What do you start thinking about when you read this quote from Mark Sprevak?
I start thinking about
- What a mind is.
- What cognition means.
- Do we think outside of our heads?
These are the questions I want to tackle in this essay but first.
Robot people.
The age of robot people
Transhumanism is a social movement looking to combine technology with humans, with origins dating back to 1923.
A group of people called grinders push the limits.
Sabine’s video explores people implanting magnets, chips and other technology into their bodies.
Neil Harbisson is a popular example.
Born with Achromatopsia.
He can’t see colours.
Neil uses an ‘eyeborg’ device Osseointigrated (connected) to his occipital bone (part of the skull) to see colours.
The device converts colours into sound waves.
In 2004 his passport photo was rejected due to the device.
However, after appealing he identified as a cyborg, and the ‘eyeborg’ should be treated as an organ, not a device, he got his ID.
A piece of technology was accepted as part of a person.
More on that later.
But a later interaction with police led to the device breaking.
Thus Neil was unable to detect information about colour.
Neil then tweeted about this situation.
But more interestingly to this conversation, there were arguments made for assault.
Grounds for ‘extended assault’.
Other examples you might feel different about include:
- Cochlear implants for the deaf.
- Pacemakers for heart or lung deficiencies.
- Wheelchairs and walking aids for physical deficiencies.
Breaking technology that functions like an organ could be grounds for extended assault.
When I think of a robot person, I think of the Hollywood androids.
But maybe, we already have robot people.
They just don’t look the way they do on TV.
Phones for brains
Most people use smartphones to help them remember things.
Phone numbers are an obvious example.
So phones function like memory… a part of the brain. So what?
Well in a landmark United States Supreme Court case, they unanimously held that the warrantless search and seizure of digital contents of a cell phone during an arrest is unconstitutional.
David Riley was stopped for a routine traffic violation but was charged with weapon charges.
Police searched Riley’s cell phone and found incriminating evidence on it.
Riley moved to suppress all evidence that the police had obtained from his cell phone, however, the trial court denied the motion, and Riley was convicted.
The California Court of Appeals affirmed the lower court’s ruling, confirming the previous decision.
However, the US Supreme Court in June 2014 unanimously overturned the conviction upheld by the California Court of Appeals.
The court ruled phones are not just property anymore.
John Roberts, the lawyer, argued that:
Despite the jokey tone I feel coming through the text, this is still significant.
The original conviction was based on search incident to arrest which permits arresting police officers to perform, without a warrant, a search of an arrested person’s physical area.
A person’s physical area.
That is the question here. What counts as a person’s physical area?
Things like pens, keys and phones are often included.
But this court ruling says no.
Phones shouldn’t be included.
Physical area is traditionally separated from our mind. Mind-body dualism.
But extended cognition, and other approaches I will touch on, suggests otherwise.
The law doesn’t talk about a brain scan or forced lie detection tests when being arrested.
If searching phone contents can be unconstitutional, to some extent cognition is going beyond the brain.
Our mind going beyond our brain
When most people say mind, they are referring to an entity that is in our head.
Not physical.
Cognition is our mind processing things in our brain.
However, Andy & David argued some cognitive states spill outside the head when the relationship is right:
- Smartphones/Laptops/Computers.
- Using a pen or pencil with paper.
- Counting your fingers.
- Other people like friends reminding you of something.
The Extended Mind book by Annie share various examples of how we think outside our brain.
This means our brain might not be in full control of our thinking.
Then Tiago Forte, discussed how we could use these ideas in his book on building a second brain.
However, I am not sold on these ideas.
Thinking outside the brain yes. But an extended mind - I don't think so.
The battle ground of extended cognition
The hypothesis of extended cognition (HEC) doesn’t consider abstract, point-of-view phenomenology.
HEC argues about the location and extent of cognition.
Instead of a brain-based location.
A location that extends outside the brain.
One of the biggest arguments for extended cognition is functionalism.
As Mark writes:
If our brain does something we may call it a cognitive function.
But if objects in our environment function the same way, the argument is that we should also call it a cognitive function.
Andy & David use a notebook as an example.
The notebook functions like a ‘biological memory’.
However, Mark writes:
This suggests that objects in the environment can become part of cognition.
However, HEC doesn’t say how much cognition extends which is a problem.
Cognitive bloat.
Extending cognition too much can make concepts and discussions pointless.
If the environment is anything outside the brain or central nervous system, everything could be cognitive.
Avoiding cognitive bloat requires a line.
What is or is not extended cognition?
Mark cited some suggestions to mark what it means to be cognitive which include:
- (i) A cognitive process must involve non-derived representational content and be functionally similar to actual cases of internal, brain-based human cognition.
- (ii) A cognitive process must be part of an integrated, persisting system, and it must causally contribute to a wide range of cognitive phenomena.
- (iii) A process is cognitive so long as it ‘belongs’ to a subject in the sense of causally contributing to the intentional content of that subject’s personal-level state.
Critics of HEC lean towards marks i and ii but move away from iii.
Supporters of HEC lean towards iii and move away from i and ii.
But if there is disagreement with what counts as cognitive, no line can be drawn.
Thus cognitive bloat will remain an issue.
However, supporters only look for instances of extended cognition for HEC to be true.
This is where HEC becomes heavily contested.
Extended cognition sounds like embedded cognition
Some HEC supporters argue an inference to the best explanation.
Suggesting we should believe HEC because it is useful.
I disagree.
Don’t worry, I will expand later.
But another argument for HEC is a second-wave argument.
Emphasizing a reciprocal relationship between the brain, body and environment.
For those familiar, leveraging ideas from dynamical systems theory.
Not the brain controlling the body in an environment.
The brain-body-environment system dynamically works together.
But all of this describes the hypothesis of embedded cognition (HEMC).
Organisms embedded in their environment, not floating around in a void.
HEMC doesn’t say notebooks have mental/cognitive properties, unlike HEC.
A reminder. HEC argues about the location and extent of cognition.
The location extended from the brain.
HEMC, to my understanding, can’t suggest a location.
Organisms embedded in dynamic environments have an ongoing process of cognition.
In Ecological Psychology we try to verb our nouns.
Thus the location is dynamic.
To use Mark’s quote from earlier:
So I would say the cognitive properties are emergent properties within the organism-environment relationship.
Not located in one object or another.
The notebook alone doesn’t think.
It requires interaction with an organism.
Thus extended cognition would have us give an object cognitive properties and then remove them.
But a notebook doesn’t think.
We offload information processing onto the environment.
Extended cognition uses this as a location of processing from the brain to the environment.
However, embedded cognition emphasizes two-way interaction.
Not the location of cognition changing, but the scale of observation changing.
Cognitions larger conversation
This conversation is among a larger conversation of the 4 E’s of cognition:
- Extended
- Embedded
- Embodied
- Enactive
Some argue a fifth E for emotion, or an A for affective trying to include motivation and interest.
I think that is included within embodied cognition.
Brain and body are connected in cognition such as using your fingers to count.
Gestures are used to enhance communication and clarify thinking as discussed in Annie’s book.
Or more broadly, our perception of touch. Our body is a perceptual system.
Emotion would therefore be included within embodied cognition.
Interoception, proprioception, emotional intelligence and related internal feelings as the macro-scale patterns of physical forces on the body.
Ecological haptics.
Ecological Psychology is the approach I take and with it, enactive cognition.
Cognition in a looping interaction between perception and action that involves the brain, body, and the world.
Together, cognition is an emergent property within the interaction of an organism-environment relationship.
Beyond extended cognition
Embodied and embedded cognition (EEC) is becoming widely used in cognitive science.
HEC seems to be an outside idea, rather than something many researchers follow.
That’s from my experience at least.
Although HEC sounds intuitive and is part of online education, it’s reframing of embedded cognition is troublesome.
Isolating a location for cognition seems reductionistic.
Again, verbing my nouns here… cognizing not cognition.
Or. Thinking.
I don't think we would ask where the location of thinking is.
That doesn’t make sense.
Thinking happens throughout time which can involve various organisms and objects.
We disagree about human cognition because traditional language tries to define cognition as a thing.
Zooming out.
Thinking is part of a dynamic system which includes perceiving and acting.
Thus, the word cognition should go beyond processing information.
