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Tallis in Wonderland

Extending The Mind

Raymond Tallis considers the mind in the body & beyond.

Over the years I have devoted many (perhaps too many) columns to discussing various philosophers’ doomed attempts to explain how mind can arise out of the matter of the brain. But in recent years, the hunt for the substrate of the mind has extended beyond the brain.

The most popular extra-cerebral destination for mind is the rest of the body – an approach called ‘enactivism’. Enactivism is a broad church, but its central tenet is encapsulated with characteristic brilliance by Adam Rostowski (with whom I have had happy hours of agreement and disagreement): “Enactivists eschew the… view of cognition as a brain-bound set of information-processing capabilities explained in terms of neurally-realized computation over internal representation” (In press).

Some (not all) enactivists embrace the ‘four Es’, according to which mental processes are:

a) Embodied: mental processes involve not just the brain but also other bodily structures and processes;

b) Embedded: mental processes function only in relation to an external environment;

c) Enacted: mental processes involve not only events in the nervous system, but also what the organism is doing; and

d) Extended: mental processes extend into the organism’s environment.

Enactivism is intended as a corrective to the idea of the mind as a discrete, bounded, neural computer acting on the body from a privileged interior, and, through the mediation of the body, its environment. Nevertheless, the problem of how first-person being pitches its tents in the apersonal physical world of the organism does not seem to be made easier by redirecting attention from ionic currents in the brain to a smorgasbord of giblets bathed in various fluids maintaining its dynamic equilibrium, physiological support systems, and, beyond that, to bones and muscles. Radical enactivists aim to restore the continuity between life and mind. Enthusiasm for the continuity between mind and living processes must, however, be tempered by acknowledging that pretty well everything that goes on in our bodies is mindless, and remote from the thoughts and other experiences that shape the voluntary activities that fill our days.

It will be clear from this that, regardless of whatever counts as ‘the body’ in embodiment and enactment, only a small part of my body seems at any time to be am bodied (a neologism, not a misprint) to the point where it’s both subject and object of cognition. The body as a whole may be inseparable from the performance of my journey up the hill, but not from the plan that lies behind my going up the hill in the first place. This would not need to be spelled out were it not that, at least for some radical enactivists, the key concept linking mind and life is autonomy, or self-individuation, which distinguishes the identity of beings as living organisms from what counts as their environment. It is self-individuation, we are told, that transforms a physical milieu into a place of significance, salience, and meaning. Some enactivist thinkers even claim that these capacities are present in single-cell organisms (I kid you not). But while cellular life may be autonomy’s necessary condition, it’s a long way from what characterises the distinctively human conscious subject. And in most cases, any meaning ascribed to the interactions between organisms and environment is present only when it’s ascribed to the organism by an informed external observer, such as a biologist. To suggest otherwise is to fall victim to the fallacy of misplaced explicitness.

This fallacy lies at the top of a slippery slope. Consider, for example, the claim made by certain radical enactivists that intentionality – the fundamental mark of the mental, such that consciousness is about something – can be ascribed to single-cell organisms in their engagement with their environments. However, there is nothing in the interaction between simple organisms and their environments that corresponds to the trademark asymmetry of consciousness, whereby a subject is conscious of objects, while those objects are not conscious of the subject. Out of the interaction between me and a cup comes my consciousness of a cup, but not the cup’s consciousness of me. The cup I look at is present to me, but I am not present to the cup. Merely increasing the size of organisms and of the physical complexity of their interactions with the environment does not change this.

Determining the nature of any putative transition from the supposed intentionality of bacteria to that of the human mind is also clearly problematic. One contrast between different organic processes that’s highlighted by Ezequiel di Paolo, is between a first dimension, instantiated in the regulatory processes that ‘define and sustain a living organism as a unity’, a second dimension, involving ‘sensorimotor’ cycles of sensation and movement interactions between the organism and the environment, and a third dimension, which involves ‘cycles of intersubjectivity in which they engage’, or in other words, interactions between different minds.

This categorisation is spot on. Among other things, it highlights an unreduced gap between the relationship to their environments of organisms not traditionally thought of as having intentionality, and the relationship of humans to their world. And it does not suggest a means by which this gap might be crossed. The idea that, for example, sensorimotor coupling (that is, simply responding physically to an environment) will necessarily generate a subject with a view upon a world, seems to assume that organic physical causal interactions will of themselves create subjectivity. This assumption has proved fatal for mind-brain identity theories, and it would most certainly fail to deliver those mental capacities that underpin our distinctively human behaviours, including the ability to entertain explicit shared possibilities, a directedness towards locations in tensed time (notably the future), and the profound elaboration of joined, shared, and collective intentionality that we call human culture.

We may grant that our negotiations with the material world are not purely intellectual exercises discharged through an entirely cerebrally-ambodied mind, without going to the opposite extreme of seeing all bodily activity shaped by an environment as potential agency. Enactivism, by incorporating (sensation and response) systems of an organism as part of the substrate of mind, narrows the gap between input (sensory) and output (motor). This effaces any sense of a distinct complex world constructed and faced by a distinct complex subject, and threatens to collapse into behaviourism (which, paradoxically, does not do justice to much human behaviour). So in its laudable endeavour to integrate life and mind, the organism and the conscious person, enactivism threatens to obliterate the mind. What it overlooks or minimises, is explicitness.

Continuous line drawing by Paul Gregory

Over The Edge

Some philosophers, in part inspired by enactivism, have embraced the so-called ‘extended mind hypothesis’, according to which the mind does not reside exclusively in the brain, or even the body, but extends beyond the body into the wider physical world.

This hypothesis was initially proposed by Andy Clark and David Chalmers in ‘The Extended Mind’ (Analysis 58 (1), 1998). They argued that, given the active role of the environment in driving cognitive processes, the borders of the mind must be extended beyond the body, into the extra-corporeal physical world that drives it. Not everything in the environment, however, was suitable for such promotion and could take ‘epistemic credit’. The part of the world had to be linked with the human organism “in a two-way interaction, creating a coupled system that can be seen as a cognitive system in its own right. All the components of the system play an active causal role, and they jointly govern behaviour in the way that cognition usually does… This sort of coupled process counts equally well as a cognitive process, whether or not it is wholly in the head.” In this account, the typical extensions of the extended mind are the technologies that support our cognitive activities, and these may range from pen and paper, to books, to supercomputers and the internet.

Clark and Chalmers defend their thesis with the example of Inga and Otto, who both want to see an exhibition, and hence to travel to the museum where it’s being held. Inga remembers where the museum is, and goes there without assistance. Otto, however, has mild Alzheimer’s disease and relies on his notebook to guide him as to where it is. Both arrive at the museum, thereby accomplishing the same cognitive task, Inga with her unextended mind, and Otto with his mind coupled to a cognitive prosthesis.

Contrary to Clark and Chalmers’ (much-criticized) claim, the equivalence of their achievement does not, however, demonstrate that Otto’s notebook is as mind-like as Inga’s unaided mind, or indeed, Otto’s diminished mind. After all, Inga’s mind achieved the desired cognitive result without any assistance, whereas Otto’s notebook would not achieve anything by itself: it’s merely a prosthesis, which depends for its status on the capabilities of Otto’s mind to recognize it for what it is and to be able to consult it as necessary. If Otto deteriorated further, his notebook would not deliver any cognitive assistance to him.

An aide-memoire is not a memoire, just as a prosthesis is not a leg unless it’s attached to a body. What’s more, the prosthetic cognitive supports are public, unlike the cognitive activity of genuine minds. So Otto and his notebook are not cognitive equal partners, any more than are the many cues arising in the material world around us which may prompt and guide our cognitive activity. The fantasy that they are partners perhaps has its roots in the personification of our technical supports – the kind of loose talk that takes literally the idea that a computer has a memory and a pocket calculator does sums. Google Maps may guide us to our destination, but it has no idea of ‘a destination’, and even less a sense of the reason we may have for wanting to go there. It does not arrive when we do. It has no experience of the journey itself, however timely its advice to turn left or take the third exit from a roundabout, or how nimble it is in changing the directions it gives us when we’ve accidentally gone off-route. In short, our technologies do not themselves make explicit that in which they assist us. They are unaware of the cognitive processes they participate in (which is one of the reasons that they’re accessible to anyone to use). This is another reason, that the extension of the mind, as a corrective to thinking of it as intracerebral computer processing itself, needs a corrective. Apps are not the stuff of chaps.

The explanatory gap between matter and mind is not crossed, or even narrowed, by providing the mind with more spacious material accommodation. Irrespective of whether that accommodation includes limbs or notebooks as well as brains, there is nothing in enactivism that makes sense of the fact that some parts of the world are lit up by conscious subjects aware of themselves as being in that world. Extending the mind does not make it more amenable to being understood as a manifestation of matter.

Raymond Tallis’s Prague 22: A Philosopher Takes a Tram Through a City will soon be published in conjunction with Philosophy Now.