Should the mind be extended?

A recent trend in cognitive science (as well as other areas of psychology) has been the call for an appreciation of the “extended mind.” This has been formulated in multiple ways, using different terms. For the present purposes I’m grouping all of these together because I want to discuss the basic idea....which is that our ordinary understanding of the mind as limited (or perhaps even more limited) by the boundaries of the skin. The term the extended mind has been used by Andy Clark and David Chalmers to describe this idea, and I cannot argue against the fact that they make a very convincing case.

Their argument is that to say that the cognitive processes of the individual person are contained by the skin (or in more extreme versions, by the brain) is to fail to appreciate the extent to which these processes continually extend beyond the skin. Clark and Chalmers give the example of a man with a memory disorder who has to use a notebook that he carries with him to remember basic facts. For example, when going to the MOMA, he uses this notebook to remember the address (53rd st). In contrast, the man’s wife has no memory disorder, needs no notebook, and can remember the address of the museum off the top of her head. Clark and Chalmers’ point is that while the processes of memory look different in the man and wife, these are actually superficial differences, and the basic processes are much the same. Even if we have no memory disorder, we can all think of situations in which we don’t remember knowledge internally, but keep it inscribed in the world in a way that allows for convenient, seamless retrieval. This applies to cases beyond those involving factual knowledge like the example above. Clark gives repeated examples of how people reorganize the environment to facilitate memory, e.g., when we are cleaning vegetable, we may put the already cleaned vegetables in a separate pile to aid our memory. Further examples of this kind of extended cognition can be found in the work of Sylvia Scribner and Jean Lave.

While there have been arguments that external and internal memory are actually importantly different processes, I want to address a separate aspect of these extended mind claims: the very idea of a boundary between mind and non-mind.

What is the nature of such a boundary? While it may actually be conceived in terms of a specific physical boundary (e.g., the skin), it’s actually the ascription of boundary-ness to a specific region of physical space. The idea of mental and non-mental is a product of our symbolic culture, rather than a preexisting thing in the world.

If we understand it in this way, the need to delineate it is understood differently. Rather than being an unavoidable distinction whose specific boundaries may be negotiated, the distinction becomes the result of the practical need for a boundary. It is therefore something in the world that has been constructed for a specific purpose, but need not be there for all purposes. If we want to discard it or disregard it, we may.

Seen like this, the idea of the extended mind may be called into question. Not because there has been solid evidence in favor of the mind stopping at the skin, but because making boundaries around the mind has no clear purpose when we are talking about cognitive processes. Rather than expanding the boundaries of the mind, a more practical option seems to disregard the idea of boundaries in the first place when talking about cognition. The availability of information in today’s world (at any given point in time) requires us to extend the boundaries of the mind in revolutionary and expansive new ways. If we are to take a historical approach, then the boundaries of the mind extend even further. Why should our mind not encompass other minds, even if these are the minds of people who have died long before we were born, but who somehow influenced us? For the sake of practicality, I would have to argue that the idea of a boundary for the mind is of little practical use for cognitive science.

With practicality in mind, it is useful to reexplore the traditional conception of the non-extended mind; the mind which stops at the skin. In spite of Clark and Chalmer’s convincing argument, this way of putting a boundary on the mind is, for practical purposes, almost essential. The value of this way of delineating the mind lies in the physical affordances of the body and the external world. Despite the fact that parts of the external world (like notebooks) can serve as extensions of our mind, they are inherently not connected to us physically. We may bring a notebook with us, or we may not. In contrast, we have no option of forgetting our arms or legs. By not including these things in our idea of a “person” or their “mind” we provide a built in way to remember that they must be talked about separately because they can be forgotten or misplaced. If we didn’t do this, our ability to conveniently coordinate interpersonal activity would be hindered because the “person” would never be a clear entity.