Quick’n’Lean or Slow and Rich?

Andy Clark’s exciting work on predictive processing provides the umbrella under which his hugely influential previous work on embodied and extended cognition seeks a unified home. This chapter argues that in fact predictive processing harbours internalist, inferentialist and epistemic tenets that cannot leave embodied and extended cognition unchanged. Predictive processing cannot do the work Clark requires of it without relying on rich, preconstructive internal representations of the world, nor without engaging in paradigmatically rational integration of prior knowledge and new sensory input. Hence, next to Clark’s image of fluid “uncertainty surfing” is an equally valid image of more emaciated and plodding world-modelling. Rather than underpinning orthodox embodied and extended approches, predictive processing therefore presents an opportunity for a potentially fruitful new synthesis of cognitivist and embodied approaches to cognition.

The Archaeology of the Extended Mind

Our great ape cousins, and very likely the last common ancestor of the human and pan lineage, depend very largely on their own intrinsic capacities not just for material resources but also for their informational resources. Chimps and bonobos are capable of social learning, and very likely, in their foraging and their communicative practices, they do learn from their parents and peers. But everything they learn socially they could probably learn by themselves, by individual exploration learning. Their lives do not depend on social learning. And while they may learn about their physical and social environment from others, they do not learn how to learn. Humans are very different: for us, social learning is essential rather than optional. As a consequence, our cognitive capacities are amplified by our social environment, by our material technology, and by our capacities to learn cognitive skills, not just physical skills, from our social peers. This chapter charts the deep history of these changes and their archaeological signature.

When Is a Mind Extended?

This chapter explores four conditions for operationalizing the concept of cognitive extension. (1) Temporal tightness of the coupling—interaction between inner and outer processes must be fast, tight, and fluid, interacting at the speed of thought. (2) External mind parts must be transparent extensions of ourselves like glasses or prosthetic limbs that are psychologically absorbed into the subject’s body sense. We act through these parts or processes rather than on them. (3) Cognitive extensions are “owned”; they are not independent functioning units that could be a source of cognition themselves; inner processes confer cognitive status on the outer. (4) Extended parts or processes interact bidirectionally; causation is reciprocal, though controlled from the biological side. The chapter concludes that extension does exist. Through interaction we create an extended cognitive envelope. The parts of this envelope are episodic processes enacting external thinking rather than being an enduring assemblage of parts. To make the final leap to durable mind parts—external assemblages that are parts of a person even when not in use—requires reasoning of the sort lawyers and judges do best, not scientists.

Extended Mental Features

The focus of the original argument for the Extended Mind thesis was the case of beliefs. It may be asked what other types of mental features can be extended. Andy Clark has always held that consciousness cannot be extended. This chapter revisits the question of extending consciousness.

The Minds of Insects

Insect systems can provide useful “edge cases” against which to test the generality of Clark’s views on the nature of perception, cognition, and action. Insect brains emerged from an independent evolutionary pathway to the mammalian brain but show a comparable capacity in some key areas, such as prediction (internal emulation?), cue integration for spatial memory (Bayesian?), and exploiting structures in the world to extend their behavioural repertoire (extended minds?). Have they converged on the same solutions? Or are there different principles for cognition that they exploit? Reviewing some of the relevant current evidence about behavioural and brain function in insects suggests there is some remaining tension between Clark’s endorsement of the predictive processing principle and his account of the embodied mind.

Matters of the Flesh

Andy Clark has defended a view of the body’s relationship to the mind that he calls the Larger Mechanism Story (LMS). At the same time, he has criticized an alternative account, the Special Contribution Story (SC). After first clarifying the commitments of these two stories, I argue that Clark’s favored LMS is of less psychological interest than SC, and that SC offers an interesting and viable research program.

The Elusive Extended Mind

For nearly twenty years Andy Clark has been the chief architect and proponent of the thesis of extended mind. But it is only the cognitive processes in the mind that extend, according to Clark (not consciousness itself). However, when it comes to saying what a cognitive process is such that one can determine whether it does or does not extend, Clark is less forthcoming. He has offered a Dennettian “cognition is as cognition does.” He has offered that cognition is “what supports intelligent behavior.” In some cases he comes very close to asserting that we don’t really need to say what cognition is. This chapter explains why this all matters and why the failure to be more forthcoming makes the extended mind an elusive entity.

Extended Cognition and Extended Consciousness

Chapter 1 discusses two questions about the extended mind. First, what is the extended mind thesis? Second, can there be extended consciousness, and if not, why not? The chapter answers the first question by arguing that the thesis should be formulated in terms of perception and action: a subject’s cognitive processes and mental states can be partly constituted by entities that are external to the subject, in virtue of the subject’s interacting with these entities via perception and action. The second question is answered by appealing to direct availability for global control as the physical correlate of consciousness: extended processes always involve indirect availability for global control, mediated by perception and action, so there is no extended consciousness.

Ways of Mindmaking

Andy Clark has been an agenda-setting figure since the dawn of his career, and, in book after book, he has laid out grand theories that invite his readers to see the human mind in new ways. With each book, Clark delivers a new and exciting vision of how the mind works. His fans can hardly keep up, and each is left wondering which of Clark’s theories to sign up for. Are they progressive stages in one grand narrative? A protracted plea for pluralism? Or a succession of new paradigms that displace their predecessors? Some noted philosophers have early, late, and even middle periods. With Clark, one might ask if each book is a metamorphosis. If so, how do we decide which Clark to follow? This chapter is about that question, and about the broader issue, which it begs: What is a theory of mind?

Introduction

Andy Clark is a leading philosopher and cognitive scientist. His work has been wide-ranging and inspiring. The extended mind hypothesis, the power of parallel distributed processing, the role of language in opening up novel paths for thinking, the flexible interface between biological minds and artificial technologies, the significance of representation in explanations of intelligent behaviour, the promise of the predictive processing framework to unify the cognitive sciences: these are just some of the ideas illuminated by Clark’s work that have sparked intense debate across the sciences of mind and brain. This introduction puts into focus some of the major motifs running through Clark’s work and outlines the content and structure of the volume.