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Empathy and the Extended Mind

Here is the intro to Joel’s article: Often, I tell a joke and the people around me laugh. (Sometimes this laughter even appears to be sincere.) I usually take this reaction to mean that they find my comment amusing. I like to smile at babies whenever possible and relish the bright-eyed facial animation and gestures…

Persons and the Extended-Mind Thesis

An extract from Lynne Rudder Baker’s paper: Cognitive scientists have become increasingly enamored of the idea of extended minds. The extended-mind thesis (EM) is the claim that mentality need not be situated just in the brain or even within the boundaries of the skin. EM is the modal claim that it is possible that the…

A conceptual and empirical framework for the social distribution of cognition: The case of memory

The power team of  Barnier, Sutton, Harris, and Wilson. Paradigms in which human cognition is conceptualised as “embedded”, “distributed”, or “extended” have arisen in different areas of the cognitive sciences in the past 20 years. These paradigms share the idea that human cognitive processing is sometimes, perhaps even typically, hybrid in character: it spans not only…

Mark Rowlands on the Extended Mind

Here’s Mark’s intro from his paper from a special issue of Zygon on The Extended Mind and Religious Thought from a few years back. The view known as the extended mind, following Andy Clark and David Chalmers (1998), also goes under a number of aliases. Clark and Chalmers themselves also refer to their view as active…

The socially extended mind

Spot on Shaun!!! This is exactly what I’ve been banging on about over the past six years – very nice validation from a top-notch theorist. The fruits of my labour will be available in its full form next year as a book entitled Stigmergic Cognition. Andy ClarkCognitive sciencecomplexityconsciousnessCritical theoryDavid ChalmersenactivismEpistemologyExtended MindExternalismInstitutionsParity Principlephilosophical psychologyPhilosophy of mindShaun…

A brain in a vat cannot break out: why the singularity must be extended, embedded and embodied

Here is a pre-published version of Francis Heylighen’s paper from JCS Abstract: The present paper criticizes Chalmers’s discussion of the Singularity, viewed as the emergence of a superhuman intelligence via the self-amplifying development of artificial intelligence. The situated and embodied view of cognition rejects the notion that intelligence could arise in a closed ‘brain-in-a-vat’ system, because…