The Mind's "I"

Here's an interesting piece by Carl Zimmer.

Eleven years ago, the philosophers Andy Clark and David Chalmers made a bizarre claim: our minds were not limited to our brains, but extended out of our heads to encompass many things beyond us, from notebooks to hammers to language. I have been vaguely aware of their “Extended Mind Hypothesis” for a while now, but it wasn’t until I got a copy of Clark’s latest book, Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension, that I spent some time getting to know it better. And as counterintuitive as it may be at first, it makes a fair amount of sense when you take a look at the results of recent experiments on real minds.

I don't find this all that surprising. I read Ludwig Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations in the late 1960s and accepted his solution to the Cartesian dualism: language is a shared experience so we are not in fact isolated minds. Your pain is not an "internal" phenomenon. I read your mind through your signs of pain and your use of language. In a sense, our minds are in fact extended as a social entity in the community of humans. So Clark and Chalmers are not turning over virgin soil.

Zimmer goes into more detail in his article in Discover magazine:

This concept of the extended mind was first raised in 1998, right around the time Google was born, by two philosophers, Andy Clark, now at the University of Edinburgh, and David Chalmers, now at the Australian National University. In the journal Analysis, they published a short essay called “The Extended Mind” in which they asked a simple question: “Where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin?” Most people might answer, “At the skull.” But Clark and Chalmers set out to convince their readers that the mind is not simply the product of the neurons in our brains, locked away behind a wall of bone. Rather, they argued that the mind is something more: a system made up of the brain plus parts of its environment.

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What’s even more remarkable about our brains is that they actually search for new things to make part of this feedback system. Imagine you are poking a stick into an animal’s burrow. As you poke away, you are aware of what the far end of the stick is touching, not the end you’re holding in your hand. This kind of extended sensation appears to be the result of a reorganization of the brain. Scientists have found that when test monkeys spent five minutes learning how to use a rake, some of the neurons in their hands began behaving in a new way. They began to fire in response to stimuli at the end of the rake, not on the monkey’s hand. Other neurons, in the brain, respond to things that appear to lie within arm’s reach. Training the monkeys to use the rakes caused these neurons to change—reacting to objects lying within rake’s reach rather than arm’s reach.

The eagerness with which the brain merges with tools has made it possible to create some stunning mind-machine interfaces. For instance, Miguel Nicolelis of Duke University and his colleagues put electrodes in the brains of monkeys to link them to a robot arm. The monkeys quickly learned how to move the arm around with pure thought; their neurons reorganized, establishing a new feedback loop between brain and robot arm.

Humans are proving just as good at this merger of mind and machine. The U.S. Navy has developed a flight suit for helicopter pilots that delivers little puffs of air on the side of the pilot’s body as his helicopter tilts in that direction. The pilot responds to the puffs by tilting away from them, and the suit passes those signals on to the helicopter’s steering controls. Pilots who train with this system can learn to fly blindfolded or to carry out complex maneuvers, such as holding the helicopter in a stationary hover. The helicopter becomes, in effect, part of the pilot’s body, linked back to his or her mind.

Results like these, Clark argues, reveal a mind that is constantly seeking to extend itself, to grab on to new tools it has never experienced before and merge with them. Some people may be horrified by how passionately people are taking to their laptops and GPS trackers. But to Clark it would be surprising if we didn’t. We are, in Clark’s words, “natural-born cyborgs.”