The Philosopher's Magazine recently posted this interview with David Chalmers, author of The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory. The article deals with Chalmers' idea of the extended mind, the theory that mind is not confined to the brain, and that our technology is a natural extension of the mind.
Read the rest of this article.A Piece of iMe: an interview with David Chalmers
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Interview by Julian Baggini
David Chalmers is standing in front of a large lecture hall holding a piece of himself. Fortunately, that piece is not a lump of organic matter but his iPhone. One of the star draws at the World Congress is doing what, arguably, other speakers have not done enough of: bringing the global audience up to date with his latest thinking about the problems he is best known for tackling.
That topic is the “extended mind” thesis, and I later caught up with him at Seoul University's western-style café, the wonderfully named A Twosome Place, to talk more about it.
“Andy Clark and I wrote 'The Extended Mind', I think in 1995, when we were colleagues at Washington University. I think it was rejected from three journals – probably from Mind, Journal of Philosophy, Philosophical Review – before it eventually made its way into Analysis in ’98.Since then it seems to have taken on a life of its own.”
So what's the big idea?
“The key idea is that when bits of the environment are hooked up to your cognitive system in the right way, they are, in effect, part of the mind, part of the cognitive system. So, say I’m rearranging Scrabble tiles on a rack. This is very close to being analogous to the situation when I’m doing an anagram in my head. In one case the representations are out in the world, in the other case they’re in here. We say doing an anagram on a rack ought be regarded as a cognitive process, a process of the mind, even though it’s out there in the world.”
This is where the iPhone comes in, as a more contemporary example of how the extended mind works.
“A whole lot of my cognitive activities and my brain functions have now been uploaded into my iPhone. It stores a whole lot of my beliefs, phone numbers, addresses, whatever. It acts as my memory for these things. It’s always there when I need it.”
Chalmers even claims it holds some of his desires.
“I have a list of all of my favorite dishes at the restaurant we go to all the time in Canberra. I say, OK, what are we going to order? Well, I’ll pull up the iPhone – these are the dishes we like here. It’s the repository of my desires, my plans. There’s a calendar, there’s an iPhone calculator, and so on. It’s even got a little decision maker that comes up, yes or no.”
It all sounds like a great advert for Apple, but isn't it stretching things to say that the iPhone is actually an extension of the mind?
“The conservative view of this is the iPhone is a tool,” says Chalmers. “It’s not part of my mind, but it’s certainly an instrument of my mind to use, so I don’t have to remember things anymore because my iPhone remembers them for me.
“The radical view, the view we’re kind of pushing, is the iPhone can be seen literally as a part of my mind. I actually remember things: in virtue of this information being in the iPhone, it is part of my memory. So the extended mind thesis basically says that the iPhone isn’t just a tool for my cognition, it’s part of my cognition.”
It sounds wacky, but Chalmers has some examples which he thinks make the idea sound more intuitive.
To get a deeper understanding, philosophically, of what Chalmers is trying to convey, you can read his paper, The Extended Mind, by Andy Clark & David J. Chalmers [*], of which I offer just the beginning.
*[[Authors are listed in order of degree of belief in the central thesis.]]Read the whole paper.1 Introduction
Where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin? The question invites two standard replies. Some accept the demarcations of skin and skull, and say that what is outside the body is outside the mind. Others are impressed by arguments suggesting that the meaning of our words "just ain't in the head", and hold that this externalism about meaning carries over into an externalism about mind. We propose to pursue a third position. We advocate a very different sort of externalism: an active externalism, based on the active role of the environment in driving cognitive processes.
2 Extended Cognition
Consider three cases of human problem-solving:
(1) A person sits in front of a computer screen which displays images of various two-dimensional geometric shapes and is asked to answer questions concerning the potential fit of such shapes into depicted "sockets". To assess fit, the person must mentally rotate the shapes to align them with the sockets.
(2) A person sits in front of a similar computer screen, but this time can choose either to physically rotate the image on the screen, by pressing a rotate button, or to mentally rotate the image as before. We can also suppose, not unrealistically, that some speed advantage accrues to the physical rotation operation.
(3) Sometime in the cyberpunk future, a person sits in front of a similar computer screen. This agent, however, has the benefit of a neural implant which can perform the rotation operation as fast as the computer in the previous example. The agent must still choose which internal resource to use (the implant or the good old fashioned mental rotation), as each resource makes different demands on attention and other concurrent brain activity.
How much cognition is present in these cases? We suggest that all three cases are similar. Case (3) with the neural implant seems clearly to be on a par with case (1). And case (2) with the rotation button displays the same sort of computational structure as case (3), although it is distributed across agent and computer instead of internalized within the agent. If the rotation in case (3) is cognitive, by what right do we count case (2) as fundamentally different? We cannot simply point to the skin/skull boundary as justification, since the legitimacy of that boundary is precisely what is at issue. But nothing else seems different.
The kind of case just described is by no means as exotic as it may at first appear. It is not just the presence of advanced external computing resources which raises the issue, but rather the general tendency of human reasoners to lean heavily on environmental supports. Thus consider the use of pen and paper to perform long multiplication (McClelland et al 1986, Clark 1989), the use of physical re-arrangements of letter tiles to prompt word recall in Scrabble (Kirsh 1995), the use of instruments such as the nautical slide rule (Hutchins 1995), and the general paraphernalia of language, books, diagrams, and culture. In all these cases the individual brain performs some operations, while others are delegated to manipulations of external media. Had our brains been different, this distribution of tasks would doubtless have varied.
In fact, even the mental rotation cases described in scenarios (1) and (2) are real. The cases reflect options available to players of the computer game Tetris. In Tetris, falling geometric shapes must be rapidly directed into an appropriate slot in an emerging structure. A rotation button can be used. David Kirsh and Paul Maglio (1994) calculate that the physical rotation of a shape through 90 degrees takes about 100 milliseconds, plus about 200 milliseconds to select the button. To achieve the same result by mental rotation takes about 1000 milliseconds. Kirsh and Maglio go on to present compelling evidence that physical rotation is used not just to position a shape ready to fit a slot, but often to help determine whether the shape and the slot are compatible. The latter use constitutes a case of what Kirsh and Maglio call an `epistemic action'. Epistemic actions alter the world so as to aid and augment cognitive processes such as recognition and search. Merely pragmatic actions, by contrast, alter the world because some physical change is desirable for its own sake (e.g., putting cement into a hole in a dam).
Epistemic action, we suggest, demands spread of epistemic credit. If, as we confront some task, a part of the world functions as a process which, were it done in the head, we would have no hesitation in recognizing as part of the cognitive process, then that part of the world is (so we claim) part of the cognitive process. Cognitive processes ain't (all) in the head!
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