Judging by a number of the comments in my Extended Mind and Political Theory post, there’s a lot of confusion as to just what the extended mind hypothesis is. Here is an excellent example of the confusion. One of the poster’s writes:
my “quibbling difficulties” (dismissiveness is always fun) are not with Clark; I think you need to reread my comments. I don’t like that he maintains the privilege of the mind (*it* is what extends, rather than anything else) but it’s *anything* but shocking.
The bolded portion of this passage is exactly the opposite of what Clark and others like Alva Noë are arguing. The thesis is not that mind extends itself into other things such as pencils and pieces of paper. Were this the case, then it would be perfectly appropriate to say that there’s nothing new here, because we would have minds on one side and the various things of the world on the other side. This would be a rather traditional view of mind standing opposed to world, such that mind projects itself on the world in a variety of ways. For example, in Hegel, the material world progressively comes to embody the mind in an externalized fashion. Here the picture that I draw or the tool that I fashion is an externalization of the interior space of my mind. Gradually the world increasingly comes to carry the mark of this interior space through the fashioning of matter.
read on!
The extended mind hypothesis, by contrast, is very different. In the case of the traditional understanding of mind, mind is one component in the assemblage. Here minds remain the same regardless of the assemblage they enter into. Under this theory, when I use a computer or a hammer or paint a painting or write longhand or use a television remote, etc., my mind always remains the same. Mind is one thing– individuated by the boundaries of the body –whereas all of these media (computer, hammer, paintbrush, canvas, paper, pen, television remote, etc) are another thing. I can imprint these other things with the contents of my mind (as in the case of externalizing my thought writing), but that piece of writing is nonetheless something other than mind. It is, to put it in Hegel speak, an “alienated” image of mind.
Within the framework of the extended mind hypothesis, mind is individuated in an entirely different way. Here mind is not a component in an assemblage, but rather mind is quite literally the assemblage itself. It’s not mind that is doing the extending, as Wildly suggests, but rather mind is extended. Mind is extended across brain, body, and the environment. Or alternatively, mind is environment+brain+body. It’s not located in any one of these components. Thus, when I sit down to solve a complex multiplication problem using pencil and paper, it is not that my mind is extending itself into this pencil and paper, nor is it that the pencil and paper are merely traces of internal operations of my mind, but rather it’s that mind is this assemblage of pencil+paper+brain+body. The unit mind = pencil+paper+brain+body. Likewise, when I turn to solve the same multiplication problem using a calculator, my mind doesn’t remain the same. This is so precisely because mind isn’t a component, but is the assemblage itself. Consequently, in the assemblage calculator+brain+body a new mind has come into being.
Now part of the point here is that these assemblages deserve to be called distinct minds because they have powers or capacities that other minds do not have. The pencil and paper are not simply props or vehicles of my internal mental processes, rather they allow me to do things that I couldn’t otherwise do. This point can be made a bit more clearly with reference to Chalmers’s example of the iPhone in his forward to Clark’s Supersizing the Mind. Chalmer’s makes the point that his iPhone is his memory. The iPhone is not a trace of his internal memory, nor a mere prop for his internal memory, but quite literally it is is memory. Chalmers’s memory is quite literally out there in the world rather than in his head. Phone numbers, notes, and all the information he can retrieve on the internet is there on the iPhone, not in his head. Under these circumstances, mind functions in a different way than in the case of those that use internalized brain memory to remember. Moreover, there are certain things that a mind that has an iPhone as one of its components is capable of doing that a mind without such a component cannot. These scaffoldings structure behavior and existence in unique ways.
Here there’s a profound connection between the conception of mind proposed by Clark and others, and the work of theorists such as Marshall McLuhan and Eric Havelock. Among other things, McLuhan and Havelock before him, argued that the invention of writing had a profound impact on the very nature of our minds and experiences of the world. In briefly unfolding this thesis, we can start by talking about simple things like memory. Memory functions in a different way in pre-literate cultures. Because everything must be stored in the internal space of the brain, memory techniques adaptive to the features and limitations of the brain must be developed. This is why cultural transmission takes the form of rhythmic poetry and repetitive refrains characterize this sort of cultural transmission. There’s something about the poetic refrain that can be more easily remembered than other types of conceptual thought, in the same way that the first few notes of a song immediately bring to mind the rest. However, this sort of memory has a number of limitations. It does a very poor job, for example, in allowing us to think abstractly, do geometrical proofs, do philosophy, etc., etc., etc.
The invention of writing changes things significantly. Hegel’s Science of Logic is not possible in the absence of writing for the simple reason that there’s no way to keep the Science of Logic in a brain. Rather, memory must become externalized, on the paper, for something like the Science of Logic to be possible. The paper here is not incidental, nor is it a mere prop or trace of internal thought, but rather it is a full-blown condition that generates an entirely new sort of thought and mind. We can do things on paper that we simply can’t do apart from paper.
McLuhan and Havlock attempt to show a whole series of profound consequences that follow from the invention of writing and the phonetic alphabet. They attempt to show, for example, how formal logic itself arises from writing. It will be recalled that in formal logic there is no time. Although we read the steps of a proof sequentially, those steps do not unfold in time in the way that the seed of a flower unfolds in time, rather all the steps are simultaneously there at once. As a result, things like formal paradoxes become possible. When people hear the Barber of Seville paradox, they’re often perplexed: “If the Barber of Seville cuts everyone’s hair except those who cut their own hair, who cuts the Barber’s hair?” How could this possibly be a paradox? The barber simply has someone else cut his own hair when he’s not cutting the hair of other people. This only becomes a paradox when propositions become timely and formal, such that they can’t simultaneously be true. Yet this timelessness comes into being as a result of existing on a piece of paper at the same time (many “contradictions” are of this sort… They arise from the extinction of time produced as a side-effect of writing). Here a new type of mind has emerged as a result of the assemblage brain+body+paper+writing. Mind isn’t one of those components– the brain, for example –but is the assemblage itself.
Now what I tried to suggest, in my earlier post, is that this conception of mind leads to significant revisions of how we pose social and political questions. As I noted earlier, one of the most distinctive features of the extended mind hypothesis is that there is no “constant mind” that remains the same mind as elements of the assemblage shift. The mind that involves the component of a computer is a different mind than the mind that uses the component of a piece of paper. Put differently, I don’t have a mind that is the same when using computer or paper. These are rather two minds precisely because mind is not that which resides inside a sack of flesh or the body, but rather is the assemblage itself. This means that in the framework of social and political theory, we’ll have many more units of analysis than we might initially think. Units of analysis or agents will be individuated not by bodies, but by assemblages involving all sorts of media. Just because I have a particular body that resembles another body (“humans”), we will be unable to say that these are the same sort of political subjects because these bodies might very well belong to very different assemblages of media and thereby be very different agents or minds. A farmer and a factory worker, for example, would be two entirely different species because of the assemblages to which they belong.
All of this is very schematic at this point because I’m groping for ways to even begin posing these questions. Once the reading group begins we’ll get into the nuts and bolts of Clark’s theory, bringing to light a number of his reasons for these strange claims. One of the things I like about Clark as opposed to, say, McLuhan, is that he provides an extremely solid foundation for his claims based on a good deal of empirical research surrounding limitations of brains and bodies. It will be recalled that for McLuhan all media enhance and obscure various sense-modalities of the body by extending the body and senses in a variety of ways. In many respects, McLuhan merely gestures at this, drawing heavily on Merleau-Ponty and Husserl, whereas Clark gives us the details of how it is so. However, perhaps the biggest difference is that where we still find the whiff of an unchanging human subject lurking in the background of thinkers such as McLuhan, Merleau-Ponty, Marx, and certainly Husserl such that if the agent were simply detached from these assemblages these agents would all share a common essence, in Clark et. al. we instead get an account that completely undermines this thesis, presenting a thoroughly ecological account of minds that are to be individuated by assemblages not by a human essence. This leads to an entirely different set of questions and concepts.
Larval Subjects . 
May 8, 2011 at 9:55 pm
What a feast. I’m studying LNC today and what you say about time makes a lot of sense.
May 9, 2011 at 12:16 am
This brings some serious questions and considerations to ‘mind’.
1) What are the implications for pan-psychic theories in OOP? Although Harman and Bogost have showed some passing interest in this avenue, Morton seems to suggest a very deflationary pan-psychic account of the mind that sees mental activity as mere information processing. Thus, a sea shore records the ocean waves when the waves wash against the sand. This recording is a form of memory and cognition. Applied to more complex self-conscious entities, this processing is simply more elaborate. On the other hand, I have a hard time seeing how Clark’s view would square with these pan-psychic ideas unless we were to suggest that these various interactions between all objects constitute minds. Pan-psychic models seem to favor an internalized, traditional view of the mind, whereas Clark’s model makes internalized accounts obsolete.
2) This could have some strange ethico-political considerations. The political can no longer be considered the mere act of squabbling humans, but an entire sticky network of objects forming ideological minds. Consider: wars between nations can now be literally seen as wars between nations, if we now consider such nations to be massive objects composed of zillions of objects, from its people to its pencil sharpeners and pop-up ads.
3) What are the limits of these minds, if any? Obviously the computational power of the minds would depend on the objects involved, especially the processing capacities of the brain, but I wonder what the boundary of a mental event is? I am sitting in a small room right now, are the walls the limit of the thought or I am missing something? Even these extended minds seem to have a central ‘location’ per se, hence the reason I think most would assume the mind is limited to the stuff between our ears. But perhaps this is simply a bias of the senses, which are of course located around the brain.
4) It would also force us to change the way we talk about the mind in everyday conversations. We can no longer say “the pain is all in your head” or something like that, seeing as the ‘pain’ is an object caught somewhere in the assemblage. For instance, if I place my hand on a stove, the stove is not inside of my brain, nor is my hand, nor are my nerve endings, so why would I suddenly assume that pain and burning are inside of my brain? Clark would suggest that it isn’t ‘inside’ of my brain at all, but that it is inside of ‘my’ mind, an object among the hand, stove, and so on.
May 9, 2011 at 6:25 am
I’ve responded to this point on the other post, but just to reiterate: my point is that the phrase ‘extended mind’ does imply *extension*, that is, a moving out from a particular location. Clark uses this term, from what I gather, as a response to other, older theories of mind, ‘unextended’ ones, and as such, he doesn’t challenge the centrality of ‘mind’ to their work, just reworks what mind means. Which leaves in place some of the problematic gendering which attends the mind/ body split.
May 9, 2011 at 12:21 pm
http://www.philosophy.ed.ac.uk/people/clark/publications.html
May 9, 2011 at 1:55 pm
“Likewise, when I turn to solve the same multiplication problem using a calculator, my mind doesn’t remain the same. ” I hope you’ll be expanding on the possessive pronoun ‘my’ (for the extended mind) in future posts. I’m not sure what to make it.
May 9, 2011 at 2:20 pm
Yeah, wjacobr, by the lights of the argument we shouldn’t be able to talk about “my” mind as if it’s abiding. It’s easy to slip in the use of language here.
May 9, 2011 at 7:52 pm
Yes, I’m gathering that the whole “extended mind” hypothesis is meant to challenge the old Cartesian dualism of res extensa (the world of bodies) from res cogitans (the world of mind). With respect to media, it would seem that things like smartphones and personal computers “extend” as a sort of mental prosthesis.
I’d personally be more interested in what the mind becomes during the act of sex, hetero-, homo- or otherwise. For example, would the mental assemblage be “brain + body + the other person’s body (their genitals or whatnot).” Transferring all the components of the example of manipulating a pencil, using the other body as either a sort of medium through which the body expresses itself or a utensil that it manipulates and “uses” — this would seem an awkward transference. Or a mindfuck, to put matters more plainly.
May 9, 2011 at 9:42 pm
I don’t know, this idea seems to challenge the centrality of the mind because I think in Clark’s case you have to say that mind is not really human, or exclusively human. It’s more of a cyborg or hybrid, it seems to me — a strange machine composed of skulls, grey matter, toothpicks, combs, origami swans and blades of grass.
My question for Wildly, I suppose, is what you suggest to replace or supplement or modify Clark’s theory with. (I’m in no way committed to Clark, I just wonder were your critique carries you in this respect.)
May 9, 2011 at 9:50 pm
I should add that I am going purely on Levi’s descriptions of Clark, so, naturally all of this is very tentative for me.
May 9, 2011 at 10:08 pm
Also, to say something totally off-topic (though related to conversations Levi and I have had), I strongly recommend the work of John D’Emilio, his essay on “Capitalism and Gay Identity.” I have a profound level of respect for D’Emilio.
May 10, 2011 at 5:44 am
Joseph, I’ve gone on and on about it in the other thread, so I won’t rehash here :-) But there are many names over there!
May 10, 2011 at 6:23 pm
“Just because I have a particular body that resembles another body (“humans”), we will be unable to say that these are the same sort of political subjects because these bodies might very well belong to very different assemblages of media and thereby be very different agents or minds. A farmer and a factory worker, for example, would be two entirely different species because of the assemblages to which they belong.”
–Doesn’t this kind of thing have some terrible implications as well? If you can say that a farmer and a factory worker would be “two entirely different species” couldn’t you then say the same for any two individuals enmeshed in different cultural-media complexes–i.e. members of two different ethnic-nations then become just as much “two different species”, and how, at that point, can you posit universal struggle toward equality, justice, etc. without simply reproducing the same type of nationalist identities we have seen in the past–and I say the same because blud-und-boden was also an extensional theory of identity, in which the volk IS the land and creates an extended volkgeist from this relationship. This clearly isn’t what you are saying here, but HOW is it avoided, using these same arguments?
Also, when you say that a human brain/body engaged with a computer and a human brain/body engaged with pen and paper are two entirely different minds, it seems an exaggeration and a slight contradiction of things like the quote above. There are clearly specie of mind, even in this system. Can’t both be said to be the same “type” of mind in one sense simply because the information flow is directed toward the same crux point in both situations (the human brain/body, which is clearly mining more information from the machine than the machine from it). Just because you can identify a gradient and differential layers in mind does not mean that we have to liquidate the idea of ego or ownership of mind any more than we have to liquidate the idea of species within contemporary evolutionary theory–there are gradients, yes, but there is also relative stasis. So, there are gradients between minds and types of mind, but there is also relative stasis when it comes to action and identity–a repeated neuronal pattern which is the background noise of constant sensory input into the nervous system, for instance.
As a third and final point, Ross mentioned how this does really seem to be a criticism of Cartesian subjectivity, res extensa, res cogitans. But this is problematic, since, in order to criticize subjectivity today you have to criticize today’s theories of subjectivity (Badiou, Zizek, etc.), not the perpetual straw man of Descartes. The explicitly Cartesian subject is not really taken seriously by anyone (even folk-psychology), yet it still seems to be the background “subject” being critiqued in much work like this. Even in the cognitive philosophy of people like Metzinger and Noe, their reliance on a critique of the folk-psychological self prevents this kind of detailed engagement with contemporary theory of subjectivity (which is, however we approach it, really Lacanian). As a Lacanian psychoanalyst, I’d be interested to know what you think about how this “extension” operates with regard to Lacanian subjectivity and where the mind exists in relation to that.
May 10, 2011 at 7:07 pm
stanley,
I think the first problem only arises if we hold that there can’t be species alliances and solidarities, but why would that be the case? Far from generating all sorts of antagonisms, I think such an awareness of these differences helps to cultivate a greater appreciation for the diversity of problems minds face and to avoid illicitly generalizing certain things in the way decried by Wildly.
Following the work of theorists like Catherine Malabou and Tom Sparrow (http://plasticbodies.wordpress.com/) your point only holds if brains remain the same across the media that they use. However, as we now know, brains are essentially plastic. The media that you use transform the nature of your neurological structure. The brains of pianists and of the deskilled factory workers that Ross reminds us of are significantly different. Consequently, in my view, we need to individuate agencies by what they can do, by the powers or capabilities that they possess as a result of their extended bodies, not as a function of superficial resemblances at the level of outward phenotype.
May 10, 2011 at 9:59 pm
[…] of contradictions or antagonisms internal to capitalism. Riffing on the extended mind hypothesis, Ross wonders whether the intertwined bodies of lovers constitute a mind. Here, in the dance of lovers, both […]
May 10, 2011 at 11:44 pm
I share the opinion of those who hold we should not read politics off of ontology:
“and how, at that point, can you posit universal struggle toward equality, justice, etc. without simply reproducing the same type of nationalist identities we have seen in the past–and I say the same because blud-und-boden was also an extensional theory of identity, in which the volk IS the land and creates an extended volkgeist”
What is fundamentally wrong with blut und boden besides the ‘evil’ associated with it? I think Levi’s arguement is far more nuanced: the farmer and the shoemaker, so on, are individual objects in their own right, they are have no farmer-essence or humanity-essence, their roles are determined by what sort of alliances they come into but they are not fixed roles. You could just as easily justify communism as you could ultranationalism, it merely depends on what objects are caught in the alliance.
May 11, 2011 at 12:54 am
@Levi:
regarding Malabou–I think she would be the first to note that plasticity does not mean infinite malleability, as plasticity is the dialectical interplay between the poles of plastic rigidity and plastique explosiveness. Yes, the media that we use change the base of our neural network, letting the brain change its own nature. None of this is in contest. But to jump from that to saying that individuals who use two types of media have entirely different minds is something very different. I’m simply saying that you can’t reduce it to a relativist gradient system, you have to acknowledge that, no matter what permutation the human brain can make in its own plastic structure, it can still be identified, across the board (even in cases of severe brain damage) as a human brain. Yes, there are gradients within it, but there is relative stasis when you compare the gradients within the potentiality of the human brain and those within the potentiality of the jellyfish nervous system. At the core, it’s true, I am holding that brains remain more or less the same across the use of different media, because they do. No amount of neural plasticity changes the fact that that neural plasticity is grounded in a physical body with a particular biochemical structure and a particular nervous system for sensory input. This is Metzinger’s point (which is not at all in contradiction of Malabou) about there being a constant pattern of background input from this nervous system into the brain which constitutes the proto-self model. Just flooding this system with a different form of sensory input(computer screen v. pen and pencil) does not change our own embodiment. Again, if we are going to differentiate agencies by what they do, and if this doing or capacity-for-doing is bedded in the plasticity of the brain, then doesn’t this infer that you can’t simply individuate agencies by what they do since they are plastic and can therefore change this doing–don’t you then have to ultimately differentiate them by that which grounds this plasticity–the SPACE of plasticity, or the subjective gap, even if always-already filled with the content of a “self”? This is the core point. I’m not trying to argue against plasticity or extended/distributed minds or the material nature of ideology. But when you say that
“this conception of mind leads to significant revisions of how we pose social and political questions.”– And specifically how it challenges the assumption of the central, owned mind — at this point I think we have to stop and ask how much this idea of centrality is the real reigning idea. Malabou notes again and again (citing Boltanski and Chiapello’s The New Spirit of Capitalism) that we are just as wrong to take the opposite position–to infer flexibility, the constant change and the market incentive to fully embrace becoming a “different mind” each time we are thrown into a different job. If centrality is the reigning idea in thought, flexibility is the reigning idea in practice. The core of my criticism is that it seems you are far too much on the side of flexibility (in what you have posted thus far) rather than plasticity.
May 11, 2011 at 1:15 am
Stanley,
I’m not sure where you’ve gotten the idea that I’m arguing for infinite malleability. Infinite variability yes. Infinite malleability no. You do stike me as rejecting the extended mind thesis because you seem to be equating minds with brains. But that’s not what minds are in this thesis. Brains are just one element in an assemblage that constitutes a mind. The mind is not the brain of a blind man, for example, but rather the blind man + his seeing eye dog. This assemblage is an irreducible unit. It seems to me that your worry arises from Marxist concerns about the conditions under which it’s possible to create solidarities. However, let’s remember that Marx says largely what I’m saying in my thesis. Marx directly says that the factory worker and the farmer are two different species. This is not, I think, a metaphor on his part. The milieu of the factory, for Marx, creates minds that have different powers or capacities than farmers (not only their skills and deskilled nature, but, Marx argues, the way they are trained as a proletariate army and come to embody a new form of collective work and organization). I think a difference between our respective positions is that you’re looking for a pre-existent ground for solidarities, a human essence, that would allow collective action to take place. My position, by contrast, is that such pre-existent grounds or essences don’t exist but rather that collectives and solidarities must be forged out of highly heterogeneous agencies.
May 11, 2011 at 1:17 am
@Drew
Even if you don’t think we should read politics off ontology, you have to admit that politics tends to try and ground itself there anyways.
I think it’s a good question: whether or not there is something fundamentally wrong with blut und boden. If there is, is there also something wrong with material theories of ideology? They seem similar enough.
I agree that it’s wrong to disavow any idea simply because the nazis used it–just as wrong as saying that any display of mass, coordinated gathering is fundamentally Fascist (especially when the Fascists stole it from the communists!). It’s only when you get so many elements and points of similarity that you can triangulate such a criticism. And I do think that we have to be utterly wary of things like ecofascism when we are trying to resuscitate many of the ideas which were originally ripe for cooptation into the 20th century Fascisms. So when we have panpsychism, revivals in naturphilosophie and vitalism, a cognitive science which, at its worst, is little better than digital phrenology–all tied together in an era ruled by fideism and the rise of actual proto-Fascist praxis in the U.S. and elsewhere, THEN I think you have to point out the potential dangers each of these things has presented in the past and if you are arguing them you have to state them in such a way that resists misinterpretation. So my point was to explicitly ask HOW such an argument resists becoming a justification for nationalist or ethnic essentialism.
I don’t see your point about essences, either. Blut und boden dictates that the essence of the national/ethnic spirit is the physical land–the alliance the bloodline has with its land. Therefore, if the land itself is tarnished or destroyed, this essence is itself tarnished and destroyed. This was the justification for the conservation efforts in German forests, the passage of animal rights laws and all of that. There was never any incorporeal essence to it. In this sense the “essence” of the shoemaker is the objects that he uses to make shoes and the action of his own body making them. I will admit that I fully believe in essences in this sense of the word, just like I fully believe in species in biology.
May 11, 2011 at 1:25 am
Just a couple additional points. Infinite plasticity would be absolute entropy. While this always threatens its just not something we see in living systems. Second, the difference between a blind man with a dog and a blind man without is not simply a difference in the presence or absence of the dog. There’s a real neurological difference between the two. There’s a strong body of neuro-cognitive research that shows that brains attached to bodies with protheses of various sorts undergo significant rewiring that gradually makes the prosthesis a seemless extension of the body experienced as a part of the body itself. This isn’t restricted to dramatic prostheses of people with artificial limbs, machinic implants, and seeing eye dogs but seems to be a regular feature of bodily interactions with all manner of media. It’s hard for me to see how Metzinger and someone like Noe can be treated in the same sentence. Metzinger, as I understand him, argues that selves are illusions. Someone like Noe isn’t arguing that selves are illusions but only that selves aren’t an internal space in the head but are distributed throughout the world.
May 11, 2011 at 1:30 am
@Levi,
Fair enough. In the second post I did maybe edge too closely in the brain-mind equation, since you had mentioned Malabou and I started using brain automatically after that. But the difference is important, because, contra any version of panpsychism, I do think that you need a brain at the center of even an extended mind in order for it to be a mind. If you kill all the workers in the factory I would say it ceases to be a collective mind, since it ceases to have the reflexive capacity for self-contemplation that distinguishes the sentient from the insentient. So, you’re right, I do not think that brains are “just one” element composing a mind. They are a central element for it, a conduit and the explosive, plastic core of what makes it a mind–and without them you do not have a mind at all. Minds can be multi-centric, having many brains within them, not all human, but if they have no brains there is no mind because nothing is presenting itself to itself.
You’re also right when you note, at the bottom, the difference between our respective positions. I would simply make one correction: I don’t believe in a pre-“existent” ground. I fully agree that no ground or essence “exists”. It in-exists, to use Badiou’s term. It is literally the nothing, the gap, caesura, clinamen, void, space, inconsistent multiplicity in absolute excess, whatever you want to call it, which guarantees that you can have any heterogeneity whatsoever. I see no need to go to the core of that dispute, though, as it is pretty much simply the difference between the ontological projects of Badiou/Zizek and Deleuze/Guattari.
May 11, 2011 at 1:35 am
Stanley,
I just don’t see how ontology can be based on a politics. I can see how an ontology can be contaminated by political and ethical commitments, but I don’t see how it can be grounded in political and ethical commitments. Reactionary and wicked things are no less beings than anything else. Moreover, not all things are related to the ethical and political. It’s thus peculiar to demand a politics or ethics from an ontology. It’s like asking for a politics and ethics from chemistry. Fusion is no less a real phenomena when used in a nuclear bomb. Atomic physics tells us nothing about whether atomic bombs should be made, it just tells us that fusiin produces these effects. The question of whether we should use fusion to do such and such is quite different. The question of whether farmers and factory workers are different agencies is entirely different than the question of what we should do about this reality if it is, in fact, a reality. That said, there’s no way we can even pose the question of what we should do about this if we don’t know this is the case. This is why we get a lot of bad social and political theory arising from unspoken assumptions about the agencies involved being the same. This is what Wildly is getting at. Someone can be an ass towards women because they implicitly make generalizing assumptions about the circumstances involved and thereby are completely blindmto those differences and the problems they provoke us with in our political praxis.
May 11, 2011 at 1:38 am
Didn’t see your last comment before I posted.
Metzinger is one of those philosophers that makes an argument with good evidence and then summarizes his own conclusion in a way that just seems wrong and misrepresentative of what he’s just said. So, yeah, he is constantly saying that self is an illusion–but what he means is precisely the folk-psychological, Cartesian-style self. Throughout, however, he’s proven that there IS a subject, an “ego tunnel” which is marked by its own inability to see its selfness as simulation but which is driven to simulate this selfness anyways–to literally write a body image into its own physical brain structure. Metzinger absolutely argues that selves, in this sense, are also distributed outside of the brain, though always re-synthesized within it as a particular self-image which is then presented back to itself. He uses the protheses argument repeatedly, showing how it’s not only true for fake hands and whatnot, but how race car drivers actually generate an internal body-image of their car which is treated as much their own as a limb would be.
May 11, 2011 at 1:39 am
I think your point about the importance of brains might be contingently true, but increasingly I think aLife undermines this thesis. There we have reflexive systems that aren’t governed by brains. That sci fi scenario aside, the pointnisn’t that brains aren’t a necessary condition, but that they aren’t sufficient. You need the other elements of the assemblage for mind to take place at all. Just as cars can’t run without alternators, minds can’t happen without brains. But the alternator is only one component in the engine. I’m not, btw, making amcase for panpsychism.
May 11, 2011 at 1:40 am
Ah K, thanks for the clarification of Metzinger. I only ever hear talk of the illusion thesis.
May 11, 2011 at 1:47 am
I do hold that someone (or some highly sentient mouse) shot into space and still somehow alive would still have a mind, even if an increasingly delusional one due to sensory deprivation. And again, not true if you shot a factory into space.
May 11, 2011 at 1:51 am
My thesis isn’t that the mouse wouldn’t have a mind but that a fundamentally different mind would begin to develop due to the change in scaffolding.
May 11, 2011 at 6:26 am
“the pointnisn’t that brains aren’t a necessary condition, but that they aren’t sufficient. You need the other elements of the assemblage for mind to take place at all.”
–That made it sound otherwise. The other elements–those outside the embodied brain (including nervous system), do seem to be missing here. Thus, how do you have the mind?
I agree that the mind exists still, and certainly does become fundamentally different.
May 17, 2011 at 12:22 am
[…] mind” theory quite seriously. Andy Clark is most associated with the idea, but Levi Bryant has been blogging about it lately. The idea is pretty straightforward: while the brain may be […]