Cognitive Extension and Rampant Expansion
Abstract from yesterday's philosophy guestlecture (found it quite accessable; if the abstract doesn't make it seem so, at least my notes may be, to the extent sleep deprivation hasn't impaired them, which it has, so actually they're almost entirely incomprehensible):
"The Hypothesis of Extended Cognition (HEC) asserts that there are circumstances under which your mind can literally extend outside your head, and into the world (Houghton, 1997; Clark & Chalmers 1998). In the talk, I explore the motivation behind this view; examine a potential objection that it faces; and present a possible response to this objection. The problem, roughly speaking, is that once we allow the mind out of the head it is rather difficult to stop it from rampantly expanding (Sprevak, forthcoming): that is, extending to a far greater degree than is intuitively plausible. The HEC must provide principled conditions that set an acceptable boundary on cognitive extension. I offer such a condition, by appealing to the causal history of the cognitive states in question."
I could joyfully spend my life on cogsci research and philosophy related to this and its implications.
Recently I haven't been in the habit of taking lecture notes that I intend to use later, so in the interest of being able to find this easily when I want to think about it, I'm putting it here rather than leaving it buried in a notebook someplace.
Motivating example: Otto and Inga.
They go to a museum; Inga remembers its address normally and Otto has Alzheimers so he, after finding out the address, wrote it down in his notebook to look up there when he wants to know what it is again.
Characteristics of Otto's notebook: He's very familiar with it, uses it regularly, it rarely leaves his side, and he uses it reliably (that is, the information he gets from it is reliably used to produce accurate/correct cognitions). In this sense it has become transparent to him - used as naturally as any other mental faculty.
Inga performs the function of retrieving information that has been physically stored in her internal memory, when she decided she needs to know it. Otto and the notebook perform the function of, when desired, retrieving information that Otto has physically stored externally to his brain. Both of them use this information to guide reasoning and behaviour. The notebook stores Otto's dispositional/standing beliefs, and as such, is the part of his mind that does so.
The Hypothesis of Extended Cognition (HEC) - under certain circumstances, the mind literally is expanded to include some things in the environment, outside the brain.
These things that can count as part of the mind must be tools that are used well; their status as part of the mind depends on the person interacting with them in a particular way - things fluidly, reliably, and transparently employed for the right functional profile* are part of the mind.
*This whole thing can be seen as an extreme case of multiple realisibility - the idea from functionalism saying that brains/cognitive systems of different physical substrates can have the same sorts of mental states ascribed to them.
Problem with the HEC: It lets too many things into the mind- the mind rampantly expands all over the environment. Need to find a way to keep the mind from leaking out everywhere.
The conditions used to claim that Otto's notebook is part of his mind allow too much to count as the mind.
Example: a guy has a set of the Encyclopaedia Brittanica in his garage. He's really good at finding stuff in it, never leaves the garage so it's always nearby, feels natural, &c &c. Under these criteria the whole thing is part of his mind (specifically, his standing beliefs). The whole internet, with all its inherent contradictions, could even be considered part of the mind of someone who's good enough with google. But intuitively, it's ... well, not. At all. So we need some criteria to distinguish the encyclopaedia-in-garage case from Otto's notebook, if they fulfil the same function and are used transparently but one's part of the mind and one's not.
The Solution: Otto is the notebook's author; the guy in the garage is not the encyc.B's author.
The problem with the solution: What does it mean to be the author of recorded beliefs?
Is it prior endorsement - if you consciously accept the belief before storing it (internally or externally), you're it's author? No, too strict criterion; this doesn't allow authorship of many of our internally-held beliefs (those acquired without reflection, under hypnosis if that exists, etc) and we should apply the same standard to all parts of the mind as that's rather the point.
Is it that external things count as a person's beliefs if that person put them there? Can't be, you could buy a giant rubber stamp of the encyc.B and stamp it on the walls of your garage and not count it as your mind. Or program your computer to find and store stuff from google. So this also is not a good sense of what it is to author a belief.
Instead, whether an external state counts as a belief (and therefore a part of the mind) depends on: who stored it where it's stored, it's action-guiding functional role, and on how it was acquired in the first place - causal history of the information state matters. The encyclopedia entries, even if consciously stored by hand-stamping on the wall of the garage, weren't acquired the right way.
Remaning obvious question: what is the right way to acquire beliefs? The talk discussed a bit of this, but honestly, I want to just say 'whatever virtue epistemology or something like that ends up figuring it out to be'. Suggestions include that beliefs are products of mental perceptual apparati, rational faculties, belief-forming mechanisms... formed from the right kind of truth-aiming faculties... but I'd rather pass the question along to virtue ethics and then plug in their answer; it should be the same for internally- and externally- stored beliefs and therefore the details aren't really necessary here at the moment. The lack of sleep thing was catching up by this point and I just wanted to have my fun with the idea of extended minds. Plus, modular program design: I'll use it in philosophy too.
There were a few more things discussed; obections, responses to them, etc.; I'll just leave this as the argument of the main talk.
And now I'm going to have wonderful cyberpunk daydreams about this~!
"The Hypothesis of Extended Cognition (HEC) asserts that there are circumstances under which your mind can literally extend outside your head, and into the world (Houghton, 1997; Clark & Chalmers 1998). In the talk, I explore the motivation behind this view; examine a potential objection that it faces; and present a possible response to this objection. The problem, roughly speaking, is that once we allow the mind out of the head it is rather difficult to stop it from rampantly expanding (Sprevak, forthcoming): that is, extending to a far greater degree than is intuitively plausible. The HEC must provide principled conditions that set an acceptable boundary on cognitive extension. I offer such a condition, by appealing to the causal history of the cognitive states in question."
I could joyfully spend my life on cogsci research and philosophy related to this and its implications.
Recently I haven't been in the habit of taking lecture notes that I intend to use later, so in the interest of being able to find this easily when I want to think about it, I'm putting it here rather than leaving it buried in a notebook someplace.
Motivating example: Otto and Inga.
They go to a museum; Inga remembers its address normally and Otto has Alzheimers so he, after finding out the address, wrote it down in his notebook to look up there when he wants to know what it is again.
Characteristics of Otto's notebook: He's very familiar with it, uses it regularly, it rarely leaves his side, and he uses it reliably (that is, the information he gets from it is reliably used to produce accurate/correct cognitions). In this sense it has become transparent to him - used as naturally as any other mental faculty.
Inga performs the function of retrieving information that has been physically stored in her internal memory, when she decided she needs to know it. Otto and the notebook perform the function of, when desired, retrieving information that Otto has physically stored externally to his brain. Both of them use this information to guide reasoning and behaviour. The notebook stores Otto's dispositional/standing beliefs, and as such, is the part of his mind that does so.
The Hypothesis of Extended Cognition (HEC) - under certain circumstances, the mind literally is expanded to include some things in the environment, outside the brain.
These things that can count as part of the mind must be tools that are used well; their status as part of the mind depends on the person interacting with them in a particular way - things fluidly, reliably, and transparently employed for the right functional profile* are part of the mind.
*This whole thing can be seen as an extreme case of multiple realisibility - the idea from functionalism saying that brains/cognitive systems of different physical substrates can have the same sorts of mental states ascribed to them.
Problem with the HEC: It lets too many things into the mind- the mind rampantly expands all over the environment. Need to find a way to keep the mind from leaking out everywhere.
The conditions used to claim that Otto's notebook is part of his mind allow too much to count as the mind.
Example: a guy has a set of the Encyclopaedia Brittanica in his garage. He's really good at finding stuff in it, never leaves the garage so it's always nearby, feels natural, &c &c. Under these criteria the whole thing is part of his mind (specifically, his standing beliefs). The whole internet, with all its inherent contradictions, could even be considered part of the mind of someone who's good enough with google. But intuitively, it's ... well, not. At all. So we need some criteria to distinguish the encyclopaedia-in-garage case from Otto's notebook, if they fulfil the same function and are used transparently but one's part of the mind and one's not.
The Solution: Otto is the notebook's author; the guy in the garage is not the encyc.B's author.
The problem with the solution: What does it mean to be the author of recorded beliefs?
Is it prior endorsement - if you consciously accept the belief before storing it (internally or externally), you're it's author? No, too strict criterion; this doesn't allow authorship of many of our internally-held beliefs (those acquired without reflection, under hypnosis if that exists, etc) and we should apply the same standard to all parts of the mind as that's rather the point.
Is it that external things count as a person's beliefs if that person put them there? Can't be, you could buy a giant rubber stamp of the encyc.B and stamp it on the walls of your garage and not count it as your mind. Or program your computer to find and store stuff from google. So this also is not a good sense of what it is to author a belief.
Instead, whether an external state counts as a belief (and therefore a part of the mind) depends on: who stored it where it's stored, it's action-guiding functional role, and on how it was acquired in the first place - causal history of the information state matters. The encyclopedia entries, even if consciously stored by hand-stamping on the wall of the garage, weren't acquired the right way.
Remaning obvious question: what is the right way to acquire beliefs? The talk discussed a bit of this, but honestly, I want to just say 'whatever virtue epistemology or something like that ends up figuring it out to be'. Suggestions include that beliefs are products of mental perceptual apparati, rational faculties, belief-forming mechanisms... formed from the right kind of truth-aiming faculties... but I'd rather pass the question along to virtue ethics and then plug in their answer; it should be the same for internally- and externally- stored beliefs and therefore the details aren't really necessary here at the moment. The lack of sleep thing was catching up by this point and I just wanted to have my fun with the idea of extended minds. Plus, modular program design: I'll use it in philosophy too.
There were a few more things discussed; obections, responses to them, etc.; I'll just leave this as the argument of the main talk.
And now I'm going to have wonderful cyberpunk daydreams about this~!