Extended Mind

Sterelny

Minds: extended or scaffolded?

Extended view of the mind

• not an internal control system, enclosed in the human body, receiving data from human sensory system and directing human action
• instead, as systems that extend far beyond the body of the human organism, systems that include extra-somatic resources: environmental fuels for adaptive action
• suggest that human cognitive systems include those resources that are importantly, robustly, reliably, or persistently supportive of decisions making

Theory of Niche Construction

• many animals intervene in their environment, shaping it in ways that improve the adaptive fit between the agent and its world
• such animals in part adapt to their niche, in part construct their own
• the niche construction perspective focuses our attention on the common features of this whole range of cases whereas the extended mind model does not
  • human capacities, cognitive and non-cognitive alike, turn out to depend on the fact that humans engineer their environment to support their activities
• extended digestion example
  • some animals do the hard digestion stuff on-board, powerful jaws, large mouths, lots of time chewing
  • we cook lmao
  • also, we selectively breed livestock which improves the food value of domestic stock

Extended Phenotypes Concept

• things animals build are part of their phenotype (physical exhibited traits that are determined genetically)
  • developmentally stable, as heritable and predictable in their ecological effects as other traits
• e.g. wasp nests, beaver dams, spider webs

Environmentally Supported Cognition

• derives from niche construction, helps to emphasize the active role of the agent in explaining the adaptive fit of agent and environment
• over time, agents adapt to environments but also adapt their environment to them
  • “Animals construct nests, burrows and dams, thus protecting themselves from predators and from the violence of the world.”
  • epistemic action is a form of niche construction too
    • epistemic → relating to knowledge
    • thus, ants lay scent trails between nest and food source
• humans display intergenerational social learning
  • intergenerational transmission of ecological and technical expertise
  • parental acts bias the environment explored by trial and error learning
  • trials are guided — social/observational learning
    • partially complete and failed exemplars of the target artefact
    • aid of tools that initially chosen by others
    • access to raw materials in various stages of preparation
  • natural bargain
    • Skilled practitioners ease their own burdens by having apprentices do low to medium skilled work.
    • Apprentices do grunt work from the perspective of the skilled, but for the beginner, it builds basic skills.
  • Over both evolutionary and developmental time frames, inner mechanisms have coevolved with and adapted to this rich environment. Language and arithmetical notation enhance our capacity to think

Otto — theman who lost has faulty memory

• clark and chalmers (extended mind) argued that information in his notebook should be amongst Otto’s memories
  • parity principle
    • if an external resource plays the same functional role in supporting action as an action-supporting internal resource that is uncontroversially cognitive, then the external resource is part of the cognitive system of the agent
  • functional difference between otto’s notebook and internally represented information
    • subject to interference from other parties and manipulation
    • only accessed via other intentional states (one must believe that the book contains memories that you’ve written before, for example)
  • cant replace internal, embodied wants (e.g. relational and sexual preferences)
    • notebook might be a prompt or a cue, but can’t replace motivation and desires
• sutton shifts away from the parity principle
  • emphasizes the real value of these tightly coupled external resources is that they are functionally distinct from, but complementary to, internal resources
  • more powerful because they have external + internal resources, differentiation and the division of labour
    • externally encoded information is often discrete, coded in representation vehicles which are stable and are modality and task independent
    • internal representations (like memory) dont have those characteristics
• environmental fuels for cognition — three dimensions
  1. trust
     • reliability of their access to a resource and the reliability of the resource itself
     • the more agents trust a resource, the less they will see themselves needing redundancy against failure
     • Otto’s competitors have the opportunity to steal his notebook, erase passages in it and add deceptively to it. If Otto is rational, he will be aware of such a danger and will be wary of committing himself to a high-stakes action on the basis of his notebooked beliefs alone
  2. interchangeability, individualization, entrenchement
     • example of stick for a blind person, extension of their hand and for them, phenomenologically the interface between body and world is at the end of their stick rather than at the end of their hand
     • stick is individualized (custom weight, balance, length, etc.) and entrenched (switch it out, they won’t be used to it)
     • can apply to cognitive resources like book too
       • most books are interchangeable (standard books) but some are heavily individualized (long marginalia, etc.)
       • none are entrenched → no single work is sufficiently salient, they dont read them enough that they adapt to their resource
  3. the individual and the collective
     • distinction between individual and collective resources
       • collective resources have distinct individual and intergeneration dynamics
       • language have almost certainly transformed the internal processes of human minds
       • We adapt the expressive powers of language to our own purposes, but no doubt we have also adapted to it (not to any one individual, but to society as a collective)
     • language as a phenotypical trait
       • like beaver dams
       • these technologies have evolved by cumulative trail and error but the mechanism of inheritance is cultural rather than genetic
       • inheritance is not strictly vertical, it can be oblique and many-to-one (information flow from many members of the parental generation — and from each other)
       • the cognitive competence of generation N+1 individually and collectively depends on cognitive provisioning by generation N

Crane

• externalism about vehicles (the extended mind)
  • externalism about content is consistent with the basic idea of the mechanical mind: the mind is a causal mechanism which has its effects in behaviour
  • extended mind externalism rejects the hypothesis of externalism of content where only the content of thought are external and instead propose that vehicles of thought as well extend beyond the brain and body of the thinker
• if you accept functionalism, you ought to accept the extended mind
  • according to functionalism what is essential to a mental state is what it does
  • if states outside the head participate in the same causal role as tstate inside the head, they should count as being the same mental states by functionalist criteria
• cartesian thinking → origins in the thought of Descartes
  • famous for his view that mind and matter are two distinct things, material world is one thing and minds/souls are something else (mental)