Extended mind
Where does the mind end and the world begin? Two great articles relating to extended mind. A follow up of an earlier post.
Read time: about 8 minutes. This week: Where does the mind end and the world begin? It seems an easy question, but people studying it are coming up with provocative ideas. Next week: Some information about creating a “salon” and the class guests I’m enlisting to visit in my fall seminar.
Of course, you can share this post easily:
Incroyable. That’s the word. Incredible. After a wide-ranging discussion of which cars should be in my Garage Mahal out back, my eldest son texted me a link. He knew of my affection for Ford’s original GT40, which this fellow, “Benjamin Workshop,” built from scratch (mostly). The link was a seventeen-minute YouTube video that compresses Benjamin’s four thousand hours of work on the car:
Yes, it’s in French, but the pictures tell the story. His other videos provide detail, and a little French helps, but YouTube has provided translations at least for some of the videos. The finished car is quite an achievement. I’ve included a link below to a track drive that shows off the car’s stuff and elicits an “epic reaction” from Benjamin. (And, unfortunately, I don’t think my old garage will have a GT40 in it anytime soon.)
Benjamin spent nearly a thousand hours — fully one-quarter of the project — in research and planning before he reached for his metal-working square in his shop (about thirty seconds into the timelapse). And he did a good part of the planning with plain pencil and paper of the entire chassis and mechanicals, before pretty finishing with a CAD application. The reason for the “low-tech” pencil-and-paper approach? “Drawing is very useful to check whether the mechanism works or not,” Benjamin said. “It can avoid wasting a lot of time making a 3D design of something that couldn’t work.”
Drawing is a way to think about the dynamics of, say, the front suspension (Benjamin’s sketching pictured below) and roughly clarifying the steps of actually creating the part. Of course, modern CAD applications incorporate underlying math and analytics that come in handy for such things as identifying stress points and suggesting materials for manufacture. But they are a bit cumbersome, making simple sketches attractive as a way of thinking about the ways a physical thing works.
Drawing and doodling are quite common, and they play a cognitive role for us. Earlier I looked at the squishy boundaries of “head” and “hand” (or “feel”), asking in effect where the edge of the mind really is.
In 1998, Andy Clark and David Chalmers got the ball rolling with their article “The Extended Mind.” More accurately, they restarted discussion, since the question has deep roots in philosophy. “If, as we confront some task,” they wrote, “a part of the world functions as a process which, were it done in the head, we would have no hesitation in recognizing as part of the cognitive process, then that part of the world is (so we claim) part of the cognitive process. Cognitive processes ain’t (all) in the head!” (emphasis in the original). Clark and Chalmers simply asked “Where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin?” — the first statement in their article, by the way.
Clark and Chalmers cited an article that showed that the simple game Tetris, which was the game to play in the last years of the last century and is still around, functions as a cognitive assist. Tetris allows a form of thinking through the puzzle by manipulation of the game elements, and importantly making it possible for players to “think” in this manner more quickly than by just “using your head” to process that game’s challenges.
Clark and Chalmers explain it pretty well and briefly:
In Tetris, falling geometric shapes must be rapidly directed into an appropriate slot in an emerging structure. A rotation button can be used. David Kirsh and Paul Maglio (1994) calculate that the physical rotation of a shape through 90 degrees takes about 100 milliseconds, plus about 200 milliseconds to select the button. To achieve the same result by mental rotation takes about 1000 milliseconds. Kirsh and Maglio go on to present compelling evidence that physical rotation is used not just to position a shape ready to fit a slot, but often to help determine whether the shape and the slot are compatible. The latter use constitutes a case of what Kirsh and Maglio call an ‘epistemic action’. Epistemic actions alter the world so as to aid and augment cognitive processes such as recognition and search.
Tetris allows for “epistemic action,” as does Benjamin Workshop’s doodling of his GT40 parts. Such actions, Kirsh and Maglio explained, differ from “pragmatic actions — actions performed to bring one physically closer to a goal.” Rather, epistemic actions are “performed to uncover information that is hidden or hard to compute mentally.” They add to how we think in our heads, a form of “thinking as thinging,” the term that Lambros Malafouris coined (article below).
The border between mind and the world isn’t so clear after all. (I recommend reading the Clark and Chalmers article. It’s pretty easy to understand, since they seem to have avoided the trap of acronyms and too much philosophical jargon. Article linked below.)
Two beautiful articles that explore aspects of the extended mind
Kensy Cooperrider’s “Handy Mnemonics: The Five-Fingered Memory Machine” appeared last month in The Public Domain Review, and it is beautifully written and beautiful to behold, since it is full of illustrations, all in the public domain. Cooperrider tells the story of how, “[b]eginning roughly twelve hundred years ago, we started using the hand itself as a portable repository of knowledge, a place to store whatever tended to slip our mental grasp. The topography of the palm and fingers became invisibly inscribed with information of all kinds — tenets and dates, names and sounds. The hand proved versatile in a new way, as an all-purpose memory machine.” The story is another example of extended mind at work with the hand, and it shows how the use of the hand crossed cultures and history.
The use of the hand as a “memory machine” was shareable and was used by communities. In a sense, the hand became a communicative tool. Early applications in Europe tended to be used for contemplation or, in the case of the compotus (“calculation”) devised by the Venerable Bede, as a means of determining the date of Easter. Not all uses were religious in Europe; the “Guidonian Hand” was used for music.
The practice of using the hands to jog memory seems to have “faded,” Cooperrider claimed, but he qualified that observation by noting hand-based schemes to remember the shape of some US states, the long or short months of the year, and to teach the “right-hand rule” in physics. Physicians even use the hand: “Teams of doctors recently proposed manual systems for remembering the expected values of certain diagnostic tests, the anatomy of the brachial plexus and the lungs.”
Take a look at the article. The pictures alone are worth it!
The second article appeared at the end of March. It’s by Miranda Anderson and titled “Engaging with an Artwork Leaves You and the Art Transformed.” As the title of the article suggested, Anderson explores the mutual meanings of experiencing art — both to the observer and the observed. This is a more nuanced — and probably more controversial — view of the cognitively coupled relationship of humans and things that Clark and Chalmers proposed. She touches on different artistic forms and contends, “When we are reading a book or listening to a story, especially one with unusual, rich and vivid language, we flesh out the words by drawing on our own experiences, expanding our networks of associations and widening conceptual horizons. Just as each viewer of a work of art (like each reader of a book) brings that work to life, an artwork brings each viewer newly forth. This is a reciprocal relationship.”
Tools and language
The extended mind certainly implies a certain view of tool-making and tool-using. Because the view of mind also brings about a coupling of mind and things, language in all forms (like the signs of the hand) plays an important role. I won’t go into those now, but I might return to these ideas in a future post.
Got a comment?
Tags: cognition, brain, mind, hand and mind, art, interpretation, extended mind
Links, cited and not, some just interesting
Really nice article on hands and memory. Plenty of illustrations, too: Cooperrider, Kensy. “Handy Mnemonics: The Five-Fingered Memory Machine.” The Public Domain Review, April 21, 2022. https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/handy-mnemonics/.
Clark, Andy, and David Chalmers. “The Extended Mind.” Analysis 58, no. 1 (January 1, 1998): 7–19. https://doi.org/10.1093/analys/58.1.7.
The article that look closely at Tetris: Kirsh, David, and Paul Maglio. “On Distinguishing Epistemic from Pragmatic Action.” Cognitive Science 18, no. 4 (October 1994): 513–49. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15516709cog1804_1.
A summary of what’s happened to “extended mind” studies since 1998. A bit more challenging article to read, but one that uses a nice metaphor of surfing, which is always good: Gallagher, Shaun. “The Extended Mind: State of the Question: The Extended Mind: State of the Question.” The Southern Journal of Philosophy 56, no. 4 (December 2018): 421–47. https://doi.org/10.1111/sjp.12308.
The mind and external things: Malafouris, Lambros. “Thinking as ‘Thinging’: Psychology With Things.” Current Directions in Psychological Science 29, no. 1 (February 2020): 3–8. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963721419873349.
Beholding and experiencing artwork as an example of extended mind in action: Anderson, Miranda. “Engaging with an Artwork Leaves You and the Art Transformed.” Psyche - Aeon, March 29, 2022. https://psyche.co/ideas/engaging-with-an-artwork-leaves-you-and-the-art-transformed.
Two bros in a fast car, speaking French. Benjamin takes a track spin in his GT40 with Romain Monti, a professional race car driver, at the wheel: Romain Monti. Que vaut la GT40 de Benjamin Workshop sur circuit ? (Sa réaction est épique), 2021.
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