The New Science of the Mind

by Mark Rowlands

  4. Susan Hurley (1998) also provides a powerful defense of this idea.

  5. This point is made by Martin Godwyn (unpublished ms), "Who's Afraid of Cognitive Bloat?"

  6. I am grateful to a conversation with Richard Samuels for the example.

  7. The scales fell from my eyes on this particular point thanks to Mike Wheeler, who, as far as I am aware, was the first to make it in a paper he gave at the Extended Mind II conference, "Phenomenology, Activism, and the Extended Mind." Subsequently, he has made this point in print in "Minds, Things, and Materiality" (2008) and "In Defense of Extended Functionalism" (2010).

  5 The Mark of the Cognitive

  1. This criterion can, I think, be regarded as an explicit version of the criterion with which I was working-or at least should have been working-in The Body in Mind (Rowlands 1999). There are, however, two differences. First, the arguments of The Body in Mind do not employ the idea of ownership. In this regard, the criterion I adopted there was incomplete. Second, in The Body in Mind I defined the idea of a cognitive process in terms of the idea of a cognitive task, where the latter was defined by ostension. I have Aaron Wilson to thank for convincing me that this move was unnecessary. In this respect, the criterion I employed in The Body in Mind was a little flabby.

  2. I take no stand on whether it is, in fact, possible for a process to make information available both to a subject and to subsequent processing operations. Some-for example, McDowell (1994b)-might want to deny this on the grounds that there is no common content that could be transmitted to both. My claims are simply that (i) subpersonal processes make information available only to other subpersonal processes and not to the subjects of those processes, and (ii) personallevel processes make information available at least to subjects. This is all I need for the arguments to follow. I thank Mike Wheeler for allowing me to clarify this.

  3. More accurately, it is to allow us to understand what, in principle, might be only an important subset of cognitive processes-those currently dealt with in cognitivescientific practice. The restriction is required because the proposed criterion provides only a sufficient condition for something to count as cognitive, and not a necessary condition.

  4. Thanks again to Michael Wheeler for allowing/forcing me to clarify this.

  5. Of course, there is nothing in the idea of the amalgamated mind that would require us to deny that external structures can possess nonderived information. Whether the external information-bearing structure possesses nonderived information would presumably, vary from case to case. Thus, in the examples discussed above, the information carried by the kvinus is derived, but that carried by the optic array is not. Whether nonderived information adds up to nonderived content depends, of course, on whether content can be explained exclusively in terms of information. For a variety of familiar reasons, I suspect that it cannot.

  6. Though, again, see Rowlands 2006 for an alternative.

  7. After writing this, I discovered that Wilson and Clark (2008) make essentially the same point. Also, to my chagrin, I discover that they have made it in a far more colorful and entertaining way. Just to demonstrate what a willful curmudgeon I can sometimes be, I am going to stick with my boring version.

  6 The Problem of Ownership

  1. Thanks to Mike Wheeler for encouraging me to clarify this point.

  2. Thanks to Fred Adams, who raised this objection in correspondence.

  3. Wilson (2001) seems to display an appreciation of the importance of the issue of ownership in the context of the extended mind. However, his discussion is vitiated by a fairly obvious conflation of the issue of (i) what an entity must be like in order to have mental properties attributed to it, with (ii) an account of what it is for such an entity to own such properties-because he fails to even address the second question. This second question is the focus of the present chapter.

  4. Richard Samuels suggested this example to me in conversation.

  5. Adams and Aizawa (2001) also use the example of digestion but with a somewhat different purpose. They use it as an example of a process that can be externalized-for example, a fly digesting its food. They claim that cognition, too, could be externalized but, in fact, is not. I am not using the example of digestion, here, to support to the idea of external cognition. With respect to the process of digestion, my concern is simply with the issue of ownership-and not with the issue of location.

  6. I know I said earlier that I proposed to take functionalism out of the equation, at least insofar as this is possible. However, the advertised riddance of functionalist principles takes place in the argument I am going to develop for the amalgamated mind-and this will be developed in the following two chapters. Here I am talking about the ownership of cognitive processes. And in supplying an account of ownership of subpersonal cognitive processes I simply don't think it is possible to possible to take functionalism out of the equation (hence the qualification "insofar as this is possible"). As we shall see in the following chapters, matters are significantly different when we turn our attention to personal-level cognitive processes. Thanks to Mike Wheeler for urging this point of clarification.

  7. See, e.g., Hurley 1998, chapter 3. Note that we would have to assume that these are psychological duplicates except in the case of indexical thoughts about themselves (and demonstrative thoughts about their environments).

  8. And also one that can subsume sensory detections and motor responses performed by an organism. This goes back to the need to account not only for cognitive processes but also the fixed frame of reference. We cannot assume, at the outset, that ownership of sensory detections and motor responses is unproblematic.

  7 Intentionality as Revealing Activity

  1. Indeed, this is one way-a translation into the language of sense-to understand the commonplace idea that intentionality consists in directedness-toward objects. If intentionality is indeed directedness-toward objects, and if this directedness-toward objects is distinct from the objects thus directed-toward, then we will look in vain at those intentional objects if we want to understand intentionality itself. The problem is, of course, that there is nothing else for us to look at.

  2. This commits me to aligning myself with Evans and McDowell in attacking Frege's claim that empty proper names-proper names that have no bearer-should be regarded as having sense but no reference. Evans and McDowell insist that empty proper names should be regarded as devoid of sense. I am happy to side with Evans and McDowell on this.

  3. Sartre was not, in fact, a commonsense realist about the world. But he was a phenomenological realist. The reality and objectivity of objects is to be understood in terms of their being constituted by a potentially infinite series of appearances, appearances that subsume and incorporate what we might regard as the "hidden" aspects of objects (e.g., their chemical structure). Appearances are, for Sartre, transcendent items rather than being parts of, or constructions out of, consciousness. The independence of things from consciousness and their ontological priority over consciousness is essential to Sartre's view, forming the basis of what he calls his "ontological proof," and his characterization of his view as a "radical reversal" of idealism.

  4. This, of course, is not the place to become embroiled in the dispute between description and causal theories of reference-that would be another book entirely. The recent resurgence in description-theoretic approaches, of course, does me no harm. But even if we assume a causal (or informational, etc.) account of the reference of some terms, the idea that we can account for the mode of presentation of an experience in causal terms alone was always a distinctly minority view. That is all I assume here.

  5. Remember that my focus here is on perceptual (indeed, largely visual) intentionality and related modes of illusion and hallucination. In effect, I am making a case for perceptual intentionality to be understood as a form of disclosing activity. The extension of this model to cognition more generally will be attempted in the next chapter.

  8 The Mind Amalgamated

&nbs
p; 1. Here I am utilizing a point I have defended at much greater length (Rowlands 2001, 2002, 2003, 2008). It is consistent with the point I am defending in the present book that one can also regard what it is like to have an experience as an empirical mode of presentation-something of which we are aware in the having of an experience-something that I would have denied in at least some of these other places. All I need here is that the claim that what it is like to have an experience is, among other things, that in virtue of which the object of the experience is presented in a given way to a subject. That is, I assume it is legitimate to think of what it is like to have an experience as a transcendental mode of presentation. If you do not like this assumption, nothing much turns on it. We can reformulate the above arguments in terms of the idea of a transcendental mode of presentation rather than what it is like to have an experience. I use the latter here because of its greater familiarity to most readers.

  2. I vacillate on this-a lot-but at the time of writing of the final typescript, I suspect not.

  3. The two possibilities, of course, correspond (roughly) to the well-known possibilities of inverted qualia and absent qualia.

  4. This claim is, of course, compatible with my earlier questioning of whether the enactive approach entails a form of extended mind. The key question, to reiterate, is this: does the enactive approach require exercise of the ability to explore the world or does it merely require the ability to do this? If it requires the former, then the enactive model qualifies as a version of the extended mind. If not, then it does not so qualify. My concern in the present section, of course, is with the process of exploration itself-i.e., the exercise of the ability.

  5. The criterion of the cognitive has been advanced as a sufficient but not a necessary condition for a process to qualify as cognitive. Therefore, the criterion is compatible with cognitive disclosure taking some other form than the one outlined here. However, for our purposes, the important point is that the position defended in this book is not, by any stretch of the imagination, committed to the idea that walking around the corner is a form of cognition.

  6. Of course, this is not to deny that there might be conceivable circumstances in which walking around a corner might be part of a cognitive process. The qualification "at least typically" is intended to allow for such a possibility. I can't, off the top of my head, imagine what those circumstances might be. But the important point, of course, is that, for the most part, walking around a corner is not a cognitive operation.

  7. Remember, of course, that even when it is being employed, the processes occurring within the telescope never amount to anything more than subpersonal cognitive processes. The subject has no epistemic authority over these processes, and that precludes their counting as personal-level cognitive processes. Therefore, to the extent that we have to be willing to face up to a problem of bloat, this is only with respect to subpersonal cognitive processes. This is what I identified earlier as the anodyne form of the problem.

  Adams, F., and K. Aizawa. 2001. The bounds of cognition. Philosophical Psychology 14:43-64.

  Adams, F., and K. Aizawa. 2010. Why the mind is still in the head. In The Extended Mind, ed. R. Menary. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

  Baumeister, R., E. Bratslavsky, M. Muraven, and D. Tice. 1998. Ego depletion: Is the active self a limited resource? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 74: 1252-1265.

  Bechtel, W., and A. Abrahamson. 1991. Connectionisin and the Mind: An Introduction to Parallel Processing in Networks. Oxford: Blackwell.

  Beer, R. 1995. Computational and dynamical languages for autonomous agents. In Mind as Motion: Explorations in the Dynamics of Cognition, ed. R. Port and T. van Gelder, 121-148. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

  Bergson, H. [1908] 1991. Matter and Memory. Trans. N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer. New York: Zone Books.

  Blackmore, S., G. Brelstaff, K. Nelson, and T. Troscianko. 1995. Is the richness of our visual world an illusion? Transsaccadic memory for complex scenes. Perception 24:1075-1081.

  Brewer, William. 1996. What is recollective memory? In Remembering Our Past, ed. D. C. Rubin, 19-66. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

  Brooks, D. 2007. The outsourced brain. New York Tines, October 26.

  Brooks, R. 1991. Intelligence without representation. Artificial Intelligence 47: 139-159.

  Brooks, R. 1994. Coherent behaviour from many adaptive processes. In From Animals to Anhnats 3, ed. D. Cliff, P. Husbands, J.-A. Meyer, and S. W. Wilson. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

  Burge, T. 1986. Individualism and psychology. Philosophical Review 45:3-45.

  Campbell, J. 1994. Past, Space, and Self. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

  Campbell, J. 1997. The structure of time in autobiographical memory. European Journal of Philosophy 5:105-118.

  Campbell, K. 1970. Body and Mind. Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press.

  Chalmers, D. 1996. The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  Clark, A. 1989. Microcognition: Philosophy, Cognitive Science, and Parallel Distributed Processing. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

  Clark, A. 1997. Being There: Putting Brain, Body and World Back Together Again. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

  Clark, A. 2008a. Pressing the flesh: A tension on the study of the embodied, embedded mind. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 76:37-59.

  Clark, A. 2008b. Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  Clark, A. Forthcoming. Spreading the joy: Why the machinery of consciousness is (probably) still in the head. Mind.

  Clark, A., and D. Chalmers. 1998. The extended mind. Analysis 58:7-19. Reprinted in Menary 2010.

  Clark, A., and J. Toribio. 1994. Doing without representing? Synthese 101:401431.

  Craig, E. 1982. The Mind of God and the Works of Man. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

  Damasio, A. 1994. Descartes' Error. New York: Grosset Putnam.

  Damasio, A. 2004. Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain. New York: Mariner Books.

  Davidson, D. 1970. Mental events. In Experience and Theory, ed. L. Foster and J. Swanson. London: Duckworth.

  Davidson, D. 1984. Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  Davidson, D. 1987. Knowing one's own mind. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Association 60:441-458.

  Dennett, D. 1987. The Intentional Stance. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

  Dennett, D. 1991. Consciousness Explained. Boston: Little, Brown.

  Donald, M. 1991. Origins of the Modern Mind. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

  Dretske, F. 1981. Knowledge and the Flow of Information. Oxford: Blackwell.

  Dretske, F. 1986. Misrepresentation. In Belief ed. R. Bogdan. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  Dreyfus, H. 1992. Being-in-the-World. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

  Drummond, J. 1990. Husserlian Intentionality and Non-Foundational Realism. Dordrecht: Kluwer.

  Dummett, M. 1973. Frege's Philosophy of Language. London: Duckworth.

  Dummett, M. 1981. The Interpretation of Frege's Philosophy. London: Duckworth.

  Fodor, J. 1986. Psychosemantics. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

  Fodor, J. 1990. A Theory of Content and Other Essays. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

  Fodor, J. 2009. Where is my mind? London Review of Books 31(3):13-15.

  Fodor, J., and Z. Pylyshyn. 1988. Connectionism and cognitive architecture: A critical analysis. Cognition 28:3-71.

  Follesdal, D. 1969. Husserl's notion of noema. Journal of Philosophy 66:680-687.

  Frege, G. [1892] 1960. On sense and reference. In Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege. Ed. P. Geach and M. Black. Oxford: Blackwell.

  Frege, G. [1918] 1994. The thought: A logical inquiry. In Basic Topics in the Philosophy of Language, ed. R. Harnish. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall.

  Gallistel, C. 1993. The Organization of Le
arning. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

  Gibson, J. 1966. The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin.

  Gibson, J. 1979. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin.

  Godwyn, M. (unpublished ms). Who's afraid of cognitive bloat?

  Gould, D. 1967. Pattern recognition and eye movement parameters. Perception and Psychophysics 2:399-407.

  Hapgood, Fred. 2008. When robots live among us. Discover (June).

  Harnish, R. 2000. Grasping modes of presentation: Frege vs. Fodor and Schweizer. Acta Analytica 15:19-46.

  Haugeland, J. 1995. The mind embodied and embedded. In Having Thought: Essays in the Metaphysics of Mind. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

  Heidegger, M. [19271 1962. Being and Time. Trans. J. Macquarie. Oxford: Blackwell.

  Hume, D. [17391 1975. A Treatise of Human Nature. Ed. L. Selby-Bigge. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  Hurley, S. 1998. Consciousness in Action. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

  Hurley, S. 2010. Varieties of externalism. In The Extended Mind, ed. R. Menary. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

  Husserl, E. [1900] 1973. Logical Investigations. Trans. J. Findlay. London: Routledge.

  Husserl, E. [ 1913 1 1982. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy. Trans. F. Kersten. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.

  Hutchins, E. 1995. Cognition in the Wild. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

  Jackson, F. 1982. Epiphenomenal qualia. Philosophical Quarterly 32:127-132.

  Jackson, F. 1986. What Mary didn't know. Journal of Philosophy 83:291-295.

  Kaplan, D. 1980. Demonstratives. The John Locke Lectures. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  Keijzer, F. 1998. Doing without representations which specify what to do. Philosophical Psychology 9:323-346.

  Kirsh, D., and P. Maglio. 1994. On distinguishing epistemic from pragmatic action. Cognitive Science 18:513-549.