I take issue with the idea of extended mind since it seems to conflate cognizing with sensorimotor capacity, i.e., affordances. This point was mentioned in the reading for 11b. Clark and Chalmers assert an “active externalism, based on the active role of the environment in driving cognitive processes”. This supposed active role of the environment is just affordances. It is plainly obvious that we can interact with things. The fact that we can interact with things in the environment, e.g., a chair affords “sittability”, does not imply that this interaction is cognizing. When I use a calculator, the calculator is not thinking. I am. I am simply using the calculator for what it affords. And what it affords is arithmetic calculation that is fundamentally dependent on my sensorimotor movements with the calculator, i.e., sensory input and output; as the reading in 11b puts it, “skin and in”. I think that the problematic underlying assumption driving Clark and Chalmers’ argument is their assertion that “not every cognitive process ... is a conscious process”. This is plainly at odds with what was presented in the reading in 11b, which I agree with: unconscious brain states are not mental. Clark and Chalmers seem to be conflating brain states with mental states. They completely miss what is most plainly obvious: feeling. In the article, they ostensibly dismiss feeling as irrelevant phenomenology. If feeling is not a defining feature of mental states, then I don’t know what is. By taking mental states are encompassing even unconscious brain states, the argument for extended mind is nonsense on stilts.
The idea put forth by Chalmers and Clark is very interesting – that cognition transcends brain processes and is distributed throughout the environment. This notion has especially proven true with the advent of the iPhone, with which we all rely on for memory, spatial navigation, communication, search engine, etc. While watching Chalmers’ TedTalk, I was reminded of an app called Timeless that I had recently come across. It was designed to help Alzheimer’s patients with facial recognition, where, given a photo of a person, the app compares it with a database of pre-enrolled photos to identify who the person is. In this way, the app serves as both the eyes with which the individual uses to see, and the retrieval mechanism, with which the individual actively recognizes. With respect to the article, the app, along with many other features of the iPhone, can replace, aid or even offload the burden of certain cognitive tasks that the deteriorating mind would be unable to accomplish otherwise. It is truly fascinating to think how advancing technology will change how we think and cognize.
iPhones and Otto’s notebook may seem convincing of the “Extended Mind Thesis”; however, the thesis totally neglects the “feeling” aspect of cognition. All these examples are merely extensions of our capacity to do – yet the capacity to feel is not extended to our iPhones nor to Otto’s notebook. These tools to enhance cognitive capacities do not generate an “extended cognition”, since “feeling” is still confined to the individual (i.e. iPhone operator, Otto). Are Chalmers and Clark saying that “feeling” extends beyond the feeler and is distributed to these “mind extenders”?
I have two issues with the externalism/outside of skin and skull approach 1. The tool I am using for my memory, like Otto’s notebook, is simply a tool in the cognitive process, but it is not an integral part of the process. 2. The issue of where our cognition ends and where the environment begins seems like an extension of the counter argument of the problem of looking for cognition in single neurons – obviously, no single cell is cognizing. But to continue to extend the system outward seems odd, because we shouldn’t assume that any “thing” as an individual (a single neuron, a notebook, a chair) is cognizing alone. 2b. The contribution made by the notebook or the chair does not feel the same to me as the contribution of the individual neuron – I don’t need a notebook to hold my information, but it helps, while I need the neurons to encode.
I am intrigued by the idea that it may be possible that our brain is also an external device which is why Fodor suggested that we move away from studying the mind through the brain. The way our smartphone is not our mind, our brain is also not our mind. I feel that there isn't a special type of physical states that allows us to have felt states. If the brain is not the physical object which we can use to understand the felt state, how can we study the felt state?
RE: Extended Cognition I was very intrigued by the three cases of human problem-solving. The question of how much cognition is present in these cases really makes you think. I tried to imagine myself performing all three tasks and how much time each would take as well as how much thinking would go into each situation. The first would definitely take the most time while the second I think would reduce the amount of time and thinking significantly. It’s hard to imagine the third scenario but I imagine it will be just as fast if not faster than the second situation. The idea of having so many environmental supports really makes me question how cognitions in humans would change accordingly. Would it be much faster?
I liked the author’s use of language as an example of how are cognitive processes are extended into the world. Perhaps language evolved because it gives the advantage of actively extending our cognitive processes and coupling them to increase efficiency, speed and expand our performance capacity through the interaction of many people’s brain power compared to just an individual’s. Its fascinating to frame language as this mode of extending our cognition and linking our mental process with others to enhance this unique type of social cooperation.
I liked the comparison between the man who writes everything in his book and the woman who stores the information in her mind and how there are parallels between how they both access the information. The discussion of what constitutes the mind (as the examples rely systematically more on hardware) was reminiscent of the distinctions between humans and robots from the Cuddly AI reading. But I have difficulty with agreeing that removing some feature of the environment has the same effect as removing some part of the brain. The idea here is sound, that cognition, and being, is a complex interaction of environment and internal structures functioning to produce a reality that is both felt internally and observed externally. Clark and Chalmers state that the idea of active externalism may be unpalatable because of the conflation of cognition with consciousness and the whimsicality of thinking of consciousness as spreading beyond the body. But is cognition is consciousness is feeling then is the extended mind argument wrong because not all the corresponding parts are capable of feeling?
"...in seeing cognition as extended one is not merely making a terminological decision; it makes a significant difference to the methodology of scientific investigation."
This article was a very interesting challenge to my previous understanding of the mind and self. In general, we are inclined to have quite rigid views on where the mind begins and where it ends but challenging and redefining these boundaries (to a certain extent) may provide a useful framework for the direction of future cognitive research. However, defining cognition too broadly runs the risk of preventing progress towards elucidating the causal mechanism underlying our doing capacity. Clark & Chalmers are perhaps too vague when it comes to drawing a distinction between the essence of cognition and tools/technologies capable of extending it (something that the next article does a really effective job of addressing).
"The real moral of portability intuition is that for coupled systems to be relevant to the core of cognition, reliable coupling is required."
I liked Clark & Chalmers idea about becoming more vulnerable when something prevents us from accessing certain parts of our cognition (either internally or externally). But I think they overreach in regards to the parallels they try to draw between Inga and Otto. Although both Inga and Otto may feel like they know the museum’s location after retrieving this information, Otto’s feeling is associated with physically having to flip through a notebook and sift through different notes before finding the relevant one. I think at best, only metaphorical links can be drawn between Otto finding a page in his notebook vs Inga’s process of memory retrieval.
When reading about the extended mind (11a) for the first time I found it peculiar that the Clark and Chalmers ignored the hard problem. This was pointed out in class; however, I wondered if the hard problem was ignored because the authors had come to terms with its insolubility and were only interested in elucidating the easy problem which concerns itself with only what cognition does. And the easy problem is what Turing concerned himself with.
For example, Clark and Chalmers talk about the person with Alzheimer's using a notebook instead of memory. This sounds like something Turing would concern himself with because it discusses what cognition does and is implementation independent-- the person with Alzheimer's who has a notebook instead of encephalized memory can hypothetically produce the same output as someone with encephalized memory.
The insight of the authors is quite interesting, but it is hard to see where they set their limits. I think most people are instinctively willing to accept the idea that a text for example might be a sort of extension of one's mind, in that it transmits the felt states of one individual to another. However, i strongly disagree with the view that the text itself has a felt state (I am not completely sure of what Chalmers would say about this, but if he refuses to attribute felt states to a zombie identical to himself, i assume he would do the same about this notebook).
I think there's a difference of extension of mind vs. brainstorming. You're sharing ideas and using what other people think, so you can incorporate that into your thoughts/cognitive resources. There are often times when you're brainstorming with people and they disagree with you or you don't understand each other. That'd be like saying that part of your mind is battling with another part of your mind, which isn't unfound, but you'll still always know what your mind means, whereas in brainstorming sessions, you might not know what another person means. I just really do not agree with the idea of an extended mind.
At one point, the authors seem to suggest that the brain develops in a way that complements its external environment. It almost sounds like they are suggesting something similar to predetermination…? I really doubt that this is the case, but I also feel like if we are to play around with this idea, then you might as well toss in the question of freewill. Are we just sitting in society as a cog in the machine? Was the way we think and what we do now just formed by our environment and that's how we ended up where we are? I don’t agree with this, but what are your thoughts?
I think it is unfeasible to consider Otto and Inga on the same playing field. Otto only knows that he writes things down because he needs to in order to function everyday. Isn’t this "belief" just that Otto believes that his notebook has information for him, not where he believes the museum is? I understand that memory isn’t always reliable, as with the notebook (because he might lose it or something), but I would not go so far to equate these things.
Although I agree that the environment plays a crucial role in cognitive processing, and with Chalmers and Clark’s concepts of coupled systems and active externalism, I think their proposal of “extended cognition” is misguided. The main problem I have is that just because something ‘X’ helps shape the the way something ‘Y' happens, doesn’t mean that 'X' should be included in the definition of 'Y'. So, for person Nancy, even if some external force played a crucial role in directing my cognitive processes by “constraining the evolution and development of cognition” this doesn’t entail that those external forces actually take part in the doing of my cognitive processing. I think Chalmers has the right motivations, but shouldn’t employ “extended cognition” in the literal sense that some other external process/ thing can take part in some entity’s cognitive processing, and rather could use “extended cognition” more metaphorically, to describe how the system as a whole interacts and distributes the work of the cognition, to arrive at some end point, or complete some function..etc. By this view, we are still investigating how the ‘epistemic credit’ is spread across the system as a whole, and external processes are considered just as important as internal processes to cognition, we just aren’t claiming that the external process actually takes part in the entity's cognitive processing.
I reasoned that Chalmer’s ‘Extended Cognition’ doesn’t work, and came to my opinion on the matter, by analogizing the arguments to a jazz band, where playing is akin to cognitive processing. Let’s say I, Nancy, am the piano player and am comping (accompanying) for John's, the bass player, solo. How I comp completely relies on what John plays. If John decides to play a modal note sequence, I will follow up with a modal chord. Further, the way I play in reaction to John’s solo will direct the progression of his playing. So, the way the other person plays, and the way our playing interacts, completely shapes each other’s playing as well as the collective musical outcome. In this situation, although John is a crucial factor to what I play on the piano, you wouldn’t say that John actually takes part in pressing the keys of the piano, or that I am actually plucking the strings of his bass, but you could say that his string plucking and my key pressing interact to collectively produce the music the audience hears. Now, if we consider a non living thing, like sheet music, the analogy still applies. The sheet music is helping me remember, and directing, what I have to play, but the sheet music doesn’t press the keys of the piano with me. With this example it is obvious that John and the sheet music wouldn’t exactly ‘feel' what I ‘feel’ in some moment of playing, as the sheet music isn't ‘playing’ at all, and John is playing something different all together! This is important to the concept of ‘extended cognition' as cognition implies feeling, so in this case John and the sheet music would have to share my feeling state, which is not the case, to be true extensions.
I take issue with the idea of extended mind since it seems to conflate cognizing with sensorimotor capacity, i.e., affordances. This point was mentioned in the reading for 11b. Clark and Chalmers assert an “active externalism, based on the active role of the environment in driving cognitive processes”. This supposed active role of the environment is just affordances. It is plainly obvious that we can interact with things. The fact that we can interact with things in the environment, e.g., a chair affords “sittability”, does not imply that this interaction is cognizing. When I use a calculator, the calculator is not thinking. I am. I am simply using the calculator for what it affords. And what it affords is arithmetic calculation that is fundamentally dependent on my sensorimotor movements with the calculator, i.e., sensory input and output; as the reading in 11b puts it, “skin and in”. I think that the problematic underlying assumption driving Clark and Chalmers’ argument is their assertion that “not every cognitive process ... is a conscious process”. This is plainly at odds with what was presented in the reading in 11b, which I agree with: unconscious brain states are not mental. Clark and Chalmers seem to be conflating brain states with mental states. They completely miss what is most plainly obvious: feeling. In the article, they ostensibly dismiss feeling as irrelevant phenomenology. If feeling is not a defining feature of mental states, then I don’t know what is. By taking mental states are encompassing even unconscious brain states, the argument for extended mind is nonsense on stilts.
ReplyDeleteThe idea put forth by Chalmers and Clark is very interesting – that cognition transcends brain processes and is distributed throughout the environment. This notion has especially proven true with the advent of the iPhone, with which we all rely on for memory, spatial navigation, communication, search engine, etc. While watching Chalmers’ TedTalk, I was reminded of an app called Timeless that I had recently come across. It was designed to help Alzheimer’s patients with facial recognition, where, given a photo of a person, the app compares it with a database of pre-enrolled photos to identify who the person is. In this way, the app serves as both the eyes with which the individual uses to see, and the retrieval mechanism, with which the individual actively recognizes. With respect to the article, the app, along with many other features of the iPhone, can replace, aid or even offload the burden of certain cognitive tasks that the deteriorating mind would be unable to accomplish otherwise. It is truly fascinating to think how advancing technology will change how we think and cognize.
ReplyDeleteiPhones and Otto’s notebook may seem convincing of the “Extended Mind Thesis”; however, the thesis totally neglects the “feeling” aspect of cognition. All these examples are merely extensions of our capacity to do – yet the capacity to feel is not extended to our iPhones nor to Otto’s notebook. These tools to enhance cognitive capacities do not generate an “extended cognition”, since “feeling” is still confined to the individual (i.e. iPhone operator, Otto). Are Chalmers and Clark saying that “feeling” extends beyond the feeler and is distributed to these “mind extenders”?
I have two issues with the externalism/outside of skin and skull approach
ReplyDelete1. The tool I am using for my memory, like Otto’s notebook, is simply a tool in the cognitive process, but it is not an integral part of the process.
2. The issue of where our cognition ends and where the environment begins seems like an extension of the counter argument of the problem of looking for cognition in single neurons – obviously, no single cell is cognizing. But to continue to extend the system outward seems odd, because we shouldn’t assume that any “thing” as an individual (a single neuron, a notebook, a chair) is cognizing alone.
2b. The contribution made by the notebook or the chair does not feel the same to me as the contribution of the individual neuron – I don’t need a notebook to hold my information, but it helps, while I need the neurons to encode.
I am intrigued by the idea that it may be possible that our brain is also an external device which is why Fodor suggested that we move away from studying the mind through the brain. The way our smartphone is not our mind, our brain is also not our mind. I feel that there isn't a special type of physical states that allows us to have felt states. If the brain is not the physical object which we can use to understand the felt state, how can we study the felt state?
ReplyDeleteRE: Extended Cognition
ReplyDeleteI was very intrigued by the three cases of human problem-solving. The question of how much cognition is present in these cases really makes you think. I tried to imagine myself performing all three tasks and how much time each would take as well as how much thinking would go into each situation. The first would definitely take the most time while the second I think would reduce the amount of time and thinking significantly. It’s hard to imagine the third scenario but I imagine it will be just as fast if not faster than the second situation. The idea of having so many environmental supports really makes me question how cognitions in humans would change accordingly. Would it be much faster?
I liked the author’s use of language as an example of how are cognitive processes are extended into the world. Perhaps language evolved because it gives the advantage of actively extending our cognitive processes and coupling them to increase efficiency, speed and expand our performance capacity through the interaction of many people’s brain power compared to just an individual’s. Its fascinating to frame language as this mode of extending our cognition and linking our mental process with others to enhance this unique type of social cooperation.
ReplyDeleteI liked the comparison between the man who writes everything in his book and the woman who stores the information in her mind and how there are parallels between how they both access the information. The discussion of what constitutes the mind (as the examples rely systematically more on hardware) was reminiscent of the distinctions between humans and robots from the Cuddly AI reading. But I have difficulty with agreeing that removing some feature of the environment has the same effect as removing some part of the brain. The idea here is sound, that cognition, and being, is a complex interaction of environment and internal structures functioning to produce a reality that is both felt internally and observed externally. Clark and Chalmers state that the idea of active externalism may be unpalatable because of the conflation of cognition with consciousness and the whimsicality of thinking of consciousness as spreading beyond the body. But is cognition is consciousness is feeling then is the extended mind argument wrong because not all the corresponding parts are capable of feeling?
ReplyDelete"...in seeing cognition as extended one is not merely making a terminological decision; it makes a significant difference to the methodology of scientific investigation."
ReplyDeleteThis article was a very interesting challenge to my previous understanding of the mind and self. In general, we are inclined to have quite rigid views on where the mind begins and where it ends but challenging and redefining these boundaries (to a certain extent) may provide a useful framework for the direction of future cognitive research. However, defining cognition too broadly runs the risk of preventing progress towards elucidating the causal mechanism underlying our doing capacity. Clark & Chalmers are perhaps too vague when it comes to drawing a distinction between the essence of cognition and tools/technologies capable of extending it (something that the next article does a really effective job of addressing).
"The real moral of portability intuition is that for coupled systems to be relevant to the core of cognition, reliable coupling is required."
ReplyDeleteI liked Clark & Chalmers idea about becoming more vulnerable when something prevents us from accessing certain parts of our cognition (either internally or externally). But I think they overreach in regards to the parallels they try to draw between Inga and Otto. Although both Inga and Otto may feel like they know the museum’s location after retrieving this information, Otto’s feeling is associated with physically having to flip through a notebook and sift through different notes before finding the relevant one. I think at best, only metaphorical links can be drawn between Otto finding a page in his notebook vs Inga’s process of memory retrieval.
When reading about the extended mind (11a) for the first time I found it peculiar that the Clark and Chalmers ignored the hard problem. This was pointed out in class; however, I wondered if the hard problem was ignored because the authors had come to terms with its insolubility and were only interested in elucidating the easy problem which concerns itself with only what cognition does. And the easy problem is what Turing concerned himself with.
ReplyDeleteFor example, Clark and Chalmers talk about the person with Alzheimer's using a notebook instead of memory. This sounds like something Turing would concern himself with because it discusses what cognition does and is implementation independent-- the person with Alzheimer's who has a notebook instead of encephalized memory can hypothetically produce the same output as someone with encephalized memory.
The insight of the authors is quite interesting, but it is hard to see where they set their limits. I think most people are instinctively willing to accept the idea that a text for example might be a sort of extension of one's mind, in that it transmits the felt states of one individual to another. However, i strongly disagree with the view that the text itself has a felt state (I am not completely sure of what Chalmers would say about this, but if he refuses to attribute felt states to a zombie identical to himself, i assume he would do the same about this notebook).
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteI think there's a difference of extension of mind vs. brainstorming. You're sharing ideas and using what other people think, so you can incorporate that into your thoughts/cognitive resources. There are often times when you're brainstorming with people and they disagree with you or you don't understand each other. That'd be like saying that part of your mind is battling with another part of your mind, which isn't unfound, but you'll still always know what your mind means, whereas in brainstorming sessions, you might not know what another person means. I just really do not agree with the idea of an extended mind.
ReplyDeleteAt one point, the authors seem to suggest that the brain develops in a way that complements its external environment. It almost sounds like they are suggesting something similar to predetermination…? I really doubt that this is the case, but I also feel like if we are to play around with this idea, then you might as well toss in the question of freewill. Are we just sitting in society as a cog in the machine? Was the way we think and what we do now just formed by our environment and that's how we ended up where we are? I don’t agree with this, but what are your thoughts?
ReplyDeleteI think it is unfeasible to consider Otto and Inga on the same playing field. Otto only knows that he writes things down because he needs to in order to function everyday. Isn’t this "belief" just that Otto believes that his notebook has information for him, not where he believes the museum is? I understand that memory isn’t always reliable, as with the notebook (because he might lose it or something), but I would not go so far to equate these things.
ReplyDeleteAlthough I agree that the environment plays a crucial role in cognitive processing, and with Chalmers and Clark’s concepts of coupled systems and active externalism, I think their proposal of “extended cognition” is misguided. The main problem I have is that just because something ‘X’ helps shape the the way something ‘Y' happens, doesn’t mean that 'X' should be included in the definition of 'Y'. So, for person Nancy, even if some external force played a crucial role in directing my cognitive processes by “constraining the evolution and development of cognition” this doesn’t entail that those external forces actually take part in the doing of my cognitive processing. I think Chalmers has the right motivations, but shouldn’t employ “extended cognition” in the literal sense that some other external process/ thing can take part in some entity’s cognitive processing, and rather could use “extended cognition” more metaphorically, to describe how the system as a whole interacts and distributes the work of the cognition, to arrive at some end point, or complete some function..etc. By this view, we are still investigating how the ‘epistemic credit’ is spread across the system as a whole, and external processes are considered just as important as internal processes to cognition, we just aren’t claiming that the external process actually takes part in the entity's cognitive processing.
ReplyDeleteI reasoned that Chalmer’s ‘Extended Cognition’ doesn’t work, and came to my opinion on the matter, by analogizing the arguments to a jazz band, where playing is akin to cognitive processing. Let’s say I, Nancy, am the piano player and am comping (accompanying) for John's, the bass player, solo. How I comp completely relies on what John plays. If John decides to play a modal note sequence, I will follow up with a modal chord. Further, the way I play in reaction to John’s solo will direct the progression of his playing. So, the way the other person plays, and the way our playing interacts, completely shapes each other’s playing as well as the collective musical outcome. In this situation, although John is a crucial factor to what I play on the piano, you wouldn’t say that John actually takes part in pressing the keys of the piano, or that I am actually plucking the strings of his bass, but you could say that his string plucking and my key pressing interact to collectively produce the music the audience hears. Now, if we consider a non living thing, like sheet music, the analogy still applies. The sheet music is helping me remember, and directing, what I have to play, but the sheet music doesn’t press the keys of the piano with me. With this example it is obvious that John and the sheet music wouldn’t exactly ‘feel' what I ‘feel’ in some moment of playing, as the sheet music isn't ‘playing’ at all, and John is playing something different all together! This is important to the concept of ‘extended cognition' as cognition implies feeling, so in this case John and the sheet music would have to share my feeling state, which is not the case, to be true extensions.
Delete