and enacted cognition

As described by Mark Rowlands, mental processes are: [23]

This "4E" view of cognition [24] contrasts with the view of the mind as a processing center that creates mental representations of reality and uses them to control the body's behaviour. The field of extended cognition focuses upon the processes involved in this creation and subsumes these processes as part of consciousness, which is no longer confined to the brain or body but involves interaction with the environment. At a 'low' level, like motor learning and haptic perception, [25] the body is involved in cognition, but there is a 'high' level where cultural factors play a role. [26] [27] This view of cognition is sometimes referred to as enaction to emphasise the role of interplay between the organism and its environment and the feedback processes involved in developing an awareness of, and a reformation of, the environment. [28] For example, Japyassú and Laland argue that some spider's web is something between part of its sensory system and an additional part of its cognitive system. [29]

Further reading

In 2021, biology and social science writer Annie Murphy Paul published “The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain.” [30] Inspired by Clark's and Chalmers's work, the book synthesizes the results of various scientific papers and studies that examine the intelligence that exists beyond the human brain. [31] [32] [33]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cognitive science</span> Interdisciplinary scientific study of cognitive processes

Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary, scientific study of the mind and its processes. It examines the nature, the tasks, and the functions of cognition. Mental faculties of concern to cognitive scientists include language, perception, memory, attention, reasoning, and emotion; to understand these faculties, cognitive scientists borrow from fields such as linguistics, psychology, artificial intelligence, philosophy, neuroscience, and anthropology. The typical analysis of cognitive science spans many levels of organization, from learning and decision to logic and planning; from neural circuitry to modular brain organization. One of the fundamental concepts of cognitive science is that "thinking can best be understood in terms of representational structures in the mind and computational procedures that operate on those structures."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mind</span> Faculties responsible for mental phenomena

The mind is that which thinks, imagines, remembers, wills, and senses, or in other words is the set of faculties responsible for such phenomena. The mind is also associated with experiencing perception, pleasure and pain, belief, desire, intention, and emotion. The mind can include conscious and non-conscious states as well as sensory and non-sensory experiences.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Perception</span> Interpretation of sensory information

Perception is the organization, identification, and interpretation of sensory information in order to represent and understand the presented information or environment. All perception involves signals that go through the nervous system, which in turn result from physical or chemical stimulation of the sensory system. Vision involves light striking the retina of the eye; smell is mediated by odor molecules; and hearing involves pressure waves.

Categorization is a type of cognition involving conceptual differentiation between characteristics of conscious experience, such as objects, events, or ideas. It involves the abstraction and differentiation of aspects of experience by sorting and distinguishing between groupings, through classification or typification on the basis of traits, features, similarities or other criteria that are universal to the group. Categorization is considered one of the most fundamental cognitive abilities, and it is studied particularly by psychology and cognitive linguistics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cognition</span> Act or process of knowing

Cognition is the "mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses". It encompasses all aspects of intellectual functions and processes such as: perception, attention, thought, imagination, intelligence, the formation of knowledge, memory and working memory, judgment and evaluation, reasoning and computation, problem-solving and decision-making, comprehension and production of language. Cognitive processes use existing knowledge and discover new knowledge.

Artificial consciousness (AC), also known as machine consciousness (MC), synthetic consciousness or digital consciousness, is the consciousness hypothesized to be possible in artificial intelligence. It is also the corresponding field of study, which draws insights from philosophy of mind, philosophy of artificial intelligence, cognitive science and neuroscience. The same terminology can be used with the term "sentience" instead of "consciousness" when specifically designating phenomenal consciousness.

A cognitive model is an approximation of one or more cognitive processes in humans or other animals for the purposes of comprehension and prediction. There are many types of cognitive models, and they can range from box-and-arrow diagrams to a set of equations to software programs that interact with the same tools that humans use to complete tasks. In terms of information processing, cognitive modeling is modeling of human perception, reasoning, memory and action.

Social cognition is a topic within psychology that focuses on how people process, store, and apply information about other people and social situations. It focuses on the role that cognitive processes play in social interactions.

The expression collective behavior was first used by Franklin Henry Giddings and employed later by Robert Park and Ernest Burgess, Herbert Blumer, Ralph H. Turner and Lewis Killian, and Neil Smelser to refer to social processes and events which do not reflect existing social structure, but which emerge in a "spontaneous" way. Use of the term has been expanded to include reference to cells, social animals like birds and fish, and insects including ants. Collective behavior takes many forms but generally violates societal norms. Collective behavior can be tremendously destructive, as with riots or mob violence, silly, as with fads, or anywhere in between. Collective behavior is always driven by group dynamics, encouraging people to engage in acts they might consider unthinkable under typical social circumstances.

The consciousness and binding problem is the problem of how objects, background and abstract or emotional features are combined into a single experience.

Distributed cognition is an approach to cognitive science research that was developed by cognitive anthropologist Edwin Hutchins during the 1990s.

Cognitive development is a field of study in neuroscience and psychology focusing on a child's development in terms of information processing, conceptual resources, perceptual skill, language learning, and other aspects of the developed adult brain and cognitive psychology. Qualitative differences between how a child processes their waking experience and how an adult processes their waking experience are acknowledged. Cognitive development is defined as the emergence of the ability to consciously cognize, understand, and articulate their understanding in adult terms. Cognitive development is how a person perceives, thinks, and gains understanding of their world through the relations of genetic and learning factors. There are four stages to cognitive information development. They are, reasoning, intelligence, language, and memory. These stages start when the baby is about 18 months old, they play with toys, listen to their parents speak, they watch TV, anything that catches their attention helps build their cognitive development.

Multisensory integration, also known as multimodal integration, is the study of how information from the different sensory modalities may be integrated by the nervous system. A coherent representation of objects combining modalities enables animals to have meaningful perceptual experiences. Indeed, multisensory integration is central to adaptive behavior because it allows animals to perceive a world of coherent perceptual entities. Multisensory integration also deals with how different sensory modalities interact with one another and alter each other's processing.

Enactivism is a position in cognitive science that argues that cognition arises through a dynamic interaction between an acting organism and its environment. It claims that the environment of an organism is brought about, or enacted, by the active exercise of that organism's sensorimotor processes. "The key point, then, is that the species brings forth and specifies its own domain of problems ...this domain does not exist "out there" in an environment that acts as a landing pad for organisms that somehow drop or parachute into the world. Instead, living beings and their environments stand in relation to each other through mutual specification or codetermination" (p. 198). "Organisms do not passively receive information from their environments, which they then translate into internal representations. Natural cognitive systems...participate in the generation of meaning ...engaging in transformational and not merely informational interactions: they enact a world." These authors suggest that the increasing emphasis upon enactive terminology presages a new era in thinking about cognitive science. How the actions involved in enactivism relate to age-old questions about free will remains a topic of active debate.

Infant cognitive development is the first stage of human cognitive development, in the youngest children. The academic field of infant cognitive development studies of how psychological processes involved in thinking and knowing develop in young children. Information is acquired in a number of ways including through sight, sound, touch, taste, smell and language, all of which require processing by our cognitive system. However, cognition begins through social bonds between children and caregivers, which gradually increase through the essential motive force of Shared intentionality. The notion of Shared intentionality describes unaware processes during social learning at the onset of life when organisms in the simple reflexes substage of the sensorimotor stage of cognitive development do not maintain communication via the sensory system.

Externalism is a group of positions in the philosophy of mind which argues that the conscious mind is not only the result of what is going on inside the nervous system, but also what occurs or exists outside the subject. It is contrasted with internalism which holds that the mind emerges from neural activity alone. Externalism is a belief that the mind is not just the brain or functions of the brain.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Collective intentionality</span> Intentionality that occurs when two or more individuals undertake a task together

In the philosophy of mind, collective intentionality characterizes the intentionality that occurs when two or more individuals undertake a task together. Examples include two individuals carrying a heavy table up a flight of stairs or dancing a tango.

Cognitive ecology is the study of cognitive phenomena within social and natural contexts. It is an integrative perspective drawing from aspects of ecological psychology, cognitive science, evolutionary ecology and anthropology. Notions of domain-specific modules in the brain and the cognitive biases they create are central to understanding the enacted nature of cognition within a cognitive ecological framework. This means that cognitive mechanisms not only shape the characteristics of thought, but they dictate the success of culturally transmitted ideas. Because culturally transmitted concepts can often inform ecological decision-making behaviors, group-level trends in cognition are hypothesized to address ecologically relevant challenges.

Social cognitive neuroscience is the scientific study of the biological processes underpinning social cognition. Specifically, it uses the tools of neuroscience to study "the mental mechanisms that create, frame, regulate, and respond to our experience of the social world". Social cognitive neuroscience uses the epistemological foundations of cognitive neuroscience, and is closely related to social neuroscience. Social cognitive neuroscience employs human neuroimaging, typically using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Human brain stimulation techniques such as transcranial magnetic stimulation and transcranial direct-current stimulation are also used. In nonhuman animals, direct electrophysiological recordings and electrical stimulation of single cells and neuronal populations are utilized for investigating lower-level social cognitive processes.

Shared intentionality is a concept in psychology that describes the human capacity to engage with the psychological states of others. According to conventional wisdom in cognitive sciences, shared intentionality supports the development of everything from cooperative interactions and knowledge assimilation to moral identity and cultural evolution that provides building societies, being a pre-requisite of social reality formation.

References

  1. ↑ (Epistles 27.5-8).
  2. ↑ Hall, Edith M (2012-08-09). "Reading Ancient Slavery (2010)". Academia.edu. Retrieved 2024-03-20.
  3. ↑ Wilson, Robert A.; Foglia, Lucia (25 July 2011). "Embodied Cognition". In Zalta, Edward N. (ed.). The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2011 Edition).
  4. ↑ Andy Clark, David J Chalmers (January 1998). "The extended mind". Analysis. 58 (1): 7–19. doi:10.1093/analys/58.1.7. JSTOR   3328150.; reprinted as: Andy Clark, David J Chalmers (2010). "Chapter 2: The extended mind". In Richard Menary (ed.). The Extended Mind. MIT Press. pp. 27–42. ISBN   9780262014038.; and available online as: Clark, Andy; Chalmers, David J. "The extended mind". Cogprints.
  5. ↑ Clark, Andy (2008). Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension . Oxford University Press. pp.  96. ISBN   9780195333213.
  6. ↑ Liu, J., Zhang, R., Xie, E. et al. (2023). "Shared intentionality modulates interpersonal neural synchronization at the establishment of communication system." Commun Biol 6, 832 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s42003-023-05197-z
  7. ↑ Painter, D.R., Kim, J.J., Renton, A.I., Mattingley, J.B. (2021). "Joint control of visually guided actions involves concordant increases in behavioural and neural coupling." Commun Biol. 2021; 4: 816.
  8. ↑ Hu, Y., Pan, Y., Shi, X., Cai, Q., Li, X., Cheng, X. (2018). "Inter-brain synchrony and cooperation context in interactive decision making." Biol Psychol. 2018; 133: 54-62.
  9. ↑ Fishburn, F.A., Murty, V.P., Hlutkowsky, C.O., MacGillivray, C.E., Bemis, L.M., Murphy, M.E., et al. (2018). "Putting our heads together: Interpersonal neural synchronization as a biological mechanism for shared intentionality." Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci. 2018; 13: 841-849.
  10. ↑ Szymanski, C., Pesquita, A., Brennan, A.A., Perdikis, D., Enns, J.T., Brick, T.R., et al. (2017). "Teams on the same wavelength perform better: Inter-brain phase synchronization constitutes a neural substrate for social facilitation." Neuroimage. 2017; 152: 425-436.
  11. ↑ Astolfi, L., Toppi, J., De Vico Fallani, F., Vecchiato, G., Salinari, S., Mattia, D., et al. (2010). "Neuroelectrical hyperscanning measures simultaneous brain activity in humans." Brain Topogr. 2010; 23: 243-256.
  12. ↑ Val Danilov I. & Mihailova S. (2023). "Empirical Evidence of Shared Intentionality: Towards Bioengineering Systems Development." OBM Neurobiology 2023; 7(2): 167; doi:10.21926/obm.neurobiol.2302167. https://www.lidsen.com/journals/neurobiology/neurobiology-07-02-167
  13. ↑ McClung, J. S., Placì, S., Bangerter, A., Clément, F., & Bshary, R. (2017). "The language of cooperation: shared intentionality drives variation in helping as a function of group membership." Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 284(1863), 20171682. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2017.1682.
  14. ↑ Shteynberg, G., & Galinsky, A. D. (2011). "Implicit coordination: Sharing goals with similar others intensifies goal pursuit." Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 47(6), 1291-1294., https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2011.04.012.
  15. ↑ Val Danilov, I., Svajyan, A., Mihailova, S. (2023). "A New Computer-Aided Method for Assessing Children's Cognition in Bioengineering Systems for Diagnosing Developmental Delay." OBM Neurobiology 2023; 7(4): 189; doi:10.21926/obm.neurobiol.2304189. https://www.lidsen.com/journals/neurobiology/neurobiology-07-04-189
  16. ↑ Val Danilov, I., Mihailova, S., Svajyan, A. (2022). "Computerized Assessment of Cognitive Development in Neurotypical and Neurodivergent Children." OBM Neurobiology 2022;6(3):18; doi:10.21926/obm.neurobiol.2203137. https://www.lidsen.com/journals/neurobiology/neurobiology-06-03-137
  17. ↑ Val Danilov, Igor (2023). "Low-Frequency Oscillations for Nonlocal Neuronal Coupling in Shared Intentionality Before and After Birth: Toward the Origin of Perception". OBM Neurobiology. 7 (4): 1–17. doi: 10.21926/obm.neurobiol.2304192 .
  18. ↑ Val Danilov, Igor (2023). "Shared Intentionality Modulation at the Cell Level: Low-Frequency Oscillations for Temporal Coordination in Bioengineering Systems". OBM Neurobiology. 7 (4): 1–17. doi: 10.21926/obm.neurobiol.2304185 .
  19. ↑ Val Danilov, I. (2023). "Theoretical Grounds of Shared Intentionality for Neuroscience in Developing Bioengineering Systems." OBM Neurobiology 2023; 7(1): 156; doi:10.21926/obm.neurobiol.2301156
  20. ↑ Adams, Fred; Aizawa, Ken (2010). "Defending the Bounds of Cognition". Defending the bounds of cognition, in The Extended Mind (Eds, Richard Menary). MIT Press. pp. 67–80.
  21. 1 2 Andy (2008). Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension. Oxford University Press.
  22. ↑ Müller, Vincent C. "The extended mind thesis is about demarcation and use of words". Italian Journal of Cognitive Science. 2: 335–48.
  23. ↑ Rowlands, Mark (2010). "Chapter 3: The mind embedded". The new science of the mind: From extended mind to embodied phenomenology. MIT Press. pp. 51 ff. ISBN   978-0262014557.
  24. ↑ Newen, Albert; Bruin, Leon; Gallagher, Shaun, eds. (2018). Oxford Handbook of 4E Cognition. Oxford Library of Psychology. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198735410.001.0001. ISBN   9780198735410. OCLC   1057357626.
  25. ↑ Morasso, Pietro (2005). "Consciousness as the emergent property of the interaction between brain, body, & environment: the crucial role of haptic perception" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2006-05-08. Slides related to a chapter on haptic perception (recognition through touch): Pietro Morasso (2007). "Chapter 14: The crucial role of haptic perception". In Antonio Chella; Riccardo Manzotti (eds.). Artificial Consciousness. Academic. pp. 234–255. ISBN   978-1845400705.
  26. ↑ Ratner, Carl (2011). Macro Cultural Psychology: A Political Philosophy of Mind. Oxford University Press. p. 96. ISBN   978-0199706297. Culture produces the mind; brain circuitry does not. The mind-body problem of how the physical body/brain produces mental, subjective qualia, is the wrong way to frame the origin of consciousness.
  27. ↑ McGann, Marek; De Jaegher, Hanne; Di Paolo, Ezequiel (June 2013). "Enaction and psychology". Review of General Psychology. 17 (2): 203–209. doi:10.1037/a0032935. S2CID   8986622.
  28. ↑ Stewart, John; Gapenne, Oliver; DiPaolo, Ezequiel A (2014). "Introduction". In Stewart, John; Oliver Gapenne; Ezequiel A DiPaolo (eds.). Enaction (Paperback ed.). MIT Press. p. vii. ISBN   978-0-262-52601-2.
  29. ↑ Japyassú, Hilton F; Laland, Kevin N (2017). "Extended spider cognition". Animal Cognition. 20 (3): 375–395. doi:10.1007/s10071-017-1069-7. PMC   5394149 . PMID   28176133.
  30. ↑ "Why You Should Think With Your Environment, Not Just Your Mind". GQ. 2021-08-12. Retrieved 2022-04-22.
  31. ↑ Pinker, Susan (2021-06-11). "There Is More to Us Than Just Our Brains". The New York Times. ISSN   0362-4331 . Retrieved 2022-04-22.
  32. ↑ Hutson, Matthew (May 24, 2021). "'The Extended Mind' Review: Thinking Outside the Brain". Wall Street Journal. Retrieved April 22, 2022.
  33. ↑ Balcetis, Emily (June 18, 2021). "Where does great thinking come from? Look beyond the brain". The Washington Post. Retrieved April 22, 2022.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.