This week my metaphysics students and I are beginning with Andy Clark’s Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again. Before jumping into Being There, we are first reading “The Extended Mind“, an article co-authored with David Chalmers where they first introduced the extended mind hypothesis. Chalmers and Clark are asking very basic and fundamental questions such as “what is cognition?”, “what is mind?”, “what are beliefs?”, and “what is a self?” Yet the basic nature of these questions yields answers that are, in my view, pathbreaking and of the utmost significance for not only cognitive science and philosophy of mind, but also for ethics and social and political thought. To be sure, there are others that touch on the sort of thesis that Chalmers and Clark put forward (Haraway, Stengers, and Latour immediately come to mind), but none, in my reading experience, in quite such a dramatic way as they do.
Marx famously argued that the essence of human beings consists both in production and in producing our own essence. In making this claim, Marx immediately problematized the assumption that we are all human in the same way, transforming the signifier human into– using Deleuze’s language –an “empty square” or moving target, such that we can no longer appeal to some unchanging essence of the human that would be the same under all historical periods and modes of production. To say that the essence of humans is production and that humans produce their own essence through their form of production is to effectively undermine the idea of a transhistorical and unchanging essence of humans. No doubt it is this thesis that would lead Marx to abandon the alienation hypothesis of his early work, for if there is no abiding essence of the human then it is difficult to defend a coherent concept of alienation. As a consequence, it becomes necessary to envision political engagement in terms different from those of emancipation.
read on!
While we might argue against Marx’s restriction of productive-essence to humans, he nonetheless touches on something very close to what Chalmers and Clark are getting at in their “extended mind” hypothesis. Posing the question “where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin?”, Chalmers and Clark contest the thesis that mind is demarcated by what is within the skin and in the skull. Instead, they argue for what they call an “active externalism” that is “…based on the active role of the environment in driving cognitive processes.” In short, Chalmers and Clark argue that cognition, belief, mind, and self are not restricted to what takes place in the skull or in consciousness, but rather that often (and perhaps predominantly) they are the result of coupling of brain and environment. In this regard, cognition wouldn’t be restricted to what takes place in the head.
Chalmers and Clark provide an excellent example of what they’re getting at in terms of the game Scrabble. The… “choice of words in Scrabble… [is] the outcome of an extended cognitive process involving the rearrangement of tiles on [the] tray.” To be sure, something similar can be done in the head alone without rearranging the tiles, but the Clark and Chalmers contend suffers in its ability to do these sorts of activities. As a consequence, they conclude that “[i]n a very real sense, the re-arrangement of tiles on the tray is not a part of action [my emphasis]; it is part of thought.” In other words, given this example, we might wish to argue that the rearranging of the tiles is merely an “action” and that the real cognitive work is taking place in the head, but Clark and Chalmers argue that the tiles are themselves an integral role in the thought or cognition. As they remark, “[t]he external features of a coupled system play an ineliminable role– if we retain internal structure but change the external features, behavior may change completely. The external features here are just as causally relevant as typical internal features of the brain.”
It is not simply that these external objects change behavior, but that the very powers of cognition are variable depending on the objects with which we’re coupled. The example of body-brains coupled with Scrabble tiles is trivial; especially since there might be only a marginal difference between the person that plays the game of Scrabble entirely in his head and the other person that re-arranges their tiles as a way of finding words. Yet when we begin to explore the wide range of technologies we interact with both today and throughout history we might very well discover that there are profound differences in cognition between different tool users both today and throughout history. This, I take it, is what thinkers such as Haraway, Stengers, Latour, Marx (in his writings on technology), Deleuze and Guattari in their assemblage theory, Kittler, Ong, and Stiegler are trying to get at in their meditations of technology. We still tend to assume a transhistorical essence of human cognition behind couplings that would allow us to say that we’re all the same, but it could be that there are as many “species” of “humans” as there are systems of technology in which human bodies are embedded. If this is the case, then we desperately need a set of categories for investigating these different “species” and uncovering their various capacities. We need to develop an ontology that allows us to overcome the Aristotlean reduction of technologies to mere “instruments” where humans alone project ends on technologies without the technologies themselves being full-blown contributors to the form cognition takes.
Chalmers and Clark also extend this hypothesis to beliefs. Our folk psychology suggests to us that a belief must be something in the head, such that a person carries it about with them at all times. However, comparing a so-called “normal” person with a person who suffers from Alzheimer’s and who relies on things written down in a notebook in the world, they argue that no difference in role can be detected between the person who relies on brain-memory alone and the person who relies on the notebook. We might object that the person who relies on brain-memory alone can “pull up” their belief on any occasion. However, this isn’t true. In periods of fatigue or when suffering from a hangover or when drunk or sick the person might not be able to pull up the belief. Do we thereby suggest that the person has ceased believing such things? If not, then why do we suggest that the Alzheimer’s patient doesn’t really believe in what he’s written down in his notebook when, in fact, that notebook serves a functionally identical role to beliefs stored in memory?
In fact, their point about belief is not an “exotic” case restricted to people who suffer from Alzheimer’s. As Plato despaired long ago in Phaedrus (and as Stiegler curiously seems to repeat in his meditations on technology), there’s a very real sense in which we’re all like the Alzheimer’s patient with respect to our beliefs. Scores of my belief are not stored in the “wetware” of my brain, but rather are stored right here on this blog, in my articles, in recorded talks I’ve given, in my books, and so on. I do not have many of these beliefs recorded in detail at all, but rather offload these beliefs on to an external medium that stores them in my stead. Likewise, there are many beliefs I posses without having ever directly thought about them, without having been exposed to them, and without being able to recall them. For example, there are all sorts of things I believe about evolutionary biology, chemistry, physics, genetics, and so on, without having ever been directly exposed to these things. Howso? At a very general level I believe in the truth of chemistry, evolutionary biology, genetics, mathematics, etc., but I don’t directly know all the details of these disciplines. Nonetheless, when wondering about some specific issue, matter, or concept pertaining to these themes, I would have no hesitation consulting a book or reputable websites on the internet to discover what it is that I believe.
And when I say that I would consult the internet or a book to discover what I do believe on these issues, I don’t mean that I would gather all these competing perspectives on these issues and then judge which one I agree with, but rather, it’s likely that there are a vast number of things that I would take as being true without question based on my belief that these sciences are true. Thus, for example, I wouldn’t debate over whether iron, in fact, has such and such an atomic weight. Nor would I look for opposing points of view on the atomic weight of iron. I would simply take it for granted that what I read in this textbook is, in fact, the atomic weight of iron (and, of course, this doesn’t preclude the possibility of re-evaluating these externalized beliefs at a later point). I had never learned the atomic weight of iron before, I had never known it, it had never passed before my consciousness; yet like the things recorded in the Alzheimer patient’s notebook, it nonetheless seems that I believe that iron has such and such an atomic weight.
This point about the nature of beliefs has, I think, tremendous consequences for critical theory and, in particular, ideology critique. If it is true that 1) many of our beliefs are actually external to our internal world, off-loaded on to the internet, books, authorities we identify with, etc, and 2) that many of the beliefs that we have are beliefs that we’ve never actually learned, had before our consciousness, directly assented to, etc., then it might be that the project of “debunking” is of limited value. Here I’m always struck by the example of religion. For many hundreds of years, for example, the Catholic lay had no idea what they were hearing during their mass, what was being read to them from the Bible, what their theology was, etc. In many respects, a variant of this situation is true of many Catholics today (having grown up in a heavily Catholic context, I’ve always been struck by how my Catholic family members, relatives, and friends would joke “I don’t know the Bible, I’m a Catholic!”). Likewise, here in the heavily fundamentalist and evangelical Texas, I’m always struck by how so many of my students can be deeply involved in their churches, yet know little of the Bible, the theology of their particular denomination of Christianity, and endorse things that are directly at odds with the theology of their religion such as the ideas defended in the “documentary” What the Bleep…?. Do these people believe the doctrine of their church or not? The extended mind hypothesis would claim that they do.
Critical theory and ideology critique spends a lot of time “debunking”, while a more traditional version of Enlightenment critique spends a lot of time demonstrating that certain truth-claims are in fact false or mythological. Neither of these models of critique should disappear and they certainly have their value; however, it may be that if belief is often external in this way, then debunking and demonstrating falsehood with have diminishing returns because conscious belief is not the primary mechanism that binds people to certain social systems. Rather, it seems that identification with many institutions or social formations is every bit as much a mechanism that binds people to oppressive systems as conscious belief. If that’s the case then a major strategy for undermining certain social formations would consist in the question of how to produce dis-identification. And here, following on the tails of John Protevi and Massumi’s work on political affect, it could be that the mechanisms that preside over identification with a social assemblage have very little to do with conscious belief in the truth-value of the social formation’s “official” position. For example, the reason a person sticks with a particular church might have less to do with people actually believing the truth-claims of the religion, and a lot to do with embedded family relationships, romantic relations, friendships, job considerations, etc., within which the person is enmeshed. The person here would “believe” because they are identified affectively with these relationships, not with the doxa of theology. Along these lines, Helen de Cruz, over at New Apps, has written a fascinating post on atheist clergy(!!!) that do not leave their religion despite having lost faith in its claims. When looked at through the lens of the extended mind hypothesis, the sort of debunking advocated by a lot of critical theory and ideology critique looks increasingly limited. To this we would also have to add the way in which we become entangled in the physical objects and environment of our life around us, fully cognizant of how certain forms of life suck, but unsure of how to disentangle ourselves from the sort of world that we’ve built and been born into.
Larval Subjects . 
November 8, 2011 at 7:28 am
Nice post, with lots of angles to reflect on. Just wanted to comment briefly on the following passage:
“We still tend to assume a transhistorical essence of human cognition behind couplings that would allow us to say that we’re all the same, but it could be that there are as many “species” of “humans” as there are systems of technology in which human bodies are embedded. If this is the case, then we desperately need a set of categories for investigating these different “species” and uncovering their various capacities. We need to develop an ontology that allows us to overcome the Aristotlean reduction of technologies to mere “instruments” where humans alone project ends on technologies without the technologies themselves being full-blown contributors to the form cognition takes.”
As you rightly point out, there is a long line of thinkers moving in this direction, including Haraway, Stengers, Latour, Marx, D & G, Kittler, Ong, and Stiegler. One could add Nietzsche (I’m thinking especially about the idea that the pen or writing instrument thinks in concert with the writer–an idea that Heidegger takes up later in his reflections on the typewriter–which is taken up in turn by Kittler). Of course, this diverse group of thinkers offers lots of ways to approach the couplings of humans and nonhumans that you’re discussing here, and I don’t think they all reduce to a common denominator (which is a good thing). By emphasizing the Nietzsche, Heidegger, Kittler line, I am implicitly endorsing a media-theoretical or media-philosophical approach (which conceives media not as neutral channels or, in Latour’s term, “intermediaries” but as active “mediators” of agency). Following this trajectory, I agree completely with you that we need to develop an ontology that allows us to overcome the reduction of technologies to instruments (and again, lots of names come to mind, including Andrew Pickering, Mark Hansen, and some of the ones you already mentioned). What I’m not so sure about, though, is whether it follows (or is compatible with these ideas) that “we desperately need a set of categories for investigating these different “species” and uncovering their various capacities.” Don’t get me wrong: there’s something to be said for breaking with the idea of a single, unified species, but the question is then whether there are discrete (human-technological) species at all that could be categorized according to some typology. The alternative remains that there is rather a continuum. I’m not proposing an answer here, just pointing out that the alternative remains open as a possibility. But intuitively, I would tend to think that a typology of species will not be possible unless clearly demarcated historical blocs of human-technological intertwining can be identified–different world-historical “ages.” But since I think that such an idea will likely be complicated by overlaps between different types of coupling that coexist at a given time across societal groupings (differential “modernization” speeds, for example), within given societies (correlated with class and gender differences, for example), and even within concrete individuals (who may enact one sort of human-technological coupling at work and another at home), I am skeptical about this proposition.
Regardless, this does not damage the rest of what you write. I just think it opens up a useful and challenging avenue of thought that might help us think about some of the fundamental issues involved. Again, I have no determinate answers here, but I think a media-philosophical approach is of value. I have grappled with some of these issues in the context of cinema and what I call the “anthropotechnical interface.” If you’re interested, the introductory chapter can be found here: http://bit.ly/sDtj88
Anyway, thanks again for the thought-provoking post!
November 8, 2011 at 10:24 am
On the subject of Latour’s relation to distributed cognition, he wrote a review of Ed Hutchins’ ‘Cognition in the Wild’ that spells out some clear points of agreement (though he disagrees with elements of Hutchins’ approach, largely because it remains tacitly anthropocentric insofar as objects only extend and distribute humans and not other objects):
http://www.bruno-latour.fr/poparticles/poparticle/p062.html
November 8, 2011 at 12:34 pm
Good post. Today the idea of the extended mind is all the rage – I think there’s at least a dozen books out on the topic now. The idea is rather sort of old (depending on precisely how you define it, of course) and it is also coupled to a similar idea of extended organism: that the organism, too, is not a self-enclosed, bounded entity separate from the environment. I wrote a small, simple paper on that, it’s online here:
http://www.ut.ee/hortussemioticus/6_2010/rattasepp.html
But an especially brilliant – because rather quite funny – paper on roughly the idea of “extended mind” was published by the now long forgotten philosopher and social theorists Arthur Bentley, titled ‘The Human Skin: Philosophy’s Last Line of Defence’, in 1941:
“Assuredly skin is a proper subject for examination in connection with the processes of knowledge, and assuredly matter-of-fact observation and report is appropriate to it. If there is a “knower” and if there is a “known,” if one of these lies apart from the other and if there is a process of “knowing” which involves both, then skin lies somewhere along the line of march, and must be taken into account.
The philosopher, having no open truck with skin, leaps from essence to essence-from the essential knower to the essentially known. He leaps with never so much as the twitch of an eye-lash to mark that he glimpses anything of significance lying in between. Yet it is simple to show that skin-and indeed skin in its primitive anatomical character-dominates every position the philosopher occupies and every decision he makes.”
And so on. Pretty funny, and spot on, considering how old the paper is.
November 9, 2011 at 9:37 am
Gregory Bateson is the (often unacknowledged) grandfather of extended mind thinking. There is a lovely description, in Mind and Nature, of the circuit of mind that is a man chopping down a tree, how the man is only one node in the circuit of information that runs through brain nerve muscle axe air wood…of course its first generation cybernetic thinking, and you can still feel this kind of cybernetics in Andy Clarks work, and in his analysis of how the blue fin tuna manages to move so fast through participating in a similarly extended environmental loop, this time using the environment to augment physical capacity. Bateson is due for a reappraisal.
November 9, 2011 at 1:50 pm
I wonder how far the extended mind thesis (EMT) challenges the idea of a distinctive human nature or a “transhistorical essence of human cognition “? If EMT is true, then some mental processes which express the kind of powers that humanists valorise – autonomy, say – will be constituted by social or physical things outside the head. If these have the same functional role in choosing or deliberating, say, as internal states or bits might have in other circumstances, then the parity principle just says that they have the same role in my mental life.
So if deliberating with internally realized concepts, say, realizes my autonomy, then, by parity, so would deliberating with externally realized concepts. If there is an important difference between these two cases, then the parity principle tells us that it isn’t a mental one! So there could be broad invariants in human cognition which are not purely biological but characterize systems composed of biological and cultural/technological bits. Of course, technologies and cultures change, so if there are such invariants we can expect them to be fairly general. But then that’s what most apologists for human nature would claim anyway.
November 9, 2011 at 4:26 pm
David,
That’s an interesting question. When I make these remarks I always have the plasticity of brain as described by neurology in the back of my mind, so I’m working on the assumption that the “media” or objects we engage with play a significant role in how brain develops and that brains will thus be different for people enmeshed in different instrumental milieus. You’d probably be able to speak better about this than I give your wide background in neurology and the way you’ve melded it with Derrida.
November 10, 2011 at 3:31 pm
I’ve always been so struck by this notion (is it an ideology?) that cognition goes on “in the brain.” It’s like saying the other person I love is “in my heart”– at best, a metaphor, that immediately betrays a disjunction or even a constitutive severance. Of course, no one acts like things go on “in the brain”– not unlike churchgoers who don’t need doxa or theology or much of anything to “believe.”
What drives us to write? I think this constant disjunction between the truth-value or truth-claim and their embeddedness. The writer chooses to write so that, although perhaps its impossible, their “truth-claim” is their “life-practice.” Or simply, their word is their world. You’ve written here, “Scores of my belief are not stored in the “wetware” of my brain, but rather are stored right here on this blog, in my articles, in recorded talks I’ve given, in my books, and so on.” I’d only say that, while it’s true something is stored, I’d say there’s always a gap. The truth-claim comes through so many channels, the first one being your own cognition, that it would seem only to be true in the instant, infinitely plural, of claiming, such that the claim itself is never true. Here, I’d want to bend “truth” away from knowledge again, away from claims, and go toward the idea that “truth is existence” (which I find similar to what you’ve said elsewhere: “this world is enough”).
As for producing dis-identification, I also think you are spot on. But this implies (I think above all it implies this for the writer) that this dis-identification be lived (written traces draw you back, help you remember why its so important, and not just on the level of knowledge, but on the level of feeling, pleasure, even presence). Living disidentification, not unlike something a kind analysis of Buddhism would call for — an active confrontation with failures, an active exposure and relationship, and admission of vulnerabilities and hopes. But contrary to Buddhism, perhaps, jumping ever further into the tension between truth-claim and life-practice, not resting content with the empty square as a truth, but taking it upon oneself, like you say, to produce this nothing, this nil.
Writing arrives because everything acts like “empty square” — human, truth, existence, “I.” In my view, writing begins in utter forgetfulness, utter flux. It comes absolutely from elsewhere (not from some brain synapse, not from my store of knowledge, not from authority, not from some relation to objects– or at least not only these things)– and so is uncertain about it, even as it claims it true. But it claims it true only in light of its own movement. As Nancy says when questioned about the “meaning” he gives to freedom in his book on the topic, he says he knows very well there is no “semantic value,” and that it is really the strategic placement that is concerned: the way it resonates with other words (being, community, existence, generosity, gift) is its meaning. But not as if they resonated in the text within itself: it requires that another existence be put at stake in them, or follow that texts movement of dis-identification. It does the writer no good to produce it, or even attempt to; the text must be dis-identification itself, such that the only way it can be truly read is by putting dis-identification into work. Everything else is just commentary, which pretends that there is a critic or a real academic community that has to be “answered to.” But this, just like the “brain” is just a straw-man. Everything “manifests” the empty square. To map out or write out or draw out the inconsistency of these symbolic orders is to push them to their breaking point by making manifest, or just letting happen, its constitutive dissatisfaction with itself, its constitutive dis-identification.
We’re called to make our address in such a way that tries to fix nothing, repair nothing, re-route nothing. To accept the irreparability of the world is more deceptive of a task than we think– we are always imagining enemies, strawmen, arguments of no account. You say it will at the end of your post: “…unsure of how to disentangle ourselves from the sort of world that we’ve built and been born into.” You have to admit that nothing could be more important.
November 11, 2011 at 12:45 am
I used to play piano and was told not to tap my foot as I played. Why? Because not tapping would force me to develop an internal timekeeper.
This was the explicit goal. Contrast that with musicians who create danceable music by intentionally “feeling” it. My experience playing is that it’s the exact same process in reverse; you set off a tiny dance in your body as you play, transfer it into the music via using it’s timings, sometimes adjusting the melody to fit in more dimensions of rhythm.
In either situation you are intentionally expanding and contracting the mental loop controlling the rhythm of your piece. Is it regular and based on internalising a metrenome (checking against internal neural processes/hearing your heartbeat)? Does it reflect the melody itself (ear), or the most comfortable way to play each section (hand+key mobility)?
You can choose how extended you are, by inhibiting or encouraging those feedback loops. But even as it affects dependence, it affects ability. Now I mostly improvise by humming and singing, rather than play the piano, because of time/space constraints, but I’m limited in the number of “voices” I can simultaniously produce, even mentally.
November 11, 2011 at 4:08 pm
Hi Levi,
Well, I’m not arguing for a human essence exactly. I think the right way of understanding humanness is probably the assemblage approach you set out in an earlier post on social class which really resonated with me: that is as a set of sorting mechanisms which define roughly what belongs to the higher-scale individual we call homo sapiens.
I’m sure you’re right about plasticity. In a really useful article “Evolutionary Psychology, Meet Developmental
Neurobiology: Against Promiscuous Modularity”, Valerie Hardcastle and David Buller point out that there are just too many connections (trillions) to be coded for in our DNA. We come into the world with many-many interneural connections which need to be “pruned” by experience to create a joined-up nervous system. There computer models called Self-organizing feature maps (SOFM’s) which suggest how some of this might be accomplished by highly general competitive learning algorithms.
That said, it seems reasonable to suppose that there are human-specific traits that get us to the point where we can be moulded by culture and tech. The psychologist Michael Tomasello has argued that human children are exceptionally good at picking up social norms compared even to our closest primate cousins. I also suspect that the structural features common to languages and cultures remain far more important than minutiae of smartphones or automobiles for moulding a recognizably human brain. This may not always be the case of course…
November 14, 2011 at 7:42 am
You make me think of the simple line ‘We are what surrounds us’ written by Anaïs Nin
November 17, 2011 at 3:57 pm
I have to say the last part sounds like you’re dipping your toes into traditional liberal sociology: Durkheim, Weber etc, but applying the extended mind theory to it (I guess Luhmann would be a link to this discourse, and Habermas and other Frankfurt School), when ideas of status as opposed to class: that is one’s associations that lead to elective affinities – one’s sports club, PTA, university etc as opposed to economic class that is the relation to the means of production, which in that sociological discourse are linked but oft treated separatley.
[seriously generalising from working groups here] So perhaps whilst mind is associated foremost with the body in materialist discourse, but can be understood through one’s psychological history in psychoanalysis ( a reverse extension – we say our current mental state is affected by our past but seem unable to suggest we then go on to affect and be affected – is this the beautiful soul? the purpose of psychoanalysis?), whilst Marxist analysis is happy to link consciousness in some sense to the economy, the other associations would be dealt with by the other areas of sociology from Habermas to Parsons etc.
although Marxism readily admits technology through the relation with the economy, in the use of a golf club as an apparatus of elitist mental cognition we may find more fruit in Parsons and Luhmann (as long as we nod to Gramsci whilst picking the fruit – he’s the look out for this type of scrumping). :-)
November 17, 2011 at 4:14 pm
I’m not sure why pointing out certain things about the externality of belief excludes things like economy and production. Clearly the same thesis applies in the case of economy and production as people such as Marx and Jared Diamond have shown.
November 17, 2011 at 4:23 pm
In Deleuzian terms, after all, there is both a plane of expression and content. I’ve written a great deal on the plane of content (which I believe many contemporary critical theorists largely ignore) both on this blog, in The Democracy of Objects, and in my Speculations article entitled “On the Reality and Construction of Hyperobjects with Respect to Class”. Just hecause I don’t discuss that in this post doesn’t mean it’s not there. What I discuss here is anathama to anything Habermas argues as Habermas requires beliefs to be located in subjects in dialogues. This view is far closer to Zizek’s thesis that beliefs are not in us, but out there in the world.
November 19, 2011 at 4:34 am
to a mystic (i trust them far more than philosophers) consciousness is infinite and omnipresent, awareness is made of consciousness, its range of experience limited only by concepts created in mind …
the “no mind” of the mystic = infinitely extendable mind