CrimePsych

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.

Opponents questioned the portability and reliability of such external artifacts, and the fundamental differences between internal and external goings-on. They also raised concerns around the fact that the brain has total choice and control and that cognitive load is increased when one uses external resources.

The Clark and Chalmers hypothesis, and what is commonly referred to as the Parity Principle, states that if in performing a certain task, a part of the external world functions as a process that, were it done in the head, we would have no hesitation in considering as part of the cognitive process, then that external artifact is part of the cognitive process.

All of the hypothetical discussions involved in the initial Clark & Chalmers paper are centred on Inga and Otto. Inga relies solely on biological memory while Otto, who has Alzheimer’s disease, relies heavily on his notebook, that he carries everywhere, for information. Otto is considered coupled with his notebook as the external resource plays a pivotal role in his cognitive processes. Coupling is described as a reciprocal, causal link between an agent and an external resource in that an agent rarely makes any decisions without using said resource. Thus the artifact is not at the end of a long causal chain but has direct impact on the agents’ cognitive processes in such a way that, if decoupled, behavioural competence drops as if a part of the biological brain were removed.

The four requirements of external artifacts for them to be considered part of an agent’s cognitive system are that the artifact must be constantly available when it is needed, and must be available without difficulty. In the case of Otto this means that his notebook must be available when he needs to look something up, like an address or phone number, and that he can easily access it i.e. it is in his pocket and not at home in his bedside table. The other two requirements are that the resource must be automatically endorsed by the agent and any information used from the resource must have been previously endorsed. Again in the case of Otto this means that any information he finds in his notebook he accepts as true and that he has previously confirmed the information. Although this fourth requirement is debatable, as beliefs may be acquired through other means, the first three are essential to the extended mind hypothesis as we shall see later in this paper.

An important aspect of a coupled cognitive system is that in using external resources we commit epistemic actions. Such an action is conducted to help determine the procedure to be executed, such as physically rotating a shape to see if it will fit in a given hole, and help with the decision being made. Pragmatic actions on the other hand are executed as a result of internal cognitive processes having made a decision already and have no influence on said decision.

One of the simplest ways detractors attempt to disprove the extended mind hypothesis is by raising objections to an external resources portability, but such objections have a specious nature. External resources can be considered part of an extended mind if they are there when needed and without difficulty, there is nothing that states that occasional decoupling cannot occur. It is unlikely that when we are asleep or in an unconscious state that our internal resources are considered any less a part of our cognitive system than if we were in a conscious state so it seems foolish to treat external artifacts this way.

Upon accepting the idea that we do extend our mind when coupled with external resources, and that portability is not actually a problem we encounter a much more obstinate dilemma; what is to stop an outside agent from altering or even stealing our external resource? This is quite patently a very real quandary that makes the use of external resources fundamentally different to those of internal ones and raises a number of questions that could derail the extended mind hypothesis.

The foremost problem is that of actual altering or theft of such resources. Obviously in the case of Otto and his notebook the chance of his artifact being sabotaged or stolen is quite slim. It seems unlikely that anybody would go out of their way to attempt to steal it, and it seems even more unlikely that given the opportunity an outside agent would be able to alter the information in it without Otto realizing it had been altered. But in the case of mobile phones, laptop computers and other more technologically advanced external artifacts these problems become more apparent and harder to detect.

However this will not prove the extended mind hypothesis to be false, it is just more likely to limit the types of resources we can consider a part of our extended cognitive system. Security of such external resources seems to be the major concern here, in that if we can make an external resource as secure as our own biological ones then surely these can count as part of our cognitive system. Software security on technology such as password protection is obviously the first step but physical security needs to be considered also. With such items getting smaller by the day theft is becoming easier, as such an intelligent thief can easily acquire possession of your external resource and have it sold and shipped to the other side of the world using an online auction facility such as eBay within a matter of days.

Nonetheless, since the dawn of human intelligence we have encountered different types of threats in our social domain, and there is evidence to support the idea that evolution has made cheat-detection or the deployment of social guards central to our success as a species. Due to the deployment of such social guards, it is stated that our cognitive load is increased in such a way that it makes our external resources development and functional poise radically different to that of our internal states or information. The conclusion drawn from this is that by increasing cognitive load, our attention to the external must increase subsequently endangering automatic endorsability.

Not to worry! This idea of Sterelny’s seems to help the hypothesis as much as it detracts from it in that he states evolution has made the deployment of social guards central. One may tend to concede the point of increased cognitive load if the mind worked as a modularized system but it is more likely that it works as a highly distributed connectionist net (Footnote #1). Such a network is comprised of thousands of nodes across a number of separate layers, and because of these nets distributed nature, social guards deployed in this type of economy are not only naturally deployed, but spread across the entire net.

Hence the social guard part of our cognitive economy partakes in any processing that involves social exchange thus cognitive load is not increased and Parity prevails. It seems that social guards are not the only thing that evolution has made a central part of our cognitive processing and that denying such external artifacts would seem to deny a lot of our evolutionary history, not just the feasibility of the extended mind. Our brains have evolved in such a way as to take advantage of such resources, including the pliable, external environment, for example our visual processing system takes advantage of the structure of natural scenes as does it use bodily motion and locomotion to take cognitive shortcuts.

We can begin to see how cognitive niche construction plays a major role in our cognitive economy. Niche construction is defined as the activities, choices and metabolic processes of an organism through which they define, choose, modify and create their own niches. This refers not only to their choice of mate, habitats and resources but the construction of things in their local environment such as burrows, hives, nests, damns etc.

We as humans similarly construct cognitive niches, for example, expert bartenders not only line up differently shaped glassware but do so in temporal sequence to the likely drink orders coming in, hence the problem of remembering what drink to prepare next is transformed from an internal memory process to simply associating a drink with a certain glass shape. It is now clear how other items such as Otto’s notebook can be considered a cognitive niche, and that such niche construction appears to be linked quite causally to our evolutionary history, without which our competence as cognitive agents would drop substantially.

It is also possible to consider language as a niche constructed by human agents. We use internal language in a range of ways, most commonly to motivate ourselves or help revise complicated processes until such time as we complete the given task. Language, whether internal or external, is a form of scaffolding used to help us either remember things (such is the case with road signs) or in an example proposed by Daniel Dennett help a chess player remember not to get their Queen out early (by internally revising what not to do whenever said player reaches for the Queen early on in the game, Footnote #2).

A problem raised by Adam & Aizawa is the idea that because of the fundamental differences between internal and external goings-on in the way that they causally drive action that there can be no unified science of the extended mind. To suggest that external and internal resources must act in the same way for them to fall within the one scientific umbrella is too presume too much, they simply need to behave and follow the same set of laws. Evolution has made us capable of using the plethora of external resources available; this does not mean they have to be fundamentally the same. It could quite easily be entertained that somewhere in the future we come to the conclusion that intelligent behaviour or cognitive processing is simply the point at which a number of illuminating paradigms coalesce into one.

Along a similar line of thought, who is to say that the way in which our internal cognitive processes operate will be able to form a unified science? It is likely as we continue to learn more about the inner workings of the biological brain that somewhere down the line we discover that there are fundamental differences between abilities such as the way we do mathematics in our head versus the way our brains interpret signals of pain from our extremities. It is beginning to appear that unification is not an overly important consideration when it comes to the extended mind hypothesis.

To take a slightly different line of thought again about the fundamental differences between internal and external resources it has been claimed that Otto’s notebook represents an outdated theory of how biological memory works and therefore any text-based storage having role-parity with that of biological memory must be false. But there is, however slight, a definitional oversight to this claim; Clark & Chalmers were never attempting to claim that the notebook alone was a cognitive system simply that it plays a crucial role within Otto’s cognitive economy and hence does not need to have role-parity.

The idea that Otto’s notebook only supports derived content while inner symbols in a cognitive agent are considered intrinsic is another objection to the extended mind. They state: “The representational capacity of orthography is in this way derived from the representational capacities of cognitive agents.” and subsequently jump to the conclusion that the extended mind hypothesis must be false as the two types of content are fundamentally different from one another. But the problem here seems to be not the underlying facts of derived versus intrinsic content but why do we need to assume that an agents cognitive processing must be comprised solely of intrinsically content-bearing representations. Yes we can accept that these two types of content are different but to exclude external resources solely on the fact that they can contain only derived content seems outrageous, the relevance to the extended mind hypothesis is not an items’ content but the role it plays within the cognitive process.

The issue of choice and overall control was brought to light by Keith Butler who states that because the brain is the ultimate decision maker in a way that the external resources are not, the external resources cannot truly be considered part of an agent’s cognitive system, although they may occasionally participate in cognitive processing. This is an interesting thought but one that ultimately fails. To eliminate that which is external from the cognitive system based solely on this assumption leads us down a path towards eliminating a lot of the internal as well. With the current information we have regarding the mind it would be impossible to pinpoint the seed of consciousness where decisive control and choice actually occurs. One can only speculate as to how much of the biological brain is needed, and where in the brain these decisions occur. A single neuron obviously isn’t enough, but what of fifty neurons, or one thousand neurons? It doesn’t make sense to eliminate the external on the basis that it does not have the final say.

External resources versus internal ones leads us to another predicament, that because we have to perceive external information rather than introspect, this provides sufficient disanalogy as to exclude it as part of the cognitive. Closely shadowing this along the lines of perception, is the dilemma that mistakes could be made when an agent is attempting to access the information or external resource, but neither of these arguments have any force behind them.

Firstly, to exclude the external based on the way in which we relate to or perceive it depends entirely on our definition of the cognitive system. Clark & Chalmers definition treats the external artifacts as if they were internal, hence this objection fails on principle alone. However the problem with an error in accessing the information is genuine, for example, Otto could misread his notebook. Even when considering a case such as this it is obvious that our internal information can encounter the same sort of problems. If an agent is intoxicated or is highly emotional such as those under the influence of drugs/alcohol or people who are highly depressed/angry, then the chances of misreading information even from our own minds becomes possible. We also have the problem of false beliefs from simply forgetting things; an agent may believe they left their keys on the coffee table in the lounge room when they actually left them in their bedside table. These events show simply that an error has occurred during the retrieval of the data, not that the error is an error in perception.

In closing, it doesn’t seem that those who protest against the extended mind hypothesis have been exceedingly auspicious in proving their case beyond a reasonable doubt. Their demurrals, although some better than others, still fail. Minor problems and definitional oversights aside, it is unlikely that the use of external artifacts in a coupled cognitive system as laid out by the extended mind hypothesis can be shown to be incorrect. By evolutionary means alone the use of external resources seems to play a pivotal role in our cognitive economy.

Also the way we as human cognitive agents, especially in expert fields, use niche construction to help simplify cognitively demanding and complex situations, let alone how we all use language for similar means seem to permanently couple such external resources with our internal goings-on. There is likely to be a large amount of debate still to come on this topic, and a lot of issues that have not been covered in this paper but however one looks at the situation, it appears the extended mind hypothesis holds steady in the face of adversary, and it appears unlikely that it will be rocked at its foundations any time in the near future.

1. This is assuming that we are not symbolic engines and that we do operate more like a highly distributed connectionist net than a modularized economy. But in the event we do operate in such a way it is likely that social guards can still avoid cognitive bloat by off-loading into the environment.
2. There are a number of issues that we could discuss here but not all are relevant.