Extending our view of mind

摘要

In Supersizing the Mind, Andy Clark defends the idea that cognition depends constitutively on structures that are literally outside the body. Where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin? According to Clark, it is prejudice to think that the limits of the cognitive system must be those of the organism. Artifacts, symbols or tools (e.g. maps, landmarks, systems of writing, the abacus) might be no less linked with cognitive operations than what is internal. For example, the ability to perform long division might depend on pencil and paper no less than it does on the normal action of the brain. Or consider memory-based belief, which is discussed in detail in Clark's 1998 essay with David Chalmers [1], which serves as the starting point for the presentation here (and that is reprinted as an appendix). Knowing where the museum is, Clark and Chalmers [1] suppose, consists in having an attitude of endorsement to a proposition encoded in memory to which one has quick and reliable access and which entered memory thanks to a normal process of belief acquisition. Crucially, there is nothing in such a functional specification that requires that the memory store must be internal (e.g. in the brain) rather than external (e.g. in a notebook). Whether the performance specifications of memory could be taken over by an external information repository is a merely technical question.