Extending the

Mind with

Cognitive

Prosthetics?

Andy Clark

School of Philosophy, Psychology

and Language Sciences (PPLS)

University of Edinburgh,

Scotland, UK

andy.clark@ed.ac.uk

With special thanks to: Rob Rupert, Kenneth Aizawa,

Fred Adams, Mark Rowlands, Dave Chalmers, Julian

Kiverstein, Mark Sprevak, Richard Menary, and Mike

Wheeler.

The Extended Mind Debate

Where in physical

space lies the

machinery of mind

and cognition?

What it isn’t: Target is that the

machinery of mind might, perhaps in some alien beings, be

smeared across more than the neural economy.

Nor is the claim merely that non-brain activity

impacts the mind.

No-one denies that causal commerce

between mind and world matters, and it

changes what we think.

The contentious claim is that the

mechanisms of mind are not all in the head

(= the 'extended mind hypothesis’- Clark

and Chalmers (1998)

It’s as if someone said that your calculator

or currency converter’s MECHANISMS

were not all inside your laptop.

This is when, e.g., we use a web-based

currency converter.

It is when we use the built-in calculator

on the mac.

TXM: The Main Idea:

The mechanisms of (your)

mind are as free to bleed

into the (rest of the) world

as the mechanisms of

calculation are to bleed into

the web

Q/ Just how crazy is this

1.The Extended Mind Claim (super-mini-version)

2. Some Objections and Replies

3.Cognitive Extension versus Cognitive

Shrinkage

The Extended Mind Claim

For the brain, it doesn’t matter whether information is

stored in the head or in the wider world, just so long as

it knows what kind of information is there and how

to get at it as soon as we (the agent) need to put it to

some practical use.

Brains like ours are already adept

at trading easy access against

expensive internal biological

representation and storage.

Roboticists and psychologists have known this for a

while..

Brooks: “The world is

its own best model” O’Regan: “The world

as external memory”

That feeling of seeing all the colour and detail in the

scenes is probably due to a kind of implicit meta-

knowing.

Our brains know that they can usually retrieve more

detailed info when needed, so we feel as if we already

see all the detail.

This is not really a mistake.

For we are poised to access that information just-in-

time for use.

TXM = a cognitive application of the same idea.

Compare: your feeling that you already know what

month this is

This is not due to your constantly rehearsing the

answer in your conscious mind

(continually sub-vocalizing “March” ‘March”

“March”).

Rather, it is due to your implicit meta-knowing that

This is the kind of thing you know and that (in

normal circumstances) you are poised to access that

information pretty much at will and as and when

needed.

So maybe being ‘ready-stored in the head’ is an

optional extra for dispositional believing (standing

beliefs) too?

Perhaps what matters here too (Clark and Chalmers

(1998) is being poised for easy access….

Yields the case of ‘note-book Otto’….

But TXM is not only about dispositional beliefs…many

of our best mind-extending loops into the world (just

like many of the best loops inside the brain) are much,

much fancier than simple access/retrieval loops…

think of loops like these:

gesturing while you talk (actively looping into the

body) – see Clark “Curing Cognitive Hiccups” Journal of Philosophy 2008)

scribbling while you think (looping into ‘passive’

external media, but not a case of simple offloading)

working with a highly-practiced software package

(looping into an active semi-intelligent sub-system)…

This complexity is highlighted in a famous exchange

between Richard Feynman (the Nobel laureate physicist)

and the historian Charles Weiner

“ Weiner once remarked casually that [a batch of notes and

sketches] represented “a record of [Feynman’s] day-to-day

work,” and Feynman reacted sharply.

“I actually did the work on the paper,” he said.

“Well,” Weiner said, “the work was done in your head,

but the record of it is still here.”

“No, it’s not a record, not really. It’s working. You have

to work on paper and this is the paper. Okay?” “

Quoted in Genius (Gleick’s biography of Feynman)

It is not that all the thinking happens inside, and the loop out

into symbols on a page is just a kind of convenience or a way

to avoid forgetting.

Rather, the loops to external media form part and parcel of a

complex, integrated, bio-technologically hybrid system

for thinking.

For lots of examples and discussion, see Clark, Supersizing

The Mind (Oxford Univ Press, 2008))

The extended mind story is most convincing, I think,

when we can by-pass the stage of consciously

consulting an external or internal information store

at all….

The Memory Glasses: Wearable Computing for Just-in-Time Memory Support Richard W. DeVaul

(MIT thesis, 2004). See also paper in 7th IEEE International Symposium on Wearable Computers

(2003)

Trials (at MIT Media Lab) of so-called ‘memory

glasses’: aids to recall for people with impaired

memory or visual recognition skills.

= a Terminator style eye-glass display

The Memory Glasses: Wearable Computing for Just-in-Time Memory Support Richard W. DeVaul

(MIT thesis, 2004). See also paper in 7th IEEE International Symposium on Wearable Computers

(2003)

The glasses work by matching the current scene

(a face, for example) to stored information and

cueing the subject (using the glasses-mounted

display) with relevant information (a name, a

relationship).

The cue may be overt (consciously perceived by the

subject) or covert (rapidly flashed and hence

subliminally presented).

In the covert case, functionality is still improved

without any process of conscious awareness of the

cueing on the part of the subject.

Subjects like this a lot better!

It is easy to imagine cases that then enhance

knowledge rather than merely ‘restore’ it.

Recognizr is a controversial app. purchased by

Apple (for over 15 million dollars).

- it makes a 3D facemap on-the-spot from a

photo input.

That means other applications can then match

that face to pictures taken from other angles etc

on the web, rapidly identifying the person and

retrieving all kinds of associated information.

Upshot: a body-mounted camera could constantly

generate these 3D face-maps, then get and act

upon a bunch of additional information from a

rapid web-trawl.

Imagine a version

where, if the person

meets some desired

condition (e.g. being a

fan of Paris SG) you

get a barely-

perceptible buzz from

a vibrotactile element

somewhere on your

body.

What happens when THAT becomes part of the

suite of robustly available equipment, through

which you encounter the wider world?

Soon you cease to consciously notice the gentle

buzz and simply register what it is telling you.

“just knowing” who is (probably) an SG fan

will then simply become part of how you

experience a new situation.

Your in-the-head cognitive routines will become

geared to the easy availability of the information,

creating a new, co-adapted, cognitive whole.

= ‘cognitive dovetailing’

The operation of a wide variety of such continuously

running programs may be compared to that of your

own (complex, active!) unconscious neural sub-

structures.

You will count as ‘using’ these software entities only

in the same attenuated sense as you ‘use’ your

hippocampus or frontal lobes.

Far better to say that the agent that IS you just is the

larger distributed system.

Speculation:

Such innovations – made increasingly

possible by the combination of web-based

infrastructure and portable technologies

that can learn about the agent as the

agent uses them - will increasingly blur

the boundaries between our own minds

and the technological infrastructures in

which we live, work, and play.

“Google Glasses”, expected to hit the market

within a year, may nudge us in this direction

sooner than we think …

34

TXM Summary

Portable (or always available/ubiquitous)

Robust.

and

Dovetailed (co-adapted)

Augmentations

“PRaDA accessories become you”

Some Worries and Replies

Adams and Aizawa (2008) find TXM

‘outrageous’ and ‘preposterous’ (p.vii).

Whatever plausibility it has, they suggest, it

gets by cheating.

Adams, F and Aizawa, K (2008) The Bounds of Cognition

(Blackwell)

First, it relies on a fuzzy, untriangulated notion of ‘cognition’.

We gave no ‘mark of the cognitive’, so how can we tell

where the machinery of cognition lies?

Second, the best candidate for such a mark involves non-

derived contents and they are all said to be found only ‘in the

head’.

Third, there are characteristic properties that the in-the-head

stuff displays that the rest doesn’t, so we can’t (even

bracketing non-derived content) run a functional-sameness

argument here.

So how come anyone is even tempted?

Only thanks (A and A suggest) to:

1. The error of mistaking (mere) causal

coupling for something more profound, more

‘constitutive’.

= rather like mistaking the inputs to a

calculator for part of the machinery that

calculates

and/or 2.

The error of confusing the cognitive process

with the cognitive system

the latter may include (inner and outer) parts

and processes that aid and abet cognition,

without themselves participating in true

cognitive processing.

(= like mistaking the calculator’s casing or

batteries for part of the calculating engine).

Concerning the mark of the cognitive

A and A suggest, as a plausible ‘mark of the cognitive’ the

presence of “non-derived representations governed by

idiosyncratic kinds of processes” (p.10).

The kinds of inscription found in e.g. some online storage fail

to make the grade on both counts.

They involve derived (that is, in some sense humanly

assigned) meanings.

And they do not behave in the same ways as their in-the-

head counterparts (for example, they fail to display various

well-known psychological effects, such as the recency effect

which systematically favors late entries in a list (p.63)).

But notice: non-derived representations (see Clark

(2005) for discussion) are indeed present in any

putative overall cognizing system

Even on the extended view, every extended mind will

involve some operations defined over

representations whose meanings are non-derived.

So the real question here concerns

the acceptability of derived

representations or contents as

genuine elements in a distributed or

hybrid cognitive process that quite

clearly involves many non-derived

ones too.

I don’t think we have clear intuitions

about this

(consider manipulating

Venn diagrams in the head)

What about the rest of the clause? “non-derived

representations governed by idiosyncratic

kinds of processes” (p.10).

A and A note that human biological memory

systems look to be characterized by certain

psychological laws (eg primacy, recency and

chunking effects).

But to identify cognitive candidacy by

comparison to typical human inner neural

processes threatens (see Wheeler (2008)) to be

question-begging in the context of this debate

In any case, we should reject the idea that the

surface psychological laws that happen to

characterize the inner (bio-cognitive) realm in

human agents should in any way define the

cognitive realm itself

Martian bio-memory, even

if it didn't display e.g. the

recency and chunking

effects found in human

neural memory systems,

could surely count as an

aspect of Martian cognition.

..helps reveal the real role of the Parity

Principle (from Clark and Chalmers

(1998)).

If, as we confront some task, a part of the

world functions as a process which, were it

to go on in the head, we would have no

hesitation in accepting as part of the

cognitive process, then that part of the

world is (for that time) part of the cognitive

process.

What Parity Isn’t:

PP does NOT require the bio-external elements

to be operating in exactly the ‘same way’ as the

bio-internal elements.

Rather, the Parity Principle is best seen as a

demand that we assess the bio-external

contributions with the same kind of unbiased

vision that we ought to bring to bear on an

alien neural or inner organization.

It is a call not for sameness, but for

sameness of opportunity

Parity Probe =

akin to a ‘veil of metabolic ignorance’

asks what our attitude would be if

currently external means of

information storage and

transformation were found in biology.

= about avoiding a rush to judgment

based on spatial location alone.

PP is a tool that’s meant to help us deploy our pre-theoretic

grip on the cognitive without the distractions of skin and skull.

We surely do have such a grip.

It is only courtesy of such a grip that we can tell that eg the

colour or texture of the brain is not (as far as we know) a

cognitive-processing relevant feature.

PP = thus what Mark Sprevak dubs a ‘Fair Play Principle’: it

helps us avoid a rush to judgment based on the spatial location

and/or the processing idiosyncrasies of human wetware.

Indeed, avoiding human wetware chauvinism is

necessary quite close to home, if we are to allow for

e.g. the minds of cats

Suppose cat-brains turn out not to display

some of the signature features of human

memory systems?

Should we conclude that cat-memory is not

real memory?

Adams and Aizawa are alert (p.71-73) to the

worry, but their discussion is revealing…

“These observations suggest a complication in the

evaluation of the hypothesis of extended cognition.

They suggest that we cannot refute the hypothesis of

extended cognition simply on the grounds that the

combination of brain, body, and environment does not

form a conglomerate that is like a normal human

cognitive processor. The combination could have

some general, non-human, kind of cognition…that is

related to human cognition in only a “family

resemblance” kind of way.” (p.72).

But in this passage ‘like a normal human

cognitive processor’ already seems to mean

‘like a normal human in-the-head

mechanism’.

This makes the response look question-

begging.

For the challenge that the theorist of extended

cognition often means to raise to this very

identification.

What about the putative "coupling

/constitution fallacy” in arguments for the

extended mind?

= the fallacy of moving from the causal

coupling of some object or process to some

cognitive agent, to the conclusion that the

object or process is part of (helps

constitute) the agent's cognitive

processing.

"Question: Why did the pencil

think that 2+2=4?

Clark's Answer: Because it was

coupled to the

mathematician…. That about

sums up what is wrong with [ the]

extended mind hypothesis.”

From Adams and Aizawa (‘Defending the

Bounds of Cognition’ )

Question: Why did the V4 neuron ‘think’ that

there was a spiral pattern in the stimulus?

Answer: Because it was coupled to the (rest of

the) monkey.

Let’s try that again:

…..the coupling is what the V4 neuron,

whose response characteristics are such-and-

such, to in virtue

of which , in the

larger Monkey-system, is exhibited.

Unlike, say, the created in

that neuron in isolation, which wouldn’t be part

of any cognitive process at all

The Appeal to Coupling (Revisited)

Coupling is just the that

allows extended or distributed cognitive

processes to emerge, and be maintained, while

processing proceeds.

Examples:

Inter-hemisphere coupling, as in part enabled by

the corpus callosum.

Neural-bodily coupling, as between neural systems

and movements of hand and arm. See e.g. the case

of gesture, discussed at length in Clark (2007) (2008)

Neural-bodily-wordly coupling, as between neural

systems, bodily effectors, and bio-external resources

such as sketchpads,notebooks, and the web. See

e.g. discussions in Clark (2008) Supersizing the Mind

59

But still, I agree that not all coupling creates extended

cognitive systems…

Many things (like the weather, or a bang on the head) may

impact cognition but are not thereby parts of the cognizing

machine.

60

Thought Experiment 1

Suppose the rhythmic pulse of rain on my Edinburgh window

somehow helps the pace and sequencing of a flow of

thoughts.

Is the rain now part of my cognitive engine? Probably not.

.

61

Thought Experiment 2

A robot that deliberately seeks those

conditions, because it is designed to use

raindrop sounds to time, sequence, and pace

some internal operations essential to proper

cognizing.

??

62

Thought Experiment 3

Imagine a robot that evolved to spit

stored water at a plate on its own

body so as to use the auditory signal to

time and sequence key neural

information-processing operations.

63

Those self-maintained, self-stimulating signals are best

seen (I claim) as part of the cognitive mechanism itself. A

neural clock or oscillator would surely count after all…

Much of advanced cognition involves the deployment of

cognitive processes that create (or sometimes just elicit)

the inputs that continuously drive those and/or other

cognitive processes along (speech, sketching, writing, and

gesture, seem like prime examples of such self-created

systemic inputs).

In these special loop-y contexts, the simple input vs

part-of-processing distinction, with its associated ban

on counting inputs as parts of processing

mechanisms seems wrong.

= Self-stimulation as one clean route from mere inputs

to parts of mechanisms..

65

Compare: the car makes exhaust fumes (outputs) that are

also inputs that drive the turbo that adds power (often

around 30% more power!) to the engine.

The exhaust fumes are outputs that are also self-

created inputs that surely form a proper part of the

overall power-generating mechanism

= automotive self-stimulation!

Another Kind of Worry

Rob Rupert (2009) looks able to allow the spitting

robot to possess a bodily extended cognizing circuit,

but would reject the use of paper or other off-body

storage

This is because Rupert argues for a special status

for the most portable bundle of processing powers

that characterize the biological organism.

He sees this bundle as the constant target

(implicitly or explicitly) of most work in psychology

and neuroscience.

Various arguments: I’ll look just at two: asymmetry and integration

Asymmetries

Eg (Rupert) If you destroy a

notebook, a cognizing agent may

well replace it. But destroy the

brain and that’s (literally) all she

wrote!

Or (Harry Collins) When my props and aids go wrong it is I

who have to repair them. They will never repair me.

There seems to be a deep asymmetry, or lopsidedness,

between the role of the notebook and that of the brain.

Reply:

So What?

Take a small part of the neural crew, and very

often ‘I’ can survive perfectly well without it (a

neuron or two, visual cortex, MT)

Similarly, when aspects of my own bio-memory

start to become unreliable, I may deliberately shift

towards alternative means of storage and retrieval.

The apparent lopsidedness (I have to take steps

to offset the loss of my own bio-memory

functioning) does not threaten the claim that, prior

to the loss, those internal resources were

realizing my cognitive activities.

Ditto, then, for the notebooks and sketchpads…

(Sprevak) Don’t hold the external stuff

to higher standards than we’d hold

aspects of the brain’s own functioning.

Integration

Rupert claims there are severe scientific costs to

adopting the extended perspective, as we may begin to

lose our experimental grip on the integrated bundles of

processing resources (agents) that psychology and

neuroscience seeks to study.

Sally-the organism (call that ‘O-Sally’)

O-Sally + iPhone

O-Sally +notebook

O-Sally + Tommy

Re these putative costs

I just don’t see them.

No need to lose our grip on the core biological bundle.

Any more than attention to whole brains makes us lose

track of the special contribution of the hippocampal

bundle, or of the right hemisphere bundle…

The invitation is to let a thousand flowers bloom.

If our goal is to understand what a (a socially and

technologically situated entity) can do, we’d better study the

class of systems that includes loops through the body,

artifacts, the web, other agents etc.

If the goal is to understand what the persisting biological

organism alone can do (say, by way of mathematical

reasoning) we might want to restrict the use of all non-

biological props and aids. Fingers yes, notepads no

If it is to discover the stand-alone capacities of the neural

apparatus, we might want to impede subjects from using their

fingers as counting buffers during an experiment. No fingers,

no gestures

If it is to track the contribution of a specific neural sub-

structure, we might want to use TMS to get a better grip on

that.

All these targets are both

theoretically and experimentally

viable!

TXM invites us to tackle them all,

and to do so as part of a single

interdisciplinary project of

understanding the distinctively

human mind.

A last question to ponder:

so…is all this potential change and

cognitive ‘upgrading’ a GOOD thing,

or is it a dangerous early step on the

road to some dark and ‘post-human’

future?

A common worry:

To allow all these well-fitted, transparent tools to

count as genuine aspects of OURSELVES is to

lose sight of our essential humanity.

It is to risk a kind of bodily, sensory, and cognitive

dissolution, as we slowly but surely lose track of

where WE stop and the world of tools and

technologies around us begins.

= a kind of personal dissolution into the bio-

technological matrix..

A kind of bodily, sensory, and cognitive BLOAT

81

Keith Butler tries to stop the bloat by appeal to a notion of the

biological brain as ultimate controller

“Even if external elements sometimes participate in processes

of control and choice ( your software agent might choose

some stocks and shares, and so on) still it is always the

biological brain that has the final say”

So the brain is the controller and chooser of actions in a way

all that external stuff is not.

So the external stuff should not count as part of the real

cognitive system. See eg Butler (1998), see also Adams and

Aizawa (2002, 2008)

82

But I am not convinced.

Re-applying the “locus of control” criterion inside the head

helps reveal what’s going wrong.

Do we now count as not part of my mind or myself any

neural subsystems that are not the ultimate arbiters of

action and choice?

Suppose only my frontal lobes have the final say- does that

shrink the “real mind” to just the frontal lobes!?

What if no subsystem has the ‘final say (Dennett)?

Has the mind and self just disappeared?

83

It is a mistake to think that all those

“cognitive tools” need some kind of

wafer-thin user…

This is where the ghost of Descartes

seeps out from under the contemporary

materialist rug

I think, though, that we should

be MUCH more worried by the

alternative, which is a kind of

unprincipled shrinkage of the

mind and self!

Brainbound’s Last Stand?

Brie Gertler (2007) has argued for what she calls ‘the

narrow mind’ (TNM)

According to TNM, the realm of the mental consists only

of the contents of occurrent conscious, processing.

This allows her to reject the arguments for TXM by e.g.

rejecting standing beliefs (classing them as not ‘mental’)

hence sidestepping the parity considerations.

If only what is active and conscious here and now is

mental, then the physical base of mind (thus reduced)

plausibly does shrink back to well within the bounds of

skin and skull….

But restricting the mental/cognitive to the

occurrent and conscious is a drastic step

It renders huge swathes of crucial in-head

processing non-mental.

Do we really want to avoid cognitive ‘bloat’ at the

cost of shrinking the mind so dramatically?

This seems scientifically unwarranted and

ethically dubious…

A Closing Story: Deacon

Patrick Jones

Jones suffers severe

memory impairments as

a result of repeated

traumatic brain injury.

Yet he lives a surprisingly

normal life as a working

catholic deacon in

Colorado Springs.

This is not due to any

super hi-tech interventions.

Jones relies upon a combination of the popular

software Evernote, a Mac program for visualization

called Curio, and an iPhone.

Courtesy of these off-the-shelf packages and

devices Jones is able to create massive webs of

interlinked notes and pointers that allow the

saving, searching, retrieving, and diagramming of his

own contacts, thoughts, meetings, decisions,

and interactions.

See “What if HM had a Blackberry?” Gary Marcus,

Psychology Today, December 2008

Amazingly, it is only in virtue of this whole up-and-

running web of structure that he able to recall who

he has spoken with, what was decided, and so

on.

Yet he carries through complex long-term projects of

pastoral care with incredible skill, optimism, and

good humour.

Patrick’s mental life is now built (it seems to me)

upon a foundation of both biological and non-

biological processing and storage.

If you were to hack into and destroy his EVERNOTE

records, that would be a crime against the person,

not merely a crime against his cyber-property.

It would be tantamount, as Dan Dennett once

commented, to inflicting brain damage on someone

while they sleep.

Issues of ownership and legal protection must

soon loom here.

Do Patrick’s software providers have the right to

delete his records if he fails to keep up

payments?

Do they have the right to cease to support old

software, even if it has become deeply dovetailed

with an ageing human’s biological brain?

What if Patrick and his spouse create a shared

resource then split up?

Issues like these will surely arise as our

cognitive technologies grow better and better,

and the ongoing dovetailing of brains and

technologies becomes more and more

pronounced.

Our laws, educational practice, and social

policy need to plan for a near-future in which

individual minds are web-extended,

technology-permeated artifacts, apt for all

kinds of transformation, repair, extension,

and enhancement

Maybe the best way to do so

is start by recognizing that it’s

cognitive technologies all the

way down….