Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension

"Andy Clark’s, Supersizing the Mind . It’s about how the mind is embodied and extended. Clark is a fascinating philosopher, and he’s always been a bit ahead of the field. He’s played the role of alerting philosophers to the latest developments in cognitive science and AI, such as connectionism, dynamical systems theory, and predictive coding. If you want to know what philosophers of mind will be thinking about in five or ten years’ time, look at what Andy Clark is thinking about today. Yes. One way to think of it is in terms of a contrast between two models of the mind. Both are physicalist, but they differ as to the range of physical processes that make up the mind. One is what Clark calls the Brainbound model. This sees the mind confined to the brain, sealed away in the skull. It is the view that Armstrong has – it’s in the name ‘central-state materialism’, where ‘central’ means the central nervous system. In this model, the brain does all the processing work and the body has an ancillary role, sending sensory data to the brain and receiving the brain’s commands. This means that there’s a lot of work for the brain to do. It needs to model the external world in great detail and calculate precisely how to move the body in order to achieve its goals. This contrasts with what Clark calls the ‘Extended Model.’ This sees mental processes as involving the wider body and external artefacts. One aspect of this concerns the role of the body in cognition. The brain can offload some of the work onto the body. For example, our bodies are designed to do some things automatically, in virtue of their structure and dynamics. Walking is an example. So the brain doesn’t need to issue detailed muscular commands for these activities but can just monitor and tweak the process as it unfolds. Another example is that instead of constructing a detailed internal model of the world, the brain can simply probe the world with the sense organs as and when it needs information – using the world as its own model, as the roboticist Rodney Brooks puts it. So the work of controlling behaviour is not all done in the head but involves interaction and feedback between brain and body. Clark lists many examples of this, with data from psychology, neuroscience, and robotics. Yes, that’s the other aspect of the Extended model. Mental processes don’t only involve the body but can also extend out into external objects and artefacts. This was an idea made famous by a 1998 article ‘The extended mind’ , which Clark co-wrote with David Chalmers and which is included in the book. (Chalmers also contributed a foreword to the book, giving his later thoughts on the topic.) The argument involves what’s called the Parity Principle . This is the claim that if an external object performs a certain function that we’d regard as a mental function if it were performed by a bit of the brain, then that external object is a part of your mind. It’s what a thing does that matters, not where it’s located. Take memory. Our memories store our beliefs (for example, about names or appointments), which we can access as needed to guide our behaviour. Now suppose someone has a memory impairment, and they write down bits of information in a notebook which they carry around with them and consult regularly. Then the notebook is functioning like their memory used to, and the bits of information in it function as beliefs. So, the argument goes, we should think of the notebook as literally part of the person’s mind and its contents as among their mental states. This view may seem counterintuitive, but it isn’t all that far from where we started with Armstrong and the claim that mental states can be defined in terms of their causal roles – what work they do within the mind/brain system. The new claim is just that these causal roles can be played by things outside the brain. It also fits in nicely with Carruthers’s massive modularity. If the brain is itself composed of modules, then why couldn’t there be further modules or subsystems external to the brain? These external modules would need to have interfaces with the brain, of course – in the case of the notepad this would be through the person’s eyes and fingers. But, as Clark notes, internal modules will need interfaces too. Yes. Of course, this only applies to things that are closely integrated with your brain processes, things that you carry with you, that you consult regularly. Clark doesn’t claim that anything you consult is part of your mind – a book that you look at only once a year, say. Yes, I think it could. Clark talks about how we construct cognitive niches – external environments that serve to guide and structure our activities. For example, the arrangement of materials and tools in a workplace might act like a workflow diagram, guiding the workers’ activities. Clark has a nice historical example of this from the Elizabethan theatre. The physical layout of the stage and scenery, combined with a schematic plot summary, enabled actors to master lengthy plays in a short time. We see this with elderly people too. As a person’s mental faculties decline, they become more and more dependent upon the cognitive niche they have created in their own home, and if you take them out of that niche and put them in an institution, they may become unable to do even simple everyday things. Yes. Or rather, the suggestion is that there is a perspective from which they can be seen that way. Clark isn’t dogmatic about this. The point is that the Extended model offers a perspective from which we see patterns and explanations that aren’t visible from the narrower Brainbound perspective. Again, this is nudging us away from this Cartesian view of the mind as something locked away from the world. We have an intuitive picture of our minds as private inner worlds, somehow separate from the physical world, but modern philosophy of mind is increasingly dismantling that picture. Maybe there’s a metaphor of Dennett’s that can help us sum this up. Dennett talks about consciousness as a user illusion . He’s thinking of the graphical user interface on a computer, where you have an image of a desktop with files, folders, a waste bin, and so on, and you can do things by moving the icons around – deleting a file by dragging it to the waste bin, for example. Now these icons and operations correspond to things inside the computer – to complex data structures and ultimately to millions of microsettings in the hardware – but they do so only in a very simplified, metaphorical way. So the interface is a kind of illusion. But it’s a helpful illusion, which enables us to use the computer in an intuitive way, without needing any knowledge of its programming or hardware. Dennett suggests that our awareness of own minds is a bit like this. My mind seems to me to be a private world populated with experiences, images, thoughts, and emotions, which I can survey and control. And Dennett’s idea is that this is a kind of user illusion too. It is useful; it gives us some access to what is going in our brains and some control over it. But it represents the states and processes there only in a very simplified, schematic way. I think that’s right. And what these books are doing, and what a lot of modern philosophy of mind is doing, is deconstructing this user illusion, showing us how it is created and how it relates to what is actually happening as our brains interact with our bodies and the world around us."