I’ve just come across this article by Andy with a follow-up here.
Some recent work in computational and cognitive neuroscience suggests that it is indeed the frugal use of our native neural capacity (the inventive use of restricted “neural bandwidth,” if you will) that explains how brains like ours so elegantly make sense of noisy and ambiguous sensory input.
Here’s a draft of a forthcoming paper I chanced across.
Just when you thought the extended mind literature couldn’t be put to more unusual use, here is a forthcoming talk by Michele Merritt who just happens to have been supervised by none other than Shaun Gallagher and Rebecca Kukla. Also on her committee was Andy Clark. Check out Michel’s recent paper for Philosophical Psychology ”The Cure for the Cure: Networking the Extended Mind,” the published version to be found in Volume 24, Number 4, 1 August 2011 , pp. 463-485.
Here is a paper by Lynne Rudder Baker entitled “Christianity and the Extended-Mind Thesis” continuing the theme of extended mind and religion she wrote on for a symposium I put together a few years back – see the journal Zygon.
Steve Fuller arguably the best-known social epistemologist in the sociological tradition seems to have taken an extended mind/distributed cognition/cyborgian turn. Steve by the way (as was Susan Haack in my previous post) most generous in participating in the first EPISTEME volume and conference, especially significant since he is the founding editor of Social Epistemology. The cover of Steve’s latest bears a striking resemblance to Andy Clark’s Natural-Born Cyborgs. Judging from the article it seems that Steve would have much in common with another major extended theorist – Rob Wilson and his What Sorts of People Should There Be? project.
In all this, it’s not so much that we’ve been losing our humanity but that it’s becoming projected or distributed across things that lack a human body.
Here’s an experiment (I’m assuming it’s legit) brought to my attention by the blog Artificialites.
Here’s a paper I chanced upon. The full title: “The Four-Color Theorem Solved, Again: Extending the Extended Mind to the Philosophy of Mathematics” (I’ve just noticed that Ken Aizawa has already beat me to the punch!).
The Extended Mind - I think that this is the first time Dave has expanded the idea to social extension or networks. I recall that FB post he mentions.
And Dave is trailing on his website his forthcoming book Constructing the World (OUP). BIG NEWS!!
Check out this review (scroll down) by Michael Madary of Mark Rowlands’ The New Science of the Mind: From Extended Mind to Embodied Phenomenology.
One of the latest labels to emerge for anti-classical (or non-Cartesian, or post-cognitivist) cognitive science is “4E.” The four Es here are the embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended approaches to cognition. Since there are a number of different, and likely incompatible, lines of thought within the 4E group, more work needs to be done to articulate how the Es can and should fit together. Mark Rowlands’ newest book, The New Science of the Mind: From Extended Mind to Embodied Phenomenology, addresses this need in a valuable way. He argues, clearly and carefully, for the thesis of the amalgamated mind, which “subsumes both theses of the embodied and the extended mind” (p. 84). The thesis of the embedded mind is rejected as being merely a claim about cognition depending causally on the environment. As such, it is not strong enough to be interesting for Rowlands’ non-Cartesian project. The thesis of the enacted mind, in particular Alva Noë’s sensorimotor version of it, is also rejected as being either implausible or no stronger than the thesis of the embedded mind (pp. 81–82). First I will outline Rowlands’ defense of the thesis of the amalgamated mind; then I will raise some issues for further investigation.
Requests for reprints should be sent to Michael Madary, Ph.D., Johannes Gutenberg — Universität Mainz, FB05 Philosophie und Philologie, Jakob-Welder-Weg 18, 55099 Mainz, Germany. Email: madary@mainz-uni.de
I’ve only just come across this wonderful symposium (Philosophical Studies Volume 152, Number 3 / February 2011, from p. 413) on Andy Clark’s Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension. The line-up:
Précis of Supersizing the mind: embodiment, action, and cognitive extension (Oxford University Press, NY, 2008)
Andy Clark
In search of clarity about parity
Michael Wheeler
Cognitive systems and the supersized mind
Robert D. Rupert
Enculturating the Supersized Mind
Edwin Hutchins
Finding the Mind
Book Symposium on Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension (Oxford University Press, NY, 2008)
Andy Clark
Seeing What You Mean
Knowledge Has Always Been Networked
Behaviourism vs. Phenomenology
The metaepistemology of knowing-how
The New Theories of Moral Sentiments
Nature, nurture and liberal values
Andy Clark – “Do Thrifty Brains Make Better Minds?”
The neuroscience of happiness
Patricia Churchland
Enaction and Dance
