September 24, 2009
The Extended Mind Hypothesis
The idea that we use pieces of our external environment to aid in our cognitive abilities has always been visible yet has remained somewhat ignored as our computational processes were always considered to be circumscribed to those that transpire under skin and skull in the biological brain. Then in 1998 Andy Clark and David Chalmers proposed a radical new form of externalism called the Extended Mind Hypothesis. Referred to as active externalism because of the active role the environment plays in driving cognitive processes it came under attack from a number of angles.