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Where does the mind end and the world begin? Is the mind locked inside its skull, sealed in with skin, or does it expand outward, merging with things and places and other minds that it thinks with? What if there are objects outside—a pen and paper, a phone—that serve the same function as parts of the brain, enabling it to calculate or remember? You might say that those are obviously not part of the mind, because they aren’t in the head, but that would be to beg the question. So are they or aren’t they?
Consider a woman named Inga, who wants to go to the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. She consults her memory, recalls that the museum is on Fifty-third Street, and off she goes. Now consider Otto, an Alzheimer’s patient. Otto carries a notebook with him everywhere, in which he writes down information that he thinks he’ll need. His memory is quite bad now, so he uses the notebook constantly, looking up facts or jotting down new ones. One day, he, too, decides to go to MoMA, and, knowing that his notebook contains the address, he looks it up.
Before Inga consulted her memory or Otto his notebook, neither one of them had the address “Fifty-third Street” consciously in mind; but both would have said, if asked, that they knew where the museum was—in the way that if you ask someone if she knows the time she will say yes, and then look at her watch. So what’s the difference? You might say that, whereas Inga always has access to her memory, Otto doesn’t always have access to his notebook. He doesn’t bring it into the shower, and can’t read it in the dark. But Inga doesn’t always have access to her memory, either—she doesn’t when she’s asleep, or drunk.
Andy Clark, a philosopher and cognitive scientist at the University of Edinburgh, believes that there is no important difference between Inga and Otto, memory and notebook. He believes that the mind extends into the world and is regularly entangled with a whole range of devices. But this isn’t really a factual claim; clearly, you can make a case either way. No, it’s more a way of thinking about what sort of creature a human is. Clark rejects the idea that a person is complete in himself, shut in against the outside, in no need of help.
How is it that human thought is so deeply different from that of other animals, even though our brains can be quite similar? The difference is due, he believes, to our heightened ability to incorporate props and tools into our thinking, to use them to think thoughts we could never have otherwise. If we do not see this, he writes, it is only because we are in the grip of a prejudice—“that whatever matters about my mind must depend solely on what goes on inside my own biological skin-bag, inside the ancient fortress of skin and skull.”
One problem with his Otto example, Clark thinks, is that it can suggest that a mind becomes extended only when the ordinary brain isn’t working as it should and needs a supplement—something like a hearing aid for cognition. This in turn suggests that a person whose mind is deeply linked to devices must be a medical patient or else a rare, strange, hybrid creature out of science fiction—a cyborg. But in fact, he thinks, we are all cyborgs, in the most natural way. Without the stimulus of the world, an infant could not learn to hear or see, and a brain develops and rewires itself in response to its environment throughout its life. Any human who uses language to think with has already incorporated an external device into his most intimate self, and the connections only proliferate from there.
In Clark’s opinion, this is an excellent thing. The more devices and objects there are available to foster better ways of thinking, the happier he is. He loves, for instance, the uncanny cleverness of online-shopping algorithms that propose future purchases. He was the last fan of Google Glass. He dreams of a future in which his refrigerator will order milk, his shirt will monitor his mood and heart rate, and some kind of neurophone connected to his cochlear nerve and a microphone implanted in his jaw will make calling people as easy as saying hello. One day, he lost his laptop, and felt so disoriented and enfeebled that it was as if he’d had a stroke. But this didn’t make him regret his reliance on devices, any more than he regretted having a frontal lobe because it could possibly be damaged.
The idea of an extended mind has itself extended far beyond philosophy, which is why Clark is now, in his early sixties, one of the most-cited philosophers alive. His idea has inspired research in the various disciplines in the area of cognitive science (neuroscience, psychology, linguistics, A.I., robotics) and in distant fields beyond. Some archeologists now say that when they dig up the remains of lost civilizations they are not just reconstructing objects but reconstructing minds. Some musicologists say that playing an instrument involves incorporating an object into thought and emotion, and that to listen to music is to enter into a larger cognitive system comprised of many objects and many people.
“Why, I think he’s trying to impress you.” Link copied
Clark not only rejects the idea of a sealed-off self—he dislikes it. He is a social animal: an eager collaborator, a convener of groups. The story he tells of his thinking life is crowded with other people: talks he’s been to, papers he’s read, colleagues he’s met, talks they’ve been to, papers they’ve read. Their lives and ideas are inextricable from his. His doors are open, his borders undefended. It is perhaps because he is this sort of person that he both welcomed the extended mind and perceived it in the first place. It is clear to him that the way you understand yourself and your relation to the world is not just a matter of arguments: your life’s experiences construct what you expect and want to be true.
Clark seeks fusion with the world in everything he does. Most of his cars—a 1965 Triumph Herald, a 1968 Ford Thunderbird, a 1971 MG Midget, among others—have been convertibles. “On a sunny day, or just a non-rainy day, I feel trapped in a car if I can’t get rid of the roof,” he says. “Though I fear that you always look a bit of a plonker with the top down, so it’s important to choose cars that are quirky rather than flashy.” He loves electronic music, and one of his favorite things to do is go dancing. “I love the steamy, sweaty vibe of a hard-techno club,” he says, “the way you can get totally lost in a sea of light, flesh, and music.” Anyone who has gone clubbing with him can see that he feels the line between himself and everything else to be very thin. “After a few drinks, Andy’s personality totally opens up,” David Chalmers, a philosopher at N.Y.U., says. “In that moment, he is just so sweet and so lovable, and he does kind of merge with the world—everything is wonderful, everything is great! I think of that as his genuine nature, and the sober, reserved version during the day is just a proto version that is waiting for this true essence to be unlocked.”
Clark is tall and spindly and moves in a hoppy, twitchy way, like a shorebird. His hair is a kind of punk mullet—spiky and gray on top, pink and a bit longer in the back. He likes costumes—he recently appeared at a birthday party as David Bowie from the “Space Oddity” period. Even at the office, his shirts are heroic, psychedelic, the shirts of a man who trusts the world, their effect muted only slightly by his black hoodie, black jeans, and black boots. When he agreed, somewhat reluctantly, to take on the administrative role of department chair, ten years ago, he made up for it by treating himself to a large, comic-book-style, undersea-themed tattoo.
Cognitive science addresses philosophical questions—What is a mind? What is the mind’s relationship to the body? How do we perceive and make sense of the outside world?—but through empirical research rather than through reasoning alone. Clark was drawn to it because he’s not the sort of philosopher who just stays in his office and contemplates; he likes to visit labs and think about experiments. He doesn’t conduct experiments himself; he sees his role as gathering ideas from different places and coming up with a larger theoretical framework in which they all fit together. In physics, there are both experimental and theoretical physicists, but there are fewer theoretical neuroscientists or psychologists—you have to do experiments, for the most part, or you can’t get a job. So in cognitive science this is a role that philosophers can play.
Most people, he realizes, tend to identify their selves with their conscious minds. That’s reasonable enough; after all, that is the self they know about. But there is so much more to cognition than that: the vast, silent cavern of underground mental machinery, with its tubes and synapses and electric impulses, so many unconscious systems and connections and tricks and deeply grooved pathways that form the pulsing substrate of the self. It is those primal mechanisms, the wiring and plumbing of cognition, that he has spent most of his career investigating. When you think about all that fundamental stuff—some ancient and shared with other mammals and distant ancestors, some idiosyncratic and new—consciousness can seem like a merely surface phenomenon, a user interface that obscures the real works below.
Thirty years ago, Clark heard about the work of a Soviet psychologist named Lev Vygotsky. Vygotsky had written about how children learn with the help of various kinds of scaffolding from the world outside—the help of a teacher, the physical support of a parent. Clark started musing about the ways in which even adult thought was often scaffolded by things outside the head. There were many kinds of thinking that weren’t possible without a pen and paper, or the digital equivalent—complex mathematical calculations, for instance. Writing prose was usually a matter of looping back and forth between screen or paper and mind: writing something down, reading it over, thinking again, writing again. The process of drawing a picture was similar. The more he thought about these examples, the more it seemed to him that to call such external devices “scaffolding” was to underestimate their importance. They were, in fact, integral components of certain kinds of thought. And so, if thinking extended outside the brain, then the mind did, too.
He wrote a paper titled “Mind & World: Breaching the Plastic Frontier,” and gave it to David Chalmers, who was then a young postdoctoral fellow. Chalmers was taken with the idea, and gave the paper back scribbled all over with notes, pushing Clark, among other things, to expand his notion of cognition not only to inanimate objects but to people as well. “You need a nifty name for your position,” Chalmers wrote. “‘Coupled externalism’? Or ‘The Extended Mind’... or something along those lines.” Clark liked Chalmers’s comments, and they decided to rewrite the article together. They worked so closely that the finished product was, they both felt, a nice example of extended cognition in itself. They called it “The Extended Mind,” by Andy Clark and David Chalmers; a note explained that the authors were listed in order of degree of belief in the paper’s thesis.
When the paper first circulated, in 1995, many found it outlandish. But, as the years passed, and better devices became available, and people started relying on their smartphones to bolster or replace more and more mental functions, Clark noticed that the idea of an extended mind had come to seem almost obvious. The paper became the most-cited philosophy paper of its decade. The philosopher Ned Block likes to say that the extended-mind thesis was false in 1995 but is true now.
After the paper was published, Clark began thinking that the extended mind had ethical dimensions as well. If a person’s thought was intimately linked to her surroundings, then destroying a person’s surroundings could be as damaging and reprehensible as a bodily attack. If certain kinds of thought required devices like paper and pens, then the kind of poverty that precluded them looked as debilitating as a brain lesion. Moreover, by emphasizing how thoroughly everyone was dependent on the structure of his or her world, it showed how disabled people who were dependent on things like ramps were no different from anybody else. Some theorists had argued that disability was often a feature less of a person than of a built environment that failed to take some needs into account; the extended-mind thesis showed how clearly this was so.
