The New Science of the Mind

by Mark Rowlands

  We can provide the same sort of account for the content of thoughts, memories, and other cognitive states. "Here is a thought; to whom does it belong?" is a question that, in normal circumstances, makes no sense. This phenomenological point about thoughts derives from their nature as revealers or disclosers of the world. The content of a thought or memory consists in the revealing or disclosing of an item in the world as falling under a given empirical mode of presentation. The content of a thought or memory is a logically sufficient condition of a certain sort of disclosure. The vehicle of that content is a causally sufficient condition of this disclosure. But there is no disclosure in itself; disclosure is relational: it is always disclosure to something.

  The vehicles of cognition-the proper subject matter of the new science-are causal rather than constitutive disclosers of the world. They provide a causally, rather than logically, sufficient condition for the world to be disclosed to a subject as falling under a given empirical mode of presentation. Nevertheless, we can give a parallel account of what makes these processes mine. Cognitive processes-whether neural, embodied, or extended-belong to me when they disclose the world to me. They can do this directly-as the causal means whereby a part of the world is disclosed as falling under an empirical mode of presentation. Or they can do it indirectly-by making information available to my subpersonal processes that then contribute to the personal-level processes defined by their worlddisclosing function. At the personal level, a cognitive process is mine when it causally discloses the world to me. And structures and processes-whether neural, embodied, or extended-belong to this process when they form part of the means, part of the vehicles, of this causal disclosure. Thus, a perceptual process is mine when it, causally rather than constitutively, discloses the tomato to me as being shiny and red. The saccadic eye movements I employ, the exploratory processes I perform, the manipulation of the optic array in which I engage: these are all parts of the perceptual process if they are part of the (causal) means, or vehicle, by which the world is disclosed to me in this way. A belief is mine when it causally discloses the world to me as containing the Museum of Modern Art on 53rd Street. The notebook forms part of this process of causal disclosure when it forms part of the means by which, or in virtue of which, the world is disclosed to me in this way.

  With this general account in mind, let us revisit the problem of bloat. Recall, now, the case of the telescope. The intratelescopic processes-reflections of light-satisfy conditions (1)-(3) of the mark of the cognitive defended earlier. Do they satisfy condition (4)? Yes, but only when I am appropriately engaged with the telescope. In such circumstances, they form part of the vehicles of my causal disclosure of the world as containing an object, say, the planet Saturn, which falls under the empirical mode of presentation of having rings. This, however, only yields the anodyne form of bloat. First, as I have argued earlier, the intratelescopic processes at most qualify as cognitive in a subpersonal sense. We are now in a position to add an important qualification to this. If the telescope were left pointing at Saturn after I had finished looking through it, then exactly the same intratelescopic processes would be occurring. But now they would not be cognitive, not even subpersonally. In order to qualify as cognitive, a process must belong to a subject. And it belongs to a subject only when it plays a role in disclosing, to that subject, the world as falling under a given empirical mode of presentation. The problem of bloat is, therefore, undercut by the fact that all cognition must ultimately relate back to the revealing activity of a subject. To be cognitive, a process must play a role in causally disclosing the world to a subject. If there is no subject to which the world is disclosed, there is no cognition. But more importantly, if there is no world disclosure of a particular form occurring at any given time, then neither is there cognition. If the telescope is, at a given time, not being used-neither by me nor by anyone else-as a vehicle of disclosing that, for example, Saturn falls under the empirical mode of presentation of having rings, then there is no part of any cognitive process that is occurring inside the telescope. There is no problem of bloat on the view defended here: the bounds of cognition are limned by the activities of world disclosure.'

  10 A Weird New Science?

  The extended mind is generally thought of as a "weird" thesis. Even its defenders accept this. The embodied mind is, I gather, regarded as slightly less outlandish-perhaps because it doesn't relocate the mental so far from its traditional home-but still distinctly peculiar. If either thesis were to turn out to be demonstrably true-this would strike many-almost certainly the vast majority-as a surprising result. The new, non-Cartesian science, therefore, would be born with the taint of the strange, peculiar, or otherwise bizarre.

  This taint, I have argued, is the result of a tacit commitment to a particular conception of intentionality. There is a pervasive tendency to misunderstand the nature of intentional directedness: to think of it as an essentially inner process. What I mean when I mean something by a word is an entirely inner state or process. What I mean by a word or expression is something I can identify by turning my attention inward. Intentional directedness, it is assumed, is something we encounter when we turn our attention inward; an object of our inner, introspective engagement. If we think that this is what intentionality is, and if we take intentional states to be paradigm cases of the mental, then the amalgamated mind will indeed seem outlandish.

  But I have argued that we will not find intentional directedness if we turn attention inward; all we can find are objects of this directedness. Intentional directedness is best understood in terms of the idea of world disclosure. Intentional directedness is the process of revealing or disclosing an item within the world as falling under one or more aspects or empirical modes of presentation. Depending on the level at which we cast our analysis-depending, that is, on whether our concern is with contents or vehicles of content-with experiences or their material realizations-this world disclosure can take one of two forms: constitutive or causal.

  The theses of embodied and extended cognition emerge as a straightforward, almost banal, implication of the idea that the vehicles of cognition are causal disclosers of the world. World disclosure, in general, is entirely neutral over the nature and location of its vehicles. Sometimes they are neural operations, but sometimes they are processes taking place in the body, or even processes that extend into the world in the form of manipulation, exploitation, and transformation of environmental structures.

  Once we accept this, the theses of embodied and extended cognition are not weird at all. They are stunningly obvious. Therefore, so too is the thesis of the amalgamated mind: the conjunction of the mind embodied and the mind extended. Suppose there were a new science of the mind to be built on the foundation of the amalgamated mind. Any stigma of the strange or deviant that attaches to this new science would, therefore, simply be the result of our implicit, and illicit, commitment to an untenable model of intentional directedness.

  1 Expanding the Mind

  1. For its growing presence in popular culture see, e.g., Fred Hapgood's "When Robots Live Among Us" in the June 2008 edition of Discover magazine, and David Brooks, "The Outsourced Brain" in the New York Times, October 26, 2007.

  2. Interestingly enough, recognizable forerunners of neural network models actually predated the "cognitive revolution" of the 1960s. The well-known pandernoniurn model developed by Oliver Selfridge (1959) was a clear forerunner of today's connectionist networks. Moreover, Selfridge was building on earlier work of this general oeuvre developed by Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts (McCulloch and Pitts 1943, 1947).

  3. For this debate, see Fodor and Pylyshyn 1988 and Smolensky 1987, 1988.

  4. In fact, I believe the conversation in question took place over lunch in Cardiff, at a situated cognition workshop organized by Alessandra Tanesini and Richard Gray. That was when Shaun coined the expression 4e. It subsequently formed the title of a conference he organized at the University of Central Florida in October 2007: 4e: The Mind Embodi
ed, Embedded, Enacted, Extended.

  5. Spoiler alert: I am, in fact, going to argue for a 2e non-Cartesian conception of the mind.

  6. By "new" I mean whatever is left of the 4e conception once the process of identification, clarification, clarification, and rendering consistent has been carried out.

  7. At least one of Rupert's (2004) criticisms of my position rests on failing to appreciate this distinction (or on attributing to me a failure to appreciate this distinction). I should, therefore, emphasize that I think the mind is embodied, embedded, enacted, or extended only if, and to the extent that, it is made up of, or constituted by, mental states and processes. If the mind is conceived of as something that is distinct from and underlies these states and processes-as something to which these states and processes attach-then there is no reason for thinking that the mind is outside the head.

  8. My thanks to Mike Wheeler for this.

  9. This interpretation of Descartes, or rather of what Descartes needs to make sense of his account, is due to Keith Campbell (1970).

  10. An alternative interpretation denies that Descartes attributed spatial location to minds, and is based on distinguishing between (i) where, for Descartes, the mind is located and (ii) where mind-brain interaction takes place. According to this interpretation, the mind may be nowhere while the interaction between mind and body might take place at a specified location-the pineal gland. I am grateful to Mike Wheeler for this suggestion. However, though this interpretation is part of a more general, and somewhat fashionable, process of rehabilitating Descartes, I think there are serious conceptual obstacles in its way. Most obviously: how can something that exists nowhere do something (i.e., act on the brain) somewhere? I shall, therefore, adhere to the more traditional interpretation of Descartes advanced in the main body of this section. If you don't buy into this interpretation of Descartes, just think of it as a way Descartes has commonly been interpreted, and then think of the label "Cartesian" as picking out the view commonly attributed to, rather than view actually held by, Descartes.

  11. See Brooks, "The Outsourced Brain."

  12. Or, in the case of my GPS, often the junction just behind me-she's not too quick off the mark. Or maybe it's me.

  13. Andy Clark's (1989) "007 principle"-know only what you need to know-predates the barking dog principle and makes essentially the same point.

  14. This objection has been championed, in slightly different ways, by Robert Rupert (2004) and Fred Adams and Ken Aizawa (2001; 2010). I think they have done a great service to anti-Cartesians by forcing them to considerably sharpen their statements of the non-Cartesian alternative. I shall discuss their objections in much more detail later on.

  2 Non-Cartesian Cognitive Science

  1. Burge (1986) demurs, presenting Marr's theory of vision as an example of externalist, or non-Cartesian, theorizing. However, his case turns on the role of "assumptions" about the nature of the environment that Marr builds in to his account of vision. Put in terms of the discussion of the previous chapter, these assumptions-or rather the environmental circumstances-provide a useful framework or scaffolding within which the processes that make up vision are embedded. But there is nothing in Marr's account that suggests that these environmental circumstances form part of the processes that make up vision itself. Therefore, I shall, I think legitimately, employ Marr's account as an example of Cartesian cognitive science. If this is correct, it, once again, illustrates that environmental embedding of cognitive processes is by no means anathema to Cartesian cognitive science. For more on this see chapter 3.

  2. I have Tony Chemero to thank for this.

  3. Thanks to Mike Wheeler for drawing my attention to this.

  3 The Mind Embodied, Embedded, Enacted, and Extended

  1. I say Hume "might have held a view similar to it" but I actually don't think he did. See Craig 1982, chapter 3, for reasons for thinking that he did not, in fact, hold this view. Nevertheless, this view of the mind is attributed to him with sufficient regularity for it to be called the Humean view of the self.

  2. In Rowlands 1999, I distinguish between ontic and epistemic versions of the extended mind thesis (or, as I preferred to call it in those days, "environmentalism"). That is, I distinguished the extended mind thesis as an ontic claim about what mental processes are from an epistemic claim about the best way to understand mental processes. I argued that the latter was an important corollary of the former, but that the former-the ontic claim-was the most interesting and important way of understanding the extended mind. The discussion of this section is, in part, an application of this distinction to the thesis of the embodied mind. However, here I am going to distinguish two different versions of the ontic thesis.

  3. This point, in the context of the extended mind rather than the embodied mind, has been made forcefully (and in my view correctly) by both Adams and Aizawa (2001, 2010), and Rupert (2004).

  4. In Rowlands 1999, I argued that the extended mind (aka environmentalism) was best understood as an ontic claim of constitution (rather than dependence). But I did not explicitly distinguish between dependence and constitution versions of the ontic claim. I do so now thanks, in part, to the work of Adams and Aizawa (2001, 2010) and Rupert (2004).

  5. This line of thought can be discerned in Rupert 2004.

  6. There are other possible ways of understanding the thesis of the extended mind, but this was the status of the thesis I developed and defended in Rowlands 1999.

  7. This is because this epistemic claim is also a corollary of a weaker claim to be discussed shortly: the thesis of the embedded mind.

  8. It is truly surprising how often one finds it necessary to repeat this obvious point.

  9. Someone, with an enthusiasm bordering on the rabid, might even find him- or herself tempted to claim: some mental processes are necessarily constituted by processes of environmental manipulation. This de re version of the necessity claim would be even more plausible than the modalized de ditto claim.

  10. See, especially, work by the "Edinburgh functionalists," Clark 2008a,b and Wheeler 2008, for the connection between the extended mind and functionalism.

  11. Adams and Aizawa (2001, 2010) and Rupert (2004) both use the distinction between dependence and constitution as a way of attacking the extended mind on the grounds that the arguments used to support only establish the dependence of cognitive process on, rather than the constitution of cognitive processes by, environmental processes. Their argument will be discussed in more detail in the next chapter.

  12. Of course, I have not argued for this claim yet. That is, I have not yet argued that a manipulative process that transforms the information contained in an external structure from the merely present to the available is thereby a properly cognitive part of a larger cognitive process. The argument for this claim will be developed in subsequent chapters.

  13. Mackay's example is cited by O'Regan and Noe (2001).

  14. Thanks to Tony Chemero for planting the seeds of doubt in my mind on this point.

  15. This is the principal moral of the change blindness results discussed extensively by O'Regan and Noe (2001). The fact that subjects can, under appropriate masking conditions, fail to notice even significant changes in a visual scene suggests strongly, O'Regan and Noe argue, that they have formed no detailed or complex internal representation of this scene.

  16. See Heidegger 1927/1962; Dreyfus 1992; Wheeler 2005.

  17. I am not, here, rehearsing Stanley and Williamson's (2001) claim that there is no distinction between knowing how and knowing that. On the contrary, I think Stanley and Williamson are clearly mistaken. There is a legitimate distinction, but Noe fails to draw it. In particular, on his account, the expectations constitutive of sensorimotor knowledge are expectations that.

  18. Not all of them, of course. My ability to mentally picture and count the number of windows in my house when I am sitting miles away in my office is an ability that is not composed of wider bodily structures and processes. The possess
ion of this ability seems to depend purely on what is going on in my brain.

  19. This, of course, is not necessarily a weakness of the enactivist view. Failure to entail an extended account might be regarded by many as a strength rather than a weakness. My concern here is only to properly distinguish enactive and extended accounts.

  20. This charge has been leveled by Siewert (2006).

  21. It is true that he puts this in interrogative form. But it is clear from the context that this is a claim he wishes to endorse.

  22. I would like to thank Andy Clark for drawing my attention to this.

  23. This point originally goes back to Davidson (1987). For something to be sunburn, it must stand in a certain relation to solar radiation. But it does not follow that the sunburn must "extend" into the solar radiation. The planet example is due to Macdonald (1990).

  24. A similar claim is endorsed by Clark (forthcoming).

  25. Indeed, it is not even clear that the claim of environmental embedding is justifiable. As the example of the planet makes clear, one can be an internalist about experience and accept with equanimity the claim that the possession of a given property by an experience depends on a "characteristic extended dynamic." This seems to stretch the idea of embedding beyond the bounds of the acceptable.

  4 Objections to the Mind Amalgamated

  1. Understood deductively, the argument would, of course, be fallacious.

  2. I think Richard Menary was the first to clearly see this-certainly he got there a long time before I did. See, especially, Menary 2006, 2007. He had been making this point at conferences long before the publication of these papers.

  3. The significance of the contribution of the enactivist account in this context is, of course, moderated by the arguments of the previous chapter. If those arguments are correct, enactivism, at least in the form defended by Noe, does not yield an extended account of perceptual processing.