"Where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin?" This is the question with which Andy Clark and David...
"Where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin?" This is the question with which Andy Clark and David Chalmers opened their influencial paper "The Extended Mind" back in 1998. In this paper, the authors postulated that the "mind" is not only "in the head" but also in que environment and in the devices/entities used to perform a given cognitive process. This leads to the concepts of "extended cognition" and "distributed cognition".
This approach allows us to see the mind and the mind processes as a complex system that does not only interact with the world from the brain as an external player, but rather understands the mind as existing beyond the brain, all around us, encomprising our bodies (embodied cognition) and our surroundings. Therefore, the mind extends all the way into the environment, engulfing the elements we use to make it work and the world around us to give it shape.
For example, right now I'm writing these very ideas on my laptop in order to post them in the essex community. I'm writing straight into the g+ posting screen instead of doing it in word first and then copy&pasting it here. That has already change (if only a bit) the way I'm writing it.
Beginning from the most basic, I have to pay a bit more attention to the form of the words I'm typing, since I have no orthography corrector for English in my internet browser. Also, I needed to remember and use a special set of characters to put the italics in the word form I just wrote. Both of these directly affect my cognitive processes since I need to use part of my cognition for monitoring all these factors. In a less superficial fashion, I'm also aware of the Essex community in the background - a constant reminder of who my target audience is and why I'm writing this. Also I'm noticing some answers being changed/displayed on Ariels post and fighting the temptation to close this thing and go and read them (I'm also thinking on going to read them as soon as I finish this).
So, where does my mind really end? In the fingers that are typing this? In the very computer I'm typing this on? In the internet page being displayed below this window?
The answer, Clark would say, is that my mind, right now, engulfs all of the above listed and probably more. My mind is not just in my brain, it works and it is composed of the complex system as a product of the interaction my brain is having with all the elements in the world I'm using right now for the cognitive process of writing this.
Let's take this further... imagine we have two people wanting to remember somebody's birthday. Person number one accesses her memory and actively remembers that that birthday is on August 22nd. Person number two, in contrast, accesses her facebook account and takes the birthday date from there. Both had been able to successfully obtained the correct date of the person's birthday. Would you say that only person number one used her mind to do so? So is the recorded data on our electronics (or a paper based notebook, for that matter) an extension of our minds? Clark would say "yes", and so would I.
Let me quote Clark and Chalmers (1998) on this:
"If the thesis is accepted, how far should we go? All sorts of puzzle cases spring to mind. What of the amnesic villagers in 100 Years of Solitude, who forget the names for everything and so hang labels everywhere? 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. The status of the fourth feature as a criterion for belief is arguable (perhaps one can acquire beliefs through subliminal perception, or through memory tampering?), but the first three features certainly play a crucial role."
Why am I telling you all of this?
Some of you might have guessed already that I'm thinking about the mental palaces and the idea posited by Nagassa about the portals being an attempt of the exogenous to generate a collective mind palace that connects to the exogenous. Though I do not fully agree with his idea, there are much of it which is correct. First, yes, landmarks in our world do constitude part of our distributed, extended minds. Since we used them to trigger and even to store memories.
Not only spacial memories (I know my working place is passed a hotel in the corner... and also I know it's between two portals) but also emotional memories (everytime I pass next to the bridge my first partner asked me to go serious I remember that... the bridge is a portal. do the exogenous have access to this memory when I interact with this portal?) and even more concrete knowledge (Somebody told me once that, at least in my country, conventioned said that you can tell how a famous person died by looking at how many legs the horse she is riding are on the ground...).
Now let's go back to Clark and Chalmers:
"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."
How much of our cognition (and our minds) is connected to the ones of others?
How much of this connection is used/accessed by the exogenous?
How much of the exogenous has permiate into our extended minds both collective and individually speaking?
H. Richard Loeb Hank Johnson Yuri Alaric Nagassa Edgar Allan Wright
http://consc.net/papers/extended.html
[embed]http://consc.net/papers/extended.html[/embed]
This approach allows us to see the mind and the mind processes as a complex system that does not only interact with the world from the brain as an external player, but rather understands the mind as existing beyond the brain, all around us, encomprising our bodies (embodied cognition) and our surroundings. Therefore, the mind extends all the way into the environment, engulfing the elements we use to make it work and the world around us to give it shape.
For example, right now I'm writing these very ideas on my laptop in order to post them in the essex community. I'm writing straight into the g+ posting screen instead of doing it in word first and then copy&pasting it here. That has already change (if only a bit) the way I'm writing it.
Beginning from the most basic, I have to pay a bit more attention to the form of the words I'm typing, since I have no orthography corrector for English in my internet browser. Also, I needed to remember and use a special set of characters to put the italics in the word form I just wrote. Both of these directly affect my cognitive processes since I need to use part of my cognition for monitoring all these factors. In a less superficial fashion, I'm also aware of the Essex community in the background - a constant reminder of who my target audience is and why I'm writing this. Also I'm noticing some answers being changed/displayed on Ariels post and fighting the temptation to close this thing and go and read them (I'm also thinking on going to read them as soon as I finish this).
So, where does my mind really end? In the fingers that are typing this? In the very computer I'm typing this on? In the internet page being displayed below this window?
The answer, Clark would say, is that my mind, right now, engulfs all of the above listed and probably more. My mind is not just in my brain, it works and it is composed of the complex system as a product of the interaction my brain is having with all the elements in the world I'm using right now for the cognitive process of writing this.
Let's take this further... imagine we have two people wanting to remember somebody's birthday. Person number one accesses her memory and actively remembers that that birthday is on August 22nd. Person number two, in contrast, accesses her facebook account and takes the birthday date from there. Both had been able to successfully obtained the correct date of the person's birthday. Would you say that only person number one used her mind to do so? So is the recorded data on our electronics (or a paper based notebook, for that matter) an extension of our minds? Clark would say "yes", and so would I.
Let me quote Clark and Chalmers (1998) on this:
"If the thesis is accepted, how far should we go? All sorts of puzzle cases spring to mind. What of the amnesic villagers in 100 Years of Solitude, who forget the names for everything and so hang labels everywhere? 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. The status of the fourth feature as a criterion for belief is arguable (perhaps one can acquire beliefs through subliminal perception, or through memory tampering?), but the first three features certainly play a crucial role."
Why am I telling you all of this?
Some of you might have guessed already that I'm thinking about the mental palaces and the idea posited by Nagassa about the portals being an attempt of the exogenous to generate a collective mind palace that connects to the exogenous. Though I do not fully agree with his idea, there are much of it which is correct. First, yes, landmarks in our world do constitude part of our distributed, extended minds. Since we used them to trigger and even to store memories.
Not only spacial memories (I know my working place is passed a hotel in the corner... and also I know it's between two portals) but also emotional memories (everytime I pass next to the bridge my first partner asked me to go serious I remember that... the bridge is a portal. do the exogenous have access to this memory when I interact with this portal?) and even more concrete knowledge (Somebody told me once that, at least in my country, conventioned said that you can tell how a famous person died by looking at how many legs the horse she is riding are on the ground...).
Now let's go back to Clark and Chalmers:
"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."
How much of our cognition (and our minds) is connected to the ones of others?
How much of this connection is used/accessed by the exogenous?
How much of the exogenous has permiate into our extended minds both collective and individually speaking?
H. Richard Loeb Hank Johnson Yuri Alaric Nagassa Edgar Allan Wright
http://consc.net/papers/extended.html
[embed]http://consc.net/papers/extended.html[/embed]
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