The Tinkering Mind by Vierkant Tillmann;

Author:Vierkant, Tillmann; [Vierkant, Tillmann]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, Incorporated
Published: 2022-08-19T00:00:00+00:00

The Tinkering Mind: Agency, Cognition, and the Extended Mind. Tillmann Vierkant, Oxford University Press. © Tillmann Vierkant 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192894267.003.0004

1 The text gives conflicting evidence on this issue. In footnote 11 Levy asserts that he is not focusing on cognition but just action, but on page 984 Levy asserts that agential cognition extends.

2 Clark has a number of other arguments to deal with cognitive bloat (2007), but they are not directly relevant in this context.

3 Note the similarity between Levy’s point and the discussion of deliberation as a skill in Chapter 3.

4 As discussed in Chapter 1.

5 As discussed in Chapter 3.

6 I have presented this option as one that seems mainly attractive in the cognitive sciences, but there is very interesting recent work in moral psychology that seems to be attracted by the idea that the looping between intentional and evaluative components in maintaining beliefs is so intricate that this control over one’s beliefs can be called intentional (see e.g. Chrisman 2018 and Tumulty 2020). I think these arguments are very plausible, but they also do not escape the consequence of our argument. If intentional mental actions are literally constitutive parts of belief maintenance, then the same can hold for intentional physical actions.

7 See Chapter 1.

8 In addition, while selection does not normally extend, in contrast to the cognitive agency case, this seems to be a contingent fact. It is entirely imaginable that in some future sci fi world there might be artificial systems that automatically select the most appropriate tool to solve a cognitive problem. The further down the ladder of cognitive complexity we go, the less deep the difference between execution and selection seems to be, at least in terms of it being cognitive. In fact, this very idea of an extended sub-personal selection process is one of the reasons why Gertler (2007) wants to restrict the mind to the conscious mind. She imagines a scenario where Otto has a computer in which he has saved his desire to make banana bread on Tuesday. This computer also controls a robot which is also part of the extended Otto system. So, one morning, while the organic part of Otto is fast asleep, the computer sends the robot to fetch the ingredients and bake the bread, so that the organic part awakens to the smell of banana bread. Gertler uses the example as an argument against the extended mind, because obviously, the very strong intuition here is that Otto did not make the bread, but Gertler argues that Clark and Chambers will struggle to explain why this should be the case. But for our question, the main point to emphasize here is that it is not obvious that selection always happens in the brain, so that selection is not sufficient for cognitive agency.

9 This is what makes Wegner’s work so counterintuitive.

10 Having said that, our earlier discussion of BMIs provides another strong argument that corporealism will struggle with. While materialism finds it easy to integrate BMI actions, the same is not obvious for corporealism.

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