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.
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Humanity 2.0: Steve Fuller takes an “extended” turn
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.
Thinking Music
Here’s an experiment (I’m assuming it’s legit) brought to my attention by the blog Artificialites.
Extending the Extended Mind to the Philosophy of Mathematics
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!).
Chalmers’ TED talk on The Extended Mind
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!!
Madary reviews Rowlands
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
Symposium on Clark’s “Supersizing”
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
Res cogitans extensa: A Philosophical Defense of the Extended Mind Thesis
Look out for Georg Theiner’s book (publisher, Peter Lang) that is about to hit the shelves. I’m reproducing the cover blurb from the preprint he so kindly sent me. Georg has already done some good work for an Extended Mind project and I’m looking forward to his contribution to the stigmergy issue.
Abstract for Res cogitans extensa: For Descartes, minds were essentially immaterial, non-extended things. Contemporary cognitive science prides itself on having exorcised the Cartesian ghost from the biological machine. However, it remains committed to the Cartesian vision of the mental as something purely inner. Against the idea that the mind resides solely in the brain, advocates of the situated and embodied nature of cognition have long stressed the importance of dynamic brain-body-environment couplings, the opportunistic exploitation of bodily morphology, the strategic performance of epistemically potent actions, the generation and use of external representations, and the cognitive scaffolding provided by artifacts and social-cultural practices. According to the extended mind thesis, a significant portion of human cognition literally extends beyond the brain into the body and its environment. This book aims to clarify the nature and the scope of this thesis, and to defend its central insight that cognition is not confined to the boundaries of the biological individual.
About Georg: Georg Theiner, born in Vienna, received his Ph.D. in Philosophy, with a Joint Ph.D. in Cognitive Science and a Minor in History and Philosophy of Science, at Indiana University, Bloomington in 2008. His research interests are in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science. During his tenure as a Killam Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Alberta, he worked on the extended mind thesis and socially distributed cognition.
Extended Mind: Special Section in TEOREMA
Here is a bunch of extended mind papers in the Spring issue of Teorema.
Merleau-Ponty
My visit to Merleau-Ponty’s grave coincided with the 50th anniversary of his death. It was Andy Clark who first brought Merleau-Ponty to my attention (Phenomenology of Perception) in his seminal book Being There, the latter, for me at least, one of those books that presented a seismic shift to my thinking. My interest in M-P is in his phenomenology, not his Marxism which I had no knowledge of. (The guy in the Jim Morrison T-shirt was a Père Lachaise guide that tracked down M-P’s grave without whom I wouldn’t have found it.)
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