PH1102E Week 10 The extended mind

I. The extended mind hypothesis II. Arguments for extended cognition III. Taking stock IV. A contracted mind?

I. The extended mind hypothesis Using a pocket calculator, I can figure out what 438 times 762 is in less than a second. Working it out on paper takes around 30 seconds. Figuring it out in my head takes more than a minute. What should we conclude from these observations? One possible conclusion is that if I use only my own mind, I arrive at the answer more slowly than if I enlist the help of paper and pencil or pocket calculator. Of course my mind is somehow involved in every case. In the first case, it is my mind that decides which buttons to press, and in which order: and it is also my mind that forms the belief that the numerals that subsequently appear on the calculators screen represent the product of 438 and 762. In the second case, my mind decides to smear graphite onto paper in the following pattern: 438 762 and then thinks that 8 times 2 is sixteen, and decides to smear more graphite as follows:
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438 762 6 and so forth. But in the third case, where I solve the problem with my eyes closed, my mind must actually do the whole calculation, instead of merely deciding which buttons to press, or deciding which single-digit multiplications to perform, which numerals to carry, etc. On this way of viewing things, someone who can do the multiplication in his head has a cognitive ability that someone who cannot do it in his head, but only on paper, or only with a calculator, lacks. But there is another way of viewing things. According to this alternative point of view, there is no cognitive difference between someone who can do long multiplication in his head and someone who can do it only using a calculator, provided that the latter person actually has a calculator at his disposal. The fact that I can come up with the product of 438 and 762 more quickly with a calculator than without one does not show that it takes me longer to come up with the answer using only my own mind than using both my mind and a calculator. It shows that I can come up with the answer more quickly when my mind has a pocket calculator as one of its parts. This is how Clark and Chalmers view things. They think it is a mistake to think that less thought takes place when someone does long multiplication using a calculator than when someone does the same multiplication in his head. In their opinion, at least as much thought takes place in the former case as in 2

the latter. Using a calculator is not a way to avoid thinking. It is a way to think in an extended part of your mind: a part of your mind that exists outside of your natural, biological body. The same mental activity takes place in you when you multiply with a calculator as when you multiply in your head. Its just that a large part of that mental activity takes place in a part of your mind that exists outside of your skull. It takes place in a part of your mind that looks like this:

The idea that the calculator is not just a mental-labor-saving device, but an actual locus of cognitive activity, is typical of active externalism, defined by the so-called extended mind hypothesis: Extended Mind Hypothesis: many of our cognitive states, processes, etc. occur outside of our bodies. According to Clark and Chalmers, calculating with a calculator is just one example of extra-bodily cognition. They think that human beings are capable of all kinds of extended cognition, including extended memory, desire, and language comprehension. Very often, what we would normally describe as a situation in which a person makes use of some external prop to make up for a cognitive deficit, Clark and Chalmers want to describe as a situation in which the person has extended his mind to include a part of his environment in which he can now perform cognitive tasks that he could not perform before. II. Arguments for extended cognition Clark and Chalmers offer a number of arguments for the existence of extended cognition (cognitive processes that occur outside of our bodies), but all of these have the same basic format: E1. If some process that occurs outside of a persons body would be considered part of that persons cognitive life if it occurred inside his body, then that process is part of that persons cognitive life. E2. ________ is a process that occurs outside of a persons body, and that we would consider to be part of that persons cognitive life it it occurred inside his body. E3. Therefore, ________ is a part of that persons cognitive life that occurs outside of his body; i.e., _______ is an example of extended cognition. The Otto/Inga argument is of this form. Otto, who suffers from Alzheimers Disease, carries around a notebook in which he has written down all kinds of useful information that his ailing brain is no longer 3

able to retain. He keeps the notebook handy at all times, and consults it in the same situations in which the healthy Inga consults her native memory. We can imagine that Ottos notebook plays essentially the same role in his life as Ingas memory plays in hers. The point is not that Ottos relationship to his notebook is in all respects identical to Inga's relationship to her memory. Otto accesses the information in his notebook through optical channels, while Inga accesses the information in her memory electrochemically; the notebook is made of paper and ink, while Ingas memory centers are made of protein; etc. The point is just that the notebooks role in Ottos life duplicates the role of Ingas memory in her life in all cognitively relevant respects. Given that this is so, and given that Ingas memory is part of her cognitive life, it follows (from the first premise of the argument outlined above) that Ottos notebook is part of his cognitive life. It is a part of his cognitive life in exactly the same way that Ingas ordinary, natural memory is part of her cognitive life. To get arguments for other forms of extended cognition, we need only identify other external phenomena that play the same roles as corresponding neural phenomena which we generally count as cognitive. The calculator is one example that weve already considered: if I were to do in my head what I do with a pocket-calculator, wed consider what I was doing to be cognitive activity; so (again from E1), when I use a calculator, I am doing mental math. Its just that Im doing it (partly) in the calculator, rather than in my brain. For another example, consider the service that an interpreter provides to his or her client. As it happens, I do not speak or understand Russian at all. But suppose that I were extremely wealthy, and, for some reason, planned to spend a lot of time in Russia. Being a sort of lazy person, instead of learning Russian, I hire a full-time interpreter who follows me wherever I go, and, when necessary, translates other peoples Russian into fluent English for me, and my English into fluent Russian for them. By hiring this interpreter and keeping him with me at all times, do I gain the ability to speak and understand Russian? It seems that I do, if Clark and Chalmers are correct. True, I dont get to understand Russian conversation in real time -- I have to wait for my interpreter to translate the sentences into English. But if my interpreter is very good, the time delay could be very small; and, after all, there could be Russians who are a bit slow, and take a while to understand what people say to them in Russian too. My interpreter could die, or abandon me. But if I hire several backup interpreters in anticipation of this possibility, the odds of my being left interpreterless might be no greater than the odds of an ordinary Russian having a stroke that destroys the language centers of his brain. Etc.1 So it seems that we can imagine a situation in which an interpreter (or team of interpreters) plays essentially the same role in my life as an ordinary Russian speakers neural language centers play in his. Given that we count whats going on in a Russians brain when she comprehends Russian as one of her cognitive processes, we must, by E1, count what goes on in my interpreters brain as one of my cognitive processes. (So this would be a case in which a single process counts as a cognitive process of two people: me, and my interpreter.)
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We could also imagine that translation software becomes so good that I can wear a small hearing-aid type device that converts Russian into English in real time.

III. Taking stock The extended mind hypothesis says that, some, and perhaps many, of your cognitive processes occur at least partly outside of your body. Whether the hypothesis is true depends on what is meant by body. In one sense, my body is just my skin and its contents (or, if you want to be slightly more sophisticated about it: the cluster of cells that trace their origins back to the zygote from which I developed). A modest amount of imagination tells us that there is no principled obstacle to removing my brain from my skull while maintaining its channels of communication with the rest of my body by means of highbandwidth wires, fiber-optic cables, or wireless telecommunication paraphernalia. We could then gradually replace the cells in my remotely-located brain with functionally equivalent computer components, until we are left with a powerful computer that duplicates the input-output architecture of my brain, and that communicates with my spinal cord, optical nerves, etc. by Wi-Fi. Voil: extended cognition. On the other hand, we might define a persons body as the place where his or her cognition takes place. In that case, extended cognition is impossible by definition. The extended mind hypothesis would therefore seem to be either trivially false (given the second definition of body) or philosophically uninteresting (given the first definition). Even so, the debate surrounding the extended mind hypothesis raises some interesting questions. These are not questions about the spatial boundaries of the mind, however, but about its conceptual boundaries. To see what these questions are, we need to take a more critical look at Clarks and Chalmers arguments for extended cognition. IV. A contracted mind? As we have seen, the argument for extended cognition rests on two claims. The first is that we should not apply a double-standard to intra- and extra- cranial processes: if two processes perform equal functions, we cannot say that one of them, but not the other, counts as part of cognition, just because one but not the other other occurs inside someones head. The second claim is that to avoid the doublestandard, we must recognize various extra-cranial processes as cognitive processes. Suppose it comes to light that the female employees of a company are paid less than their male counterparts, despite doing the same work as the men, equally well. This is a clear case of a doublestandard. We could eliminate the double-standard by paying the women more. But we could also eliminate it by paying the men less. Similarly, when it comes to cognitive status, there are two ways to avoid a double-standard for functionally equivalent intra- and extra-cranial processes. We could avoid the double-standard by counting both processes as cognitive. This is the solution that Clark and Chalmers favor. Alternatively, we could avoid the double-standard by counting neither process as cognitive. Why shouldnt we take this approach instead? 5

Clark and Chalmers argue that Ottos notebook is an integral part of Otto's cognitive life, since it functions just like Ingas memory. The notebook simply is memory, realized externally in paper and ink. But one could also argue that Ingas memory is not an integral part of her cognitive life, since it functions just like Ottos notebook. Ingas memory is nothing but a notebook that she carries around in her head. Both positions avoid the double-standard. How do we decide between them? In some ways, it doesnt matter. Consider the case of poor Gustav, who has neither teeth nor dental insurance. Fortunately, he does have a battery-powered blender. With this, he can eat almost anything he wants, albeit in pabulum form. In any situation in which Inga would deploy her teeth, Gustav deploys his blender. Dentally speaking, the blender plays the same role in Gustavs life as Ingas teeth play in hers. Is this a case for extended dentition? Well, you can say what you like. We dont care what the answer is, because our teeth do not play an existentially central role in our lives. Much as we would miss them, we could survive the loss of our teeth. This last consideration suggests a method for deciding how to resolve the double-standard that Clark and Chalmers rightly identify as unsustainable (i.e., whether we should resolve it by way of extension, or by way of contraction). The aspects of cognition that are most important to us are those whose loss we do not consider survivable. These aspects of cognition, I suggest, are mental in the most central psychological sense in of the word. (Of course, if a cognitive process is accompanied by phenomenal consciousness, it can be said to be mental in the equally central sense of being accompanied by phenomenal consciousness.) Consider Victor, who is incapable of performing any save the simplest of arithmetical calculations. Single digit addition and subtraction are his limit. He has the concepts of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, and can tell when he is confronted with a task that requires a specific form of arithmetical reckoning. He just cant carry out the computations. This being so, Victor always carries a pocket calculator, which he uses in any situation in which an ordinary person (like Inga) would perform a computation in her head. Does mental reckoning occur in Victors calculator? According to those who would extend the mind, it does. Certainly we could describe the case in such a way that Victors calculator plays essentially the same role in his life as the neural basis of Ingas arithmetical prowess plays in hers. If we are to count what Inga does when she calculates in her head as a mental process, then we must equally count what happens in Victors calculator as a mental process (or an integral part thereof). By the same token, if we do not count the operations of the calculator as instances of cognition, then we should not count Ingas calculations as part of cognition. Which way should we jump in this case? If survivability of loss is to be our guide, it seems clear that we should go the way of contraction. Losing ones ability to do simple arithmetic would be annoying and inconvenient (although far less so today than before the advent of the pocket calculator), but it is clearly

something that one could survive. This is proven by the fact that Victor could survive the loss of his calculator. How about memory? Could a person survive the loss of that? As we know from our study of personal identity, opinions about this differ, but it seems to me that he could (recall that this was also the opinion of Dainton and Bayne). Those who consider memory to be one of a persons defining characteristics might be inclined to side with Clark and Chalmers, but caution is in order here. Suppose Inga were to lose her memory entirely. Perhaps this loss would result in the non-existence of Inga. But if memory is all that is lost, then surely some cognitive agent would remain, albeit a severely impaired one. There would be a clear sense in which a cognitive system would survive the memory loss, even if Inga as a person did not. Is the survivability test for cognitive status a reasonable one? Here is a possible basis for thinking that it is not: it could be that a cognitive system comprises processes or capacities any one of which the system could survive without. In that case, the survivability test would compel us to say that no process or capacity counts as cognitive, since you (or at rate the cognitive system that you include) could survive the loss of any single process or capacity! But it seems to me that there are certain processes whose losses a cognitive system could not survive. For example, consider occurrent judgement or mental assent. Insofar as he is a cognitive system, Otto could survive the loss of his notebook, and insofar as she is a cognitive system, Inga could survive the loss of her memory. But could Otto and Inga survive the loss of their ability to give mental assent to representations derived from memory and sensation? I can conceive of a mind with no memory, but can I conceive of a mind with no capacity for judgement -- no capacity for accepting information as accurate or inaccurate, true or false? Perhaps; but then the mind of which I am conceiving does not appear to be capable of anything that could really be called cognition. Maybe it would be capable of raw appetition (although this is not clear), and so capable of cognition in an broad sense of this word which covers not only thinking and problem solving, but also desiring, wishing, and lusting. In that case, it seems that the right thing to say would be that a cognitive system is essentially a combination of two capacities: a capacity for making judgements, and a capacity for having desires. Maybe a cognitive system could survive the loss of one of these capacities, but it is hard to see how it could survive the loss of both. Similar comments apply to Victor. Against Clark and Chalmers, one could argue that the genuinely thoughtful part of mathematical reasoning lies not in the computations one performs, but in recognizing a computational problem as such, framing the problem in a way that makes it amenable to computation, and applying the results of the computation. These are clear-cut cases of occurrent judgement. Viewed in this light, the function of mental reckoning, like that of memory, is to supply grist to the cognitive mill. For all of the philosophical debate surrounding it, the extended mind hypothesis should not be considered philosophically controversial. The interesting hypothesis in this neighborhood relates to the 7

conceptual rather than spatial boundaries of cognition. The intriguing possibility is not that we can think outside our skulls: it is that much of what we unreflectively count as thought is really no more than a crutch for or input to thought. When it comes to this possibility, the question is not one of where we are, but what.

M.W.P. 8