“The moral is that when it comes to belief, there is nothing sacred about skull and skin. What makes some information count as a belief is the role it plays, and there is no reason why the relevant role can be played only from inside the body.” Unsettlingly, extending mental processes outside of one’s skull and skin opens them up to third party interference. If we borrow Otto’s journal (of which he is dependent, given his Alzheimer’s and subsequent inability to maintain arbitrary information in his short-term memory) and we then re-write his information without his knowing, we are reshaping his cognitive capacity. In doing this, by Chalmer’s definition of mind, we are also circumventing the other minds problem. We can know exactly what Otto believes (in a simple sense) as Otto believes it, and we are able to act on his surroundings just as easily as he is. This hypothetical carries a faint smell of brainwash, and if we extend Otto’s Journal to apply to our smartphones (as discussed in Chalmer’s TED talk) it doesn’t take much to concoct some dystopian future, full of spontaneous information alteration at the will of your carrier. Without getting carried a way, if we consider technological advances in personal, problem solving technology to be an advance in our own mental capacity, then we have undergone a microevolution over the past few decades (definitely not a Darwinian sense, and greatly restricted in its demographic). This could be supported even by those caught up in the “portability problem,” as we have reduced several instruments worth of cognitive aid, to pocket sized, ever-handy, devices.
I have discussed briefly about the differences and similarities between Inga's memory and Otto's notebook in a previous reply, but I'd like to elaborate on that a little bit more here.
Memory can be omitted, distorted and interfered with. Omitted is probably one of the many sins of memory that we are the most familiar with. At one time or another, everyone has experienced a moment of failed memory retrieval. The information, maybe due to a lack of constant rehearsal, is lost, forgotten.
Distortion happens just about as often as omission, but we are far less aware of it because we are biased to believe that our own memory is truthful. This relates to: 1. the other minds problem: because there is no way for us to know exactly what is going on inside other people's minds, there is no way for us to know whether their memory is any more or less truthful than our own. And 2. when we remember something, it is not encoded frame by frame like Funes, but instead we remember what's most interesting/important to us. We (with the amazing ability of categorization) abstract the relevant information from an experience and store that in the memory, but it's not always foolproof. Most of the time, we see and experience things with a biased perspective. We often don't see the whole picture and every tiny detail in it, because we are humans, not omniscient Gods. This is why our memory, not only is it prone to post-hoc distortions, could also be a piece of distorted reality right from the start, from the moment we store it in our memory.
Distortion is different from interference. By interference, I mean the process of memory recall can be blocked by other, perhaps stronger/more emotional, but irrelevant memory.
Like the authors suggested, the omission of memory is analogous to lost pages or entries in the notebook. The notebook could get brittle over time, and it's understandable that some pages could come loose without us noticing them. Distortion is analogous to the notebook being tampered with. The content could be written over, substituted, or misplaced. Again, in this case, the owner of the notebook is completely unaware of that. Finally, interference is analogous to, for example, some distracting entry on the notebook written in giant upper cases letters and highlighted multiple times just so that it screams at you to catch your attention every time you try to search for something else on the same page. In this sense, the analogy between Inga's memory and Otto's notebook seems logical. However, my main concern about this particular analogy is the fact that Inga's memory recall may not always be successful, even if that piece of memory is stored in her brain. To the contrary, if an entry is recorded in Otto's notebook, Otto will always find it. It might take some time, but he will retrieve that piece of information he needs.
Like a few others have mentioned I find the idea of active externalism to be really interesting, but I'm left unsatisfied as it doesn't explain the hard problem, or hows and whys.
What has stood out to me after reading the comments is that Clark and Chalmers say: "In the cases we describe, by contrast, the relevant external features are active, playing a crucial role in the here-and-now. Because they are coupled with the human organism, they have a direct impact on the organism and on its behavior. In these cases, the relevant parts of the world are in the loop, not dangling at the other end of a long causal chain. Concentrating on this sort of coupling leads us to an active externalism, as opposed to the passive externalism of Putnam and Burge."
From this I understand that they are focussing on feeling within the context of a moment. And I can see how that solves a lot of the issues brought up by others involving mechanism and particularities about recall. I think that a belief is a belief regardless of where it originated or what it has been influenced by. And of course there are different ways to achieve functions within the brain too on a neuronal level (using different drugs for example). We also have internal modulation of our own beliefs - why does the mind need to be within the skull? But how do we define a moment? And it still doesn't answer the hard problem of course.
Clark and Chalmers (1998) put into question the idea that the mind is limited to our skull. The authors propose that minds extend outside our heads, what they call ‘active externalism’, and that the tools we use to cognize are also part of our cognition, because if these tools were ‘in the head, we would have no hesitation in recognizing (it) as part of the cognitive process’. The cognitive system (or mind) becomes a ‘coupled system’, which we can clearly relate to the systems reply to Searle’s CRA. More concretely, the authors suggest that it since we live in interaction with the external world and our cognition is inevitably influenced by it, (some features of) our external world should be ‘part of’ our cognition. Accepting this view also implies making changes to the scientific methodology used to study our ‘internal processes’. More concretely, the authors say that since our beliefs are determined by elements outside our brains, resource-objects on which our beliefs rely, some of these elements must be considered as part of our ‘extended belief’. Some features of these elements are constancy and immediate availability of the resource object, and the automatic endorsement of the information it conveys. The main argument is that since our cognition has resources outside the brain, these resources must be part of cognition and thus that ‘processing’ takes place in the environment.
The article doesn’t convince me at all, and I think it misses the opportunity to do so because it maintains a great confusion on what cognition is. The words ‘belief system’, ‘beliefs’, ‘mental states’ and ‘cognition’ are used without distinction. I think cognition is doubtless determined by our environment and oriented to it, but regardless of how many tools we use to complement it, it remains complementation of a process that takes place in our heads.
The example given to illustrate their argument demonstrates the great confusion they sustain about the meaning of cognition which they do not bother specifying. Otto and Inga both have the same desire and the same behavior, what differentiates them is the means by which they complete their action, Inga accesses the information thanks to her memory, while Otto does it thanks to his notebook. The authors say that Inga had the belief (about the museum’s address) before she made it conscious and therefore we must say it is also the case for Otto, even though his mechanism for retrieving it is different. First, to say that you can have a belief without being conscious of it, you must have an unclear definition of the term, as ‘having a belief’ is a conscious mental state which Inga did not have before she thought of the address, the most we can say is that the information was contained somewhere in her brain. Second, I think they both had beliefs before retrieving the info, namely about their memory and notebook’s reliability, which means there is some cognition in both cases. However, it makes no sense to say that the notebook is part of the (extended) mind; the place where the information lies is not cognitive, the process of accessing it is, and that process occurs, in both cases, in the brain. The confusion is due to the fact that they characterize beliefs 'by their explanatory roles’ and since a belief is a mental state, anything that plays a role in this belief is cognitive.
I found this article very interesting especially when discussing the person using a notebook as external memory. I have not yet decided how I feel about the concept of externalism mainly because I thought of computers being a part of our cognitive abilities. This part of it made me think twice about the veracity of this argument. How do external cognitive systems affect us?
Well obviously they are capable of doing things we cannot or they can do them much quicker, like arithmetic for example. What about all the other capabilities a computer has? Dia mentioned earlier that this article reminded her very much of Searle's Chinese Room article and I agree that it sort of proposes a similar concept. Searle does not really understand Chinese himself but the entire room (all the symbols and resources) do understand it according to the systems reply. Does that mean extended cognition could allow us to do things we are not even capable of understanding? If I am using my computer, does that mean my extended cognition involves the internet? Or just what I am using? It can't be just what I am using because according to the example with the old man with Alzheimer's, he might not necessarily know what is in his notebook. He thinks it probably contains medication regimens and phone numbers/names, but what about the addresses of points of interest? How would he know the museum's address was contained in the book? Unless he already knows the categories of the content in his book, his extended cognition includes things he is not even aware of. One could say that even though we are connected to the internet, it's potential information. Information we have access to but we haven't seen yet. Fine but what if we don't understand it? An article about quantum physics for example? That cannot possibly constitute as external cognition if we cannot even process it.
I understand the concept of active externalism, but I only agree with the fact that everything we interact with takes part in our cognition but not with idea that the outside world becomes our cognition, in a sense, which is proclaimed by Clark and Chalmers see it. You can extend your cognition outside of your head since you are interacting with the outside world; manipulating, learning, and categorizing but it doesn’t mean the what you are interacting is your cognition. I believe it takes part in the way we cognise since our thoughts and beliefs are well known to be influenced by our teachings, culture and experiences; it shapes our cognizing and what we cognize about.
“By embracing an active externalism, we allow a more natural explanation of all sorts of actions.”
I also don’t believe that their meaning of active externalism allows for a more natural and simple explanations of our actions, or that explaining them with inputs and outputs will just make it more complex. What I think makes it a simpler explanation is the fact that we can talk about the interaction of our cognition with the objects or people, rather then seperate ourselves from the world by talking in inputs and outputs but that still doesn’t mean that the outside world is part of our cognition even if it certainly takes part in it.
“Still, mere contingency of coupling does not rule out cognitive status. In the distant future we may be able to plug various modules into our brain to help us out: a module for extra short-term memory when we need it, for example”
This “distant future” Chalmers refers to may not be so distant at all. Pharmaceutical drugs, such as stimulants prescribed for deficits in attention capacity could be used in the same argument. The chemical changes induced in the brain produce heightened processing capacities. I cannot imagine anyone asserting that thee mental states are not cognition, even though the person may not choose to take the medication at all times or the medication may be unavailable at time. The uncoupling seems not to be an issue.
While I agree wholeheartedly with Chalmers in his argument for externalized cognition, I take issue with his assertion that this makes a significant difference to the methodology of scientific investigation. It seems to be a matter of terminology, especially when he says, “social activity might be reconceived as less akin to communication and action, and as more akin to thought.” Would this really change the way we discuss social activity? Would we really dismiss any notions of the self and internalized processes? Take for example his analogy of the anatomy of fish and how the interaction with the environment produces swimming. I don’t think that referring to the water and the fish as part of the same entity would affect the methodology or study of the fish anatomy. In cognitive science and psychology for that matter, the environment is already studied and considered in relation to the mind.
11a. “One might worry that Otto's access to his notebook in fact comes and goes. He showers without the notebook, for example, and he cannot read it when it is dark. 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.”
I was one of those readers who was worrying about Otto’s access to his notebook, but I can see the logic of C & C’s argument that there are times when Inga is not ‘online’ yet her belief remains—in other words, I think, our beliefs are always inexistence, but whether or not we are feeling them at a given moment in time can change whether we are asleep, drunk, or misplaced a notebook. As the authors say, what counts is that the information is easily available when needed. However, this is a point that I’m not sure fits in with our definition of physical implementation of mental states: Otto’s notebook is not part of his brain, yet the physical implementation of mental states means that a specific part of the brain is being activated because of specific informational input. Otto has his beliefs constantly, but this does not mean his mind is extended to wherever his notebook is. His notebook might provide input to ‘jog’ his belief, if you would, but it is not equitable to having a second brain or even part of a brain.
The focal question driving this essay is whether what we call "mind" ends within our scull or whether our "mind" can exist someone external to us. The classic example developed by Clark and Chalmers is the idea that a notebook is in someway a placeholder for aspects of our mind. To further develop this idea, Clark and Chalmers give the example of two people, one with normal memory function and another with Alzheimer's. They both want to go to an exhibit help at a particular museum. While the person with normal memory will retrieve their belief about where the museum is from their brain/head, the person with Alzheimer's must refer to a notebook that they use as a memory aid. The idea is that the information retrieval, whether occurring at a neural retrieval of a memory or whether written out in the notebook is the same thing. From here, Clark and Chalmer's conjectures that the "mind" can extends beyond the confinement of the brain/nervous system. As discussed in class, trying to fit feeling into this model becomes problematic. Intuitively, it doesn't make sense to say that feeling can exist on external, inert objects - they happen internally and are particular to the person feeling them. How are we then to understand external resources that clearly aid us in our cognitive functioning (calculators, pen and paper, machine, etc)? It appears that the authors have an unclear definition of "mind" therefore conflating too many things for their argument to hold. If we define mind as thinking, and thinking is just feeling, then we are left to conclude that "mind"/thinking/feeling does in fact exist solely within the subject. What Clark and Chalmers characterize as "external mind" is perhaps then just computational aspects of cognition that are facilitated when done outside one's head.
I watched the TED talk to get a better understanding of what was meant by an Extended Mind. This video really clarified the points I was skeptical about while reading the paper. The most convincing example was his explanation of how an iPhone acts as an extended mind. The iPhone takes over some of the functions that my brain can do (i.e. stores phone numbers for example) and hence, becomes an extension of my mind.
Nevertheless, I still questioned his explanation of the philosophical mind/brain problem. The latter deals with the nature of consciousness and the mind as well as its relationship to the brain. Chalmers claims that the iPhone becomes part of my mind but does this imply that feeling and emotion arise from the iPhone as well? To what extent is the iPhone included as part of the mind? Is it purely for storage use or can it actually influence my doings and how I feel about myself? Moreover, am “I” extended into the iPhone? Can the iPhone act on my behalf? It seems rather strange to argue that I am extended into the phone or that the phone can act on my behalf without my immediate relation to it.
To further elaborate on my comment, although the iPhone is now replacing many aspects of my cognition (remembering phone numbers), this does not mean that using an iPhone feels the same way as it does to cognize. I agree with Chalmers when he says that the mind could potentially not be in the brain because what we think and feel is constantly influenced by our surroundings. However, this does not mean that what’s around us IS our mind…
To this, Chalmers’ might argue that I am confusing cognition with consciousness; cognition can be part of the mind without cognitive processes being conscious (i.e. linguistic abilities, skill acquisition, memory retrieval). In that sense, I may be wrong. In the same way that we don’t consciously feel ourselves acquiring skills, we also don’t feel when our minds have extended to our surroundings.
“The moral is that when it comes to belief, there is nothing sacred about skull and skin. What makes some information count as a belief is the role it plays, and there is no reason why the relevant role can be played only from inside the body.”
ReplyDeleteUnsettlingly, extending mental processes outside of one’s skull and skin opens them up to third party interference. If we borrow Otto’s journal (of which he is dependent, given his Alzheimer’s and subsequent inability to maintain arbitrary information in his short-term memory) and we then re-write his information without his knowing, we are reshaping his cognitive capacity. In doing this, by Chalmer’s definition of mind, we are also circumventing the other minds problem. We can know exactly what Otto believes (in a simple sense) as Otto believes it, and we are able to act on his surroundings just as easily as he is. This hypothetical carries a faint smell of brainwash, and if we extend Otto’s Journal to apply to our smartphones (as discussed in Chalmer’s TED talk) it doesn’t take much to concoct some dystopian future, full of spontaneous information alteration at the will of your carrier.
Without getting carried a way, if we consider technological advances in personal, problem solving technology to be an advance in our own mental capacity, then we have undergone a microevolution over the past few decades (definitely not a Darwinian sense, and greatly restricted in its demographic). This could be supported even by those caught up in the “portability problem,” as we have reduced several instruments worth of cognitive aid, to pocket sized, ever-handy, devices.
I have discussed briefly about the differences and similarities between Inga's memory and Otto's notebook in a previous reply, but I'd like to elaborate on that a little bit more here.
ReplyDeleteMemory can be omitted, distorted and interfered with.
Omitted is probably one of the many sins of memory that we are the most familiar with. At one time or another, everyone has experienced a moment of failed memory retrieval. The information, maybe due to a lack of constant rehearsal, is lost, forgotten.
Distortion happens just about as often as omission, but we are far less aware of it because we are biased to believe that our own memory is truthful. This relates to: 1. the other minds problem: because there is no way for us to know exactly what is going on inside other people's minds, there is no way for us to know whether their memory is any more or less truthful than our own. And 2. when we remember something, it is not encoded frame by frame like Funes, but instead we remember what's most interesting/important to us. We (with the amazing ability of categorization) abstract the relevant information from an experience and store that in the memory, but it's not always foolproof. Most of the time, we see and experience things with a biased perspective. We often don't see the whole picture and every tiny detail in it, because we are humans, not omniscient Gods. This is why our memory, not only is it prone to post-hoc distortions, could also be a piece of distorted reality right from the start, from the moment we store it in our memory.
Distortion is different from interference. By interference, I mean the process of memory recall can be blocked by other, perhaps stronger/more emotional, but irrelevant memory.
Like the authors suggested, the omission of memory is analogous to lost pages or entries in the notebook. The notebook could get brittle over time, and it's understandable that some pages could come loose without us noticing them. Distortion is analogous to the notebook being tampered with. The content could be written over, substituted, or misplaced. Again, in this case, the owner of the notebook is completely unaware of that. Finally, interference is analogous to, for example, some distracting entry on the notebook written in giant upper cases letters and highlighted multiple times just so that it screams at you to catch your attention every time you try to search for something else on the same page.
In this sense, the analogy between Inga's memory and Otto's notebook seems logical. However, my main concern about this particular analogy is the fact that Inga's memory recall may not always be successful, even if that piece of memory is stored in her brain. To the contrary, if an entry is recorded in Otto's notebook, Otto will always find it. It might take some time, but he will retrieve that piece of information he needs.
Like a few others have mentioned I find the idea of active externalism to be really interesting, but I'm left unsatisfied as it doesn't explain the hard problem, or hows and whys.
ReplyDeleteWhat has stood out to me after reading the comments is that Clark and Chalmers say:
"In the cases we describe, by contrast, the relevant external features are active, playing a crucial role in the here-and-now. Because they are coupled with the human organism, they have a direct impact on the organism and on its behavior. In these cases, the relevant parts of the world are in the loop, not dangling at the other end of a long causal chain. Concentrating on this sort of coupling leads us to an active externalism, as opposed to the passive externalism of Putnam and Burge."
From this I understand that they are focussing on feeling within the context of a moment. And I can see how that solves a lot of the issues brought up by others involving mechanism and particularities about recall. I think that a belief is a belief regardless of where it originated or what it has been influenced by. And of course there are different ways to achieve functions within the brain too on a neuronal level (using different drugs for example). We also have internal modulation of our own beliefs - why does the mind need to be within the skull? But how do we define a moment? And it still doesn't answer the hard problem of course.
Clark and Chalmers (1998) put into question the idea that the mind is limited to our skull. The authors propose that minds extend outside our heads, what they call ‘active externalism’, and that the tools we use to cognize are also part of our cognition, because if these tools were ‘in the head, we would have no hesitation in recognizing (it) as part of the cognitive process’. The cognitive system (or mind) becomes a ‘coupled system’, which we can clearly relate to the systems reply to Searle’s CRA. More concretely, the authors suggest that it since we live in interaction with the external world and our cognition is inevitably influenced by it, (some features of) our external world should be ‘part of’ our cognition. Accepting this view also implies making changes to the scientific methodology used to study our ‘internal processes’. More concretely, the authors say that since our beliefs are determined by elements outside our brains, resource-objects on which our beliefs rely, some of these elements must be considered as part of our ‘extended belief’. Some features of these elements are constancy and immediate availability of the resource object, and the automatic endorsement of the information it conveys. The main argument is that since our cognition has resources outside the brain, these resources must be part of cognition and thus that ‘processing’ takes place in the environment.
ReplyDeleteThe article doesn’t convince me at all, and I think it misses the opportunity to do so because it maintains a great confusion on what cognition is. The words ‘belief system’, ‘beliefs’, ‘mental states’ and ‘cognition’ are used without distinction. I think cognition is doubtless determined by our environment and oriented to it, but regardless of how many tools we use to complement it, it remains complementation of a process that takes place in our heads.
The example given to illustrate their argument demonstrates the great confusion they sustain about the meaning of cognition which they do not bother specifying. Otto and Inga both have the same desire and the same behavior, what differentiates them is the means by which they complete their action, Inga accesses the information thanks to her memory, while Otto does it thanks to his notebook. The authors say that Inga had the belief (about the museum’s address) before she made it conscious and therefore we must say it is also the case for Otto, even though his mechanism for retrieving it is different. First, to say that you can have a belief without being conscious of it, you must have an unclear definition of the term, as ‘having a belief’ is a conscious mental state which Inga did not have before she thought of the address, the most we can say is that the information was contained somewhere in her brain. Second, I think they both had beliefs before retrieving the info, namely about their memory and notebook’s reliability, which means there is some cognition in both cases. However, it makes no sense to say that the notebook is part of the (extended) mind; the place where the information lies is not cognitive, the process of accessing it is, and that process occurs, in both cases, in the brain. The confusion is due to the fact that they characterize beliefs 'by their explanatory roles’ and since a belief is a mental state, anything that plays a role in this belief is cognitive.
ReplyDeleteI found this article very interesting especially when discussing the person using a notebook as external memory. I have not yet decided how I feel about the concept of externalism mainly because I thought of computers being a part of our cognitive abilities. This part of it made me think twice about the veracity of this argument. How do external cognitive systems affect us?
ReplyDeleteWell obviously they are capable of doing things we cannot or they can do them much quicker, like arithmetic for example. What about all the other capabilities a computer has? Dia mentioned earlier that this article reminded her very much of Searle's Chinese Room article and I agree that it sort of proposes a similar concept. Searle does not really understand Chinese himself but the entire room (all the symbols and resources) do understand it according to the systems reply. Does that mean extended cognition could allow us to do things we are not even capable of understanding? If I am using my computer, does that mean my extended cognition involves the internet? Or just what I am using? It can't be just what I am using because according to the example with the old man with Alzheimer's, he might not necessarily know what is in his notebook. He thinks it probably contains medication regimens and phone numbers/names, but what about the addresses of points of interest? How would he know the museum's address was contained in the book? Unless he already knows the categories of the content in his book, his extended cognition includes things he is not even aware of. One could say that even though we are connected to the internet, it's potential information. Information we have access to but we haven't seen yet. Fine but what if we don't understand it? An article about quantum physics for example? That cannot possibly constitute as external cognition if we cannot even process it.
“cognition ain’t (all) in the head.”
ReplyDeleteI understand the concept of active externalism, but I only agree with the fact that everything we interact with takes part in our cognition but not with idea that the outside world becomes our cognition, in a sense, which is proclaimed by Clark and Chalmers see it. You can extend your cognition outside of your head since you are interacting with the outside world; manipulating, learning, and categorizing but it doesn’t mean the what you are interacting is your cognition. I believe it takes part in the way we cognise since our thoughts and beliefs are well known to be influenced by our teachings, culture and experiences; it shapes our cognizing and what we cognize about.
“By embracing an active externalism, we allow a more natural explanation of all sorts of actions.”
I also don’t believe that their meaning of active externalism allows for a more natural and simple explanations of our actions, or that explaining them with inputs and outputs will just make it more complex. What I think makes it a simpler explanation is the fact that we can talk about the interaction of our cognition with the objects or people, rather then seperate ourselves from the world by talking in inputs and outputs but that still doesn’t mean that the outside world is part of our cognition even if it certainly takes part in it.
“Still, mere contingency of coupling does not rule out cognitive status. In the distant future we may be able to plug various modules into our brain to help us out: a module for extra short-term memory when we need it, for example”
ReplyDeleteThis “distant future” Chalmers refers to may not be so distant at all. Pharmaceutical drugs, such as stimulants prescribed for deficits in attention capacity could be used in the same argument. The chemical changes induced in the brain produce heightened processing capacities. I cannot imagine anyone asserting that thee mental states are not cognition, even though the person may not choose to take the medication at all times or the medication may be unavailable at time. The uncoupling seems not to be an issue.
While I agree wholeheartedly with Chalmers in his argument for externalized cognition, I take issue with his assertion that this makes a significant difference to the methodology of scientific investigation. It seems to be a matter of terminology, especially when he says, “social activity might be reconceived as less akin to communication and action, and as more akin to thought.” Would this really change the way we discuss social activity? Would we really dismiss any notions of the self and internalized processes? Take for example his analogy of the anatomy of fish and how the interaction with the environment produces swimming. I don’t think that referring to the water and the fish as part of the same entity would affect the methodology or study of the fish anatomy. In cognitive science and psychology for that matter, the environment is already studied and considered in relation to the mind.
11a.
ReplyDelete“One might worry that Otto's access to his notebook in fact comes and goes. He showers without the notebook, for example, and he cannot read it when it is dark. 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.”
I was one of those readers who was worrying about Otto’s access to his notebook, but I can see the logic of C & C’s argument that there are times when Inga is not ‘online’ yet her belief remains—in other words, I think, our beliefs are always inexistence, but whether or not we are feeling them at a given moment in time can change whether we are asleep, drunk, or misplaced a notebook. As the authors say, what counts is that the information is easily available when needed. However, this is a point that I’m not sure fits in with our definition of physical implementation of mental states: Otto’s notebook is not part of his brain, yet the physical implementation of mental states means that a specific part of the brain is being activated because of specific informational input. Otto has his beliefs constantly, but this does not mean his mind is extended to wherever his notebook is. His notebook might provide input to ‘jog’ his belief, if you would, but it is not equitable to having a second brain or even part of a brain.
The focal question driving this essay is whether what we call "mind" ends within our scull or whether our "mind" can exist someone external to us. The classic example developed by Clark and Chalmers is the idea that a notebook is in someway a placeholder for aspects of our mind. To further develop this idea, Clark and Chalmers give the example of two people, one with normal memory function and another with Alzheimer's. They both want to go to an exhibit help at a particular museum. While the person with normal memory will retrieve their belief about where the museum is from their brain/head, the person with Alzheimer's must refer to a notebook that they use as a memory aid. The idea is that the information retrieval, whether occurring at a neural retrieval of a memory or whether written out in the notebook is the same thing. From here, Clark and Chalmer's conjectures that the "mind" can extends beyond the confinement of the brain/nervous system. As discussed in class, trying to fit feeling into this model becomes problematic. Intuitively, it doesn't make sense to say that feeling can exist on external, inert objects - they happen internally and are particular to the person feeling them. How are we then to understand external resources that clearly aid us in our cognitive functioning (calculators, pen and paper, machine, etc)? It appears that the authors have an unclear definition of "mind" therefore conflating too many things for their argument to hold. If we define mind as thinking, and thinking is just feeling, then we are left to conclude that "mind"/thinking/feeling does in fact exist solely within the subject. What Clark and Chalmers characterize as "external mind" is perhaps then just computational aspects of cognition that are facilitated when done outside one's head.
ReplyDeleteI watched the TED talk to get a better understanding of what was meant by an Extended Mind. This video really clarified the points I was skeptical about while reading the paper. The most convincing example was his explanation of how an iPhone acts as an extended mind. The iPhone takes over some of the functions that my brain can do (i.e. stores phone numbers for example) and hence, becomes an extension of my mind.
ReplyDeleteNevertheless, I still questioned his explanation of the philosophical mind/brain problem. The latter deals with the nature of consciousness and the mind as well as its relationship to the brain. Chalmers claims that the iPhone becomes part of my mind but does this imply that feeling and emotion arise from the iPhone as well? To what extent is the iPhone included as part of the mind? Is it purely for storage use or can it actually influence my doings and how I feel about myself? Moreover, am “I” extended into the iPhone? Can the iPhone act on my behalf? It seems rather strange to argue that I am extended into the phone or that the phone can act on my behalf without my immediate relation to it.
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ReplyDeleteTo further elaborate on my comment, although the iPhone is now replacing many aspects of my cognition (remembering phone numbers), this does not mean that using an iPhone feels the same way as it does to cognize. I agree with Chalmers when he says that the mind could potentially not be in the brain because what we think and feel is constantly influenced by our surroundings. However, this does not mean that what’s around us IS our mind…
ReplyDeleteTo this, Chalmers’ might argue that I am confusing cognition with consciousness; cognition can be part of the mind without cognitive processes being conscious (i.e. linguistic abilities, skill acquisition, memory retrieval). In that sense, I may be wrong. In the same way that we don’t consciously feel ourselves acquiring skills, we also don’t feel when our minds have extended to our surroundings.