Spreading the Joy? Why the Machinery of Consciousness is (Probably) Still in the Head

active externalism, Andy Clark, cognition, david chalmers, extended cognitive systems, extended mind, externalism, philosophy of mind, philosophy of science

Check out this recent(ish) paper by Andy Clark in Mind Vol. 118 . 472 . October 2009

Is consciousness all in the head, or might the minimal physical substrate for some forms of conscious experience include the goings on in the (rest of the) body and the world? Such a view might be dubbed (by analogy with Clark and Chalmers’s (1998) claims concerning ‘the extended mind’) ‘the extended conscious mind’. In this article, I review a variety of arguments for the extended conscious mind, and find them flawed. Arguments for extended cognition, I conclude, do not generalize to arguments for an extended conscious mind.