Extended Mind Thesis

I touched on the idea of the extended mind over a year ago, when I wrote "love, pizza, grief, and personal identity. At the time, I had not heard the idea named, and did not know that the extended mind thesis is a well-developed and hot topic in cognitive science and philosophy of mind. I find it fascinating:

From Wikipedia:

The Extended Mind refers to an emerging concept within the philosophy of mind that addresses the question as to the division point between the mind and the environment by promoting the view of active externalism. This view proposes that some objects in the external environment are utilized by the mind in such a way that the objects can be seen as extensions of the mind itself. Specifically, the mind is seen to encompass every level of the cognitive process, which will often include the use of environmental aids.

The primary body of work in the field is The Extended Mind, by Andy Clark and David Chalmers. In this paper, Clark and Chalmers present the idea of active externalism, (similar to semantic or "content" externalism,) in which objects within the environment function as a part of the mind. They 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. The main criterion that Clark and Chalmers outline for approaching the use of external environmental objects utilized during cognitive tasks as a part of an extended cognitive system is that the external objects must function with the same purpose as the internal processes.

In The Extended Mind, a thought experiment is presented to further illustrate the environment's role in connection to the mind. The fictional characters Otto and Inga are both travelling to a museum simultaneously. Otto has Alzheimer’s Disease, and has written all of his instructions down on in a notebook to serve the function of his memory. Inga is able to recall the internal instructions within her memory. In a traditional sense, Inga can be thought to have had a belief as to the location of the museum before consulting her memory. In the same manner, Otto can be said to have held a belief of the location of the museum before consulting his notebook. The argument is that the only difference existing in these two cases is that Inga's memory is being internally processed by the brain, while Otto's memory is being served by the notebook. In other words, Otto's mind has been extended to include the notebook as the source of his memory.

From "Collective memory, group minds, and the extended mind thesis" abstract

While memory is conceptualized predominantly as an individual capacity in the cognitive and biological sciences, the social sciences have most commonly construed memory as a collective phenomenon. Collective memory has been put to diverse uses, ranging from accounts of nationalism in history and political science to views of ritualization and commemoration in anthropology and sociology. These appeals to collective memory share the idea that memory “goes beyond the individual” but often run together quite different claims in spelling out that idea.

I should note for any interested readers that in philosophy, the words "internalism" and "externalism" can mean different things depending on the subject matter. For instance, when discussing theories of knowledge, internalism and externalism refer to different kinds of theories regarding epistemic justification (e.g., reliable process v. coherence or mental states).

In this instance, externalism refers to the idea that a part of the mind or memory is located outside of the brain. I am quite at ease with this notion, and I feel that it is almost certainly true, although there are quite a lot of details to be worked out.

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Questions (idle, amateurish ones all):

Is the extended mind idea plausible? Is the idea compatible with other well-supported theories of how the mind works?

If the extended mind exists, is it the case that it makes real - that is, enables the existence of - group minds, analogous to individual minds that actually think and react to stimuli? Or, is the extended mind merely an ability of the individual mind to store, retrieve, and/or process information externally, using the environment?

Does this inform theories of group consciousness and group memory? I am sceptical of both, but it seems to me that if extended consciousness is demonstrated, then perhaps it could be a mechanism for the functioning of some kind of group consciousness or shared memory.

How does this impact our notions of community, morality and personal moral responsibility?

Since I had not heard of the extended mind when I first started writing about it, is it the case that I absorbed the idea from some sort of group consciousness, made possible by the extended mind?

Related topics: innatism/nativism, memetics.