View 14 excerpts, cites background and methods. From the Publisher: The old opposition of matter versus mind stubbornly persists in the way we study mind and brain. In treating cognition as problem solving, Andy Clark suggests, we may often … Expand.
The body in mind. Mental content and external representations. This paper challenges that view without relying on arguments about the … Expand.
Origins of the modern mind. In Origins of the Modern Mind, Merlin Donald has offered a provocative, compelling, and radically different view of cognition. It was a great pleasure to follow his convincing arguments on the … Expand. Individualism and psychology. Recent years have seen in psychology — and overlapping parts of linguistics, artificial intelligence, and the social sciences — the development of some semblance of agreement about an approach to the … Expand.
Psychosemantics explores the relation between commonsense psychological theories and problems that are central to semantics and the philosophy of language.
Building on and extending Fodor's earlier … Expand. Part 1 The departing ground: a fundamental circularity - in the mind of the reflective scientist - an already-given condition, what is cognitive science? View 1 excerpt, references background. What is it like to be a Bat. Consciousness is what makes the mind-body problem really intractable. Perhaps that is why current discussions of the problem give it little attention or get it obviously wrong.
Overview Author s. Summary Leading scholars respond to the famous proposition by Andy Clark and David Chalmers that cognition and mind are not located exclusively in the head. May August Share Share Share email. He is the author of Cognitive Integration and other books.
Surely his belief cannot come and go so easily? We could get around this problem by redescribing the situation, but in any case an occasional temporary disconnection does not threaten our claim. After all, when Inga is asleep, or when she is intoxicated, we do not say that her belief disappears.
What really counts is that the information is easily available when the subject needs it, and this constraint is satisfied equally in the two cases.
If Otto's notebook were often unavailable to him at times when the information in it would be useful, there might be a problem, as the information would not be able to play the action-guiding role that is central to belief; but if it is easily available in most relevant situations, the belief is not endangered.
Perhaps a difference is that Inga has better access to the information than Otto does? Inga's "central" processes and her memory probably have a relatively high-bandwidth link between them, compared to the low-grade connection between Otto and his notebook. But this alone does not make a difference between believing and not believing. Consider Inga's museum-going friend Lucy, whose biological memory has only a low-grade link to her central systems, due to nonstandard biology or past misadventures.
Processing in Lucy's case might be less efficient, but as long as the relevant information is accessible, Lucy clearly believes that the museum is on 53rd Street. If the connection was too indirect -- if Lucy had to struggle hard to retrieve the information with mixed results, or a psychotherapist's aid were needed -- we might become more reluctant to ascribe the belief, but such cases are well beyond Otto's situation, in which the information is easily accessible.
Another suggestion could be that Otto has access to the relevant information only by perception, whereas Inga has more direct access -- by introspection, perhaps. In some ways, however, to put things this way is to beg the question. After all, we are in effect advocating a point of view on which Otto's internal processes and his notebook constitute a single cognitive system.
From the standpoint of this system, the flow of information between notebook and brain is not perceptual at all; it does not involve the impact of something outside the system. It is more akin to information flow within the brain.
The only deep way in which the access is perceptual is that in Otto's case, there is a distinctly perceptual phenomenology associated with the retrieval of the information, whereas in Inga's case there is not. But why should the nature of an associated phenomenology make a difference to the status of a belief? Inga's memory may have some associated phenomenology, but it is still a belief. The phenomenology is not visual, to be sure. But for visual phenomenology consider the Terminator, from the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie of the same name.
When he recalls some information from memory, it is "displayed" before him in his visual field presumably he is conscious of it, as there are frequent shots depicting his point of view. The fact that standing memories are recalled in this unusual way surely makes little difference to their status as standing beliefs. These various small differences between Otto's and Inga's cases are all shallow differences.
To focus on them would be to miss the way in which for Otto, notebook entries play just the sort of role that beliefs play in guiding most people's lives. Perhaps the intuition that Otto's is not a true belief comes from a residual feeling that the only true beliefs are occurrent beliefs. If we take this feeling seriously, Inga's belief will be ruled out too, as will many beliefs that we attribute in everyday life.
This would be an extreme view, but it may be the most consistent way to deny Otto's belief. Upon even a slightly less extreme view -- the view that a belief must be available for consciousness, for example -- Otto's notebook entry seems to qualify just as well as Inga's memory.
Once dispositional beliefs are let in the door, it is difficult to resist the conclusion that Otto's notebook has all the relevant dispositions. If the thesis is accepted, how far should we go? All sorts of puzzle cases spring to mind. Does the information in my Filofax count as part of my memory? If Otto's notebook has been tampered with, does he believe the newly-installed information?
Do I believe the contents of the page in front of me before I read it? Is my cognitive state somehow spread across the Internet? We do not think that there are categorical answers to all of these questions, and we will not give them. But to help understand what is involved in ascriptions of extended belief, we can at least examine the features of our central case that make the notion so clearly applicable there.
First, the notebook is a constant in Otto's life -- in cases where the information in the notebook would be relevant, he will rarely take action without consulting it. Second, the information in the notebook is directly available without difficulty. Third, upon retrieving information from the notebook he automatically endorses it. Fourth, the information in the notebook has been consciously endorsed at some point in the past, and indeed is there as a consequence of this endorsement.
Insofar as increasingly exotic puzzle cases lack these features, the applicability of the notion of "belief" gradually falls of. If I rarely take relevant action without consulting my Filofax, for example, its status within my cognitive system will resemble that of the notebook in Otto's.
But if I often act without consultation -- for example, if I sometimes answer relevant questions with "I don't know" -- then information in it counts less clearly as part of my belief system. The Internet is likely to fail on multiple counts, unless I am unusually computer-reliant, facile with the technology, and trusting, but information in certain files on my computer may qualify. In intermediate cases, the question of whether a belief is present may be indeterminate, or the answer may depend on the varying standards that are at play in various contexts in which the question might be asked.
But any indeterminacy here does not mean that in the central cases, the answer is not clear. What about socially extended cognition? Could my mental states be partly constituted by the states of other thinkers?
We see no reason why not, in principle. In an unusually interdependent couple, it is entirely possible that one partner's beliefs will play the same sort of role for the other as the notebook plays for Otto.
What is central is a high degree of trust, reliance, and accessibility. In other social relationships these criteria may not be so clearly fulfilled, but they might nevertheless be fulfilled in specific domains.
For example, the waiter at my favorite restaurant might act as a repository of my beliefs about my favorite meals this might even be construed as a case of extended desire. In other cases, one's beliefs might be embodied in one's secretary, one's accountant, or one's collaborator. In each of these cases, the major burden of the coupling between agents is carried by language. Without language, we might be much more akin to discrete Cartesian "inner" minds, in which high-level cognition relies largely on internal resources.
But the advent of language has allowed us to spread this burden into the world. Language, thus construed, is not a mirror of our inner states but a complement to them. It serves as a tool whose role is to extend cognition in ways that on-board devices cannot. Indeed, it may be that the intellectual explosion in recent evolutionary time is due as much to this linguistically-enabled extension of cognition as to any independent development in our inner cognitive resources.
What, finally, of the self? Does the extended mind imply an extended self? It seems so. Most of us already accept that the self outstrips the boundaries of consciousness; my dispositional beliefs, for example, constitute in some deep sense part of who I am.
If so, then these boundaries may also fall beyond the skin. The information in Otto's notebook, for example, is a central part of his identity as a cognitive agent.
What this comes to is that Otto himself is best regarded as an extended system, a coupling of biological organism and external resources. This volume brings together for the first time the best responses to Clark and Chalmers's bold proposal. These responses, together with the original paper by Clark and Chalmers, offer a valuable overview of the latest research on the extended mind thesis. The contributors first discuss and answer objections raised to Clark and Chalmers's thesis.
Clark himself responds to critics in an essay that uses the movie Memento 's amnesia-aiding notes and tattoos to illustrate the workings of the extended mind. Contributors then consider the different directions in which the extended mind project might be taken, including the need for an approach that focuses on cognitive activity and practice. PDF KB.
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