The Experience Machine by Andy Clark

Author:Andy Clark [Clark, Andy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2023-05-02T00:00:00+00:00

Extended Minds

The philosopher Jerry Fodor once wrote, “If the mind happens in space at all, it happens somewhere north of the neck.” Fodor emphatically rejected the idea that the machinery of individual human minds could include goings-on in the rest of the body (the bits south of the head) or, worse still, the wider world.

The extremely heretical view to the contrary was pioneered by myself and David Chalmers in a short paper written in the early 1990s, back when I was directing the PNP program at Washington University in St. Louis. One of my first acts as director had been to persuade Chalmers to join us as a postdoctoral fellow—a research-heavy role ideal for such an academic rising star. Dave is now famous for his work on consciousness and (most recently) on how we should think about virtual and augmented reality. But our short paper has become a kind of modern classic and remains one of the most cited papers in contemporary philosophy of mind.

The paper was called “The Extended Mind” and in it we argued that the machinery of an individual mind did not have to be restricted to the machinery of that individual’s brain and central nervous system. It did not even have to be restricted to their body more generally construed. Instead, true mental circuitry could indeed be spread out across brain, body, and aspects of the material and technological world. The idea was that under certain conditions outward loops that involve quite mundane goings-on (such as consulting calculators or smartphones or even just looking at things we’ve written down in notebooks) could count as proper parts of the machinery of thinking. Your mind, we argued, isn’t always all in your head.

At the heart of our argument lay a very simple theme—one that already looms large in our discussions. It is that one of the functions of the biological brain is to create and maintain perception-action loops that keep us alive and that bring us closer to our goals. This requires both storing information using “onboard” memory, and also actively seeking out additional information as and when it is needed. In this search for good information, it doesn’t matter whether the information is already stored in memory or requires the use of bodily actions that loop in various tools and technologies. What matters is just that the right information becomes available at the right moment. Our radical suggestion was that when the weave between the brain’s activities and the functionality of some nonbiological resource becomes sufficiently tight, it really is better to think of that person’s mind as an extended mind—a new problem-solving architecture built from an array of resources spanning brain, body, and world.

The argument we presented involved a general principle (the parity principle) which is best seen as a heuristic, a rough-and-ready tool, for identifying plausible cases of cognitive extension. The parity principle went like this:

If, as we confront some task, a part of the world functions as a process which, were it to

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