The Extended Mind

"Keep on playing those mind games together ..." - John Lennon

My old mate Matthew Knight recently turned me on to some interesting work by Philosopher Andy Clark (who taught us both back in the day) and David Chalmers. The extended mind is a radical extension to situated cognition that sprang from Clark’s research into cognition (Clark, 1989) and Chalmers’ (1996) research into consciousness. It postulates an “active role of the environment in driving cognitive processes” (Clark and Chalmers, 2003, p 7) to the extent that “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!” (ibid, p 10).

References

• Chalmers (1996), The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory, Oxford: Oxford University Press.


• Clark, A. (1989), Microcognition: Philosophy, Cognitive Science, and Parallel Distributed Processing. Boston, M.A.: MIT Press.


• Clark, A. and Chalmers, D. J. (2003), The Extended Mind, Analysis, 58, pp 10-23.