In this paper, Clark and Chalmers ... argue that it is arbitrary to say that the mind is contained only within the boundaries of the skull. The separation between the mind, the body, and the environment is seen as an unprincipled distinction. Because external objects play a significant role in aiding cognitive processes, the mind and the environment act as a "coupled system". This coupled system can be seen as a complete cognitive system of its own. In this manner, the mind is extended into the external world. — Wikipedia
But, clearly, this objection isn't going to sink the moral of the paper -- that cognition, and the mind [if memory counts as part of the mind] extend outside the boundaries of the skull and skin.
My general reaction to the paper was that I didn't see why one must commit to the idea that cognition occurred outside the mind simply because a problem could be more easily solved by reorganizing it in a more solvable way. — Hanover
the thesis becomes somewhat trivial, simply offering a novel definition of "mind." — Hanover
... in seeing cognition as extended one is not merely making a terminological decision; it makes a significant difference to the methodology of scientific investigation. In effect, explanatory methods that might once have been thought appropriate only for the analysis of "inner" processes are now being adapted for the study of the outer, and there is promise that our understanding of cognition will become richer for it.
... what occurs outside the brain is fundamentally different than what occurs internally. — Hanover
The reason we outsource our mental processing to external devices is to conserve energy. Processing information (thinking) requires energy. — Harry Hindu
A storehouse metaphor leads to storehouse experiments, which lead to storehouse memory.
So, just as with experiments on robots and other animals, there is also our frame of reference to consider with respect to experiments on other humans—what looks like a stable structure to an observer from the outside may, from the perspective of the person performing the task, be a more dynamic process of re-creation (or even simply creation). Rolf Pfeifer and Josh Bongard give the example of a fountain: the shape of the water as it sprays out is not stored anywhere as a structure inside the fountain, but results from the interaction of the water pressure and surface tension, the effects of gravity, and the shape and direction of the jets. This gives the fountain structure—not a static, stable structure, though, but one that is continuously created. It is quite possible that memory could have this kind of “structure” and be completely different from our everyday idea of memory.
This is especially likely to be so given that the conscious recall of words is a very specialized human activity. Most of our everyday activities that involve memory are not like this (driving or walking to work; preparing a meal), and it certainly doesn’t capture aspects of the daily experience of other animal species. We also learn and memorize many things implicitly—we have no conscious awareness that we have done so, but our behavior changes in ways that refl ect our experience—and this kind of implicit memory is undoubtedly common to other animals as well.
What we call memory may be much more like the activity of the robot mouse in its maze environment: a process of sensorimotor coordination distributed across animal and environment, in which the animal actively engages, and not simply the storage and retrieval of (explicit) internal representations. — Louise Barrett, Beyond the Brain
Where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin?
One might expect them to question the question—e.g., what if the mind is an activity or a kind of worldly engagement, like dancing, rather than a thing in space?—but I'm not sure they ever really do. They argue that the mind doesn't stop at the skull or the skin, but goes beyond it to a definite if uncertain extent. In a nutshell, their answer to the question is that the mind stops a bit further out, depending on the functional role of certain things we happen to use (indicating that we're dealing with a kind of functionalism, which might lead us to wonder if this is another representationalist theory of mind a la computationalism, rather than a more interesting and radical theory of dynamic embodiment). — jamalrob
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