Mark Gross shared Larissa MacFarquhar’s 2018 New Yorker profile of philosopher Andy Clark with me. That prompted some thoughts about minds and embodiment.
When someone argues that there’s thinking, as Clark does, my thoughts turn to who’s doing the thinking. If the things and places around me are part of my thinking, are they also part of the thinker? Clark seems to like the notion of permeable boundaries, and I imagine he’d count the whole kit and caboodle as a thinker. But on the face of it it’s quite a stretch; it implies that supposedly inanimate objects are thinking.
The examples in MacFarquhar’s profile seem to focus on memory, and the seminal 1988 Clark & Chalmers article (“The Extended Mind,” https://doi.org/10.1093/analys/58.1.7) spends a lot of time talking about belief (Wikipedia). It’s plausible that parts of my memory are in the environment (like their example of Otto, an Alzheimer patient, who uses a notebook to remember travel directions), but it makes me wonder about whether there’s processing (not just data storage) in the environment that’s also part of “my” thinking. I certainly get the sense that the TikTok algorithm is directing my attention, and so is doing some of my thinking for me. Books have been doing this since Plato, of course; the new wrinkle is that the attention co-processing is parallel, not sequential. Perhaps parallel processing that happens simultaneously in my brain and outside it isn’t so weird if one considers other people trying to shape our attention with language and gesture.
The paper made me ponder identity persistence: how waking up not only with memories from yesterday but also surrounded by my personal living infrastructure helps my identity recreate itself every morning. Most road warriors know the disorientation of waking up in strange hotel room that’s uncannily like all the other hotel rooms—Where am I, again? I gained new insight into why going away for a week’s vacation in Ellensburg, even if I take along my pile of reading and my laptop, helps reboot me; there’s enough unfamiliarity to obstruct the loading of the customary runtime.
Larissa MacFarquhar notes Clark’s insight that “A mind’s first task, in other words, was to control a body. The idea of pure thought was biologically incoherent: cognition was always embodied.” Since I’m thinking about egregores at the moment (more here; I call the mundane egregore that supervenes on a large, connected organization of people an o-gregore) it occurred to me that an o-gregore mind’s first task is to control an organization. This is not embodiment in material/biological terms, at least not at first order, but perhaps there’s mileage in the metaphor.
A couple pages later, MacFarquhar writes, “Cognition was a network of partly independent tricks and strategies that had evolved one by one to address various bodily needs.” The “bodily needs” of an organization are different from those of an organism, so one shouldn’t expect it’ll have the same kind of cognition; in fact, it might be so alien to us as to be incomprehensible. Different animals have vastly different niches; Jonathan Birch et al. have suggested that they have distinct consciousness profiles. My favorite example is the notion that each of an octopus’s limbs (two-thirds of its neurons are in its arms) operates semi-autonomously.
MacFarquhar wraps up her piece by noting that Clark was attracted to the extended-mind view because the brain itself “was not one indivisible thing but millions of quasi-independent things, which worked seamlessly together while each had a kind of existence of its own.” One could say something similar, one level up the hierarchy, of a large organization that consists of many thousands (millions, in a few cases) of quasi-independent people who work together while each has an existence of its own.
All that said, I must confess that I prefer Edwin Hutchins’ distributed cognition approach over Clark’s extended mind. Hutchins slightly predates Clark and is said to have influenced him. Hutchins is an ethnographer, not a philosopher, and seems grounded in the real problems groups of people are trying to solve; he’s more oriented to task completion. Hutchins’ example of a ship’s crew collectively bringing a boat into port made a big impression on me. Unlike Clark & Chalmers looking at one person surrounded by tools, Hutchins with this collective thinking describes a group of people thinking as a body. That’s much closer to o-gregores than the extended mind.
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