Zoe Drayson’s contribution to the EM special issue.
Andy ClarkCognitionCognitive scienceExtended MindExternalismFred AdamsPhilosophy of mindExtended cognition and the metaphysics of mind
Zoe Drayson’s contribution to the EM special issue.
Recollections of Turing
This from The Independent
Towards an externalist neuroeconomics
Here is a recent paper kindly brought to my attention by the author.
To achieve the aim of establishing the case for externalist neuroeconomics, I rely on other approaches to externalism in the cognitive sciences which focus on the role of external causal processes establishing mental phenomena in terms of interactions between neuronal states and external facts. These approaches are to be found in the growing literature on “distributed cognition” or the “extended mind” (e.g., Clark, 2011; Hutchins, 1995; Hutchins, 2005; Sterelny, 2004; Ross, Spurrett, Kincaid, & Stephens, 2007; for a critical view, see, e.g., Sprevak, 2009). In this literature, the operations of the human mind are seen as being fundamentally dependent on external facts, referring not only to the obvious role of devices which leverage cognitive skills, but more fundamentally to the externalization of all cognitive processes in the sense that cognitive performance essentially involves the external world and includes both physical entities and social interaction. Therefore, a straightforward sketch of an externalist approach that is different from the externalism of standard economics is possible. This would offer a fresh view on neuroeconomics (for a related argument, see Wilcox, 2008). In this view, if one continued to use the term “utility” in explaining human choice, “utility” would not correspond exclusively to a neuronal state in a neuro-reductionist approach, but to a causal conjunction between a neuronal state and an external fact.
Hayek and Behavioral Economics
The publisher has now put up a webpage for this volume.
Jacob Frank and the Frankist Movement
Extended mind and business
EM finds some currency in the business world.
In the work entitled the “Extended Mind” Andy Clark and David Chalmers asked where does the mind stop and the world end? This question led them to looking at our “gameified” world and the classic game of Tetris. Clark and Chalmers found a piece of work done by David Kirsh and Paul Maglio. Below is a quote from that work:
“In Tetris, falling geometric shapes must be rapidly directed into an appropriate slot in an emerging structure. A rotation button can be used. David Kirsh and Paul Maglio (1994) calculate that the physical rotation of a shape through 90 degrees takes about 100 milliseconds, plus about 200 milliseconds to select the button. To achieve the same result by mental rotation takes about 1000 milliseconds.
Kirsh and Maglio go on to present compelling evidence that physical rotation is used not just to position a shape ready to fit a slot, but often to help determine whether the shape and the slot are compatible. The latter use constitutes a case of what Kirsh and Maglio call an `epistemic action’. Epistemic actions alter the world so as to aid and augment cognitive processes such as recognition and search. Merely pragmatic actions, by contrast, alter the world because some physical change is desirable for its own sake (e.g., putting cement into a hole in a dam).”
Clark and Chalmers go on to add” In these cases, the human organism is linked with an external entity in a two-way interaction, creating a coupled system that can be seen as a cognitive system in its own right. All the components in the system play an active causal role, and they jointly govern behavior in the same sort of way that cognition usually does. If we remove the external component the system’s behavioral competence will drop, just as it would if we removed part of its brain. Our thesis is that this sort of coupled process counts equally well as a cognitive process, whether or not it is wholly in the head.”
With this work in mind I would then suggest that this would also extend to the organization. For an organization to truly be innovative it must leverage coupled systems to increase its collective cognitive ability and increase its speed of discovery.
Oakeshott in French
Adrien Guillemin tells me that that the French translation of Michael Oakeshott’s “On Being Conservative” has been released by Les Editions du Félin in Paris with a Preface and a biographical epilogue. He continues: “The book has already been welcomed by a nice editorial in Le Monde and one on the cultural channel of Radio France.” Congratulations to Adrien for this enterprising effort and for seeing it through to fruition some two years after he first made contact regarding copyright.
From cognition’s location to the epistemology of its nature
The latest installment from the CSR special issue on EM of a couple of years back (three more papers to come).
Three Rival Views of Tradition (Arendt, Oakeshott and MacIntyre)
A recent paper from Journal of the Philosophy of History.
Thomism and the extended mind
This from the Catholic journal New Blackfriars:
Of course there are other ways of doing away with the epistemological gap between mind and world. Thomists would be interested in whether EMT is motivated, in part at least, by a desire to remove the gap that philosophers have often supposed to exist between the world outside and what is going on inside one’s head. How can we be sure, they have asked, that things out there are really as they are represented in our minds? Perhaps, at one time or another, most people have suspected that appearance and reality do not coincide — in some religious traditions that they never do is taken for granted. Actually, removing the supposed mind/world gap seems to be of little interest to Extended Mind theorists. For Thomists, when the intellect comes to know some object, the form that makes the object what it is comes to reside in the intellect itself. Moreover, it isn’t that a ‘likeness’, pictured as a kind of object, floats before the mind’s eye, as if replicating the thing out there; rather, it’s that one and the same thing, the object’s form, exists simultaneously in the intellect and in the object known. In a neat phrase, Professor John Haldane has called this the ‘mind-world identity theory’: ‘the soul is in a way all things’, anima est quodammodo omnia, as Thomas Aquinas says in his commentary on Aristotle’s De Anima. But this is a very different view from EMT. Far from the mind’s extending itself bit by bit into the world, the mind is informed by the world, and the world is taken into the mind. The next step that Professor Clark foresees in the mind’s integration with technology is the development of what he calls cognitive prosthetics, or electronic brain enhancements (EBEs). It may not be impossible, but it would be a challenge to reconcile such advances in the integration of the brain and robotic devices with traditional ideas about the place of the mind in the world.
