The Extended Mind and the Ontology of Consciousness

David Chalmers’s and Andy Clark’s notion of the extended mind is facing greater empirical tests, and it seems to me that these tests may prove the notion’s validity.

As I understand it, the notion suggests that the “mind” is not limited to the brain or the body — that biological or material chauvinism denies the complex integration of information that results from a system of brain plus tool. The tool can be as simple as a notebook — this was the first technology Chalmers used to argue for the extended mind hypothesis (EMH), and the idea is that a brain that consistently uses such a notebook and trusts it as an element of the brain’s cognitive process has created an extended mind, incorporating the mind emergent from or constructed by the brain with the notebook as functor. The mind, here, is defined as a thinking system and the brain is but one physical tool used to create and sustain the mind, with the notebook being another.

With mobile phones, the argument becomes more compelling, and with brain interface technologies like Neuralink and established assistance devices, the argument becomes difficult to resist. And if these technologies suggest the EMH is valid, it has ontological implications for both the mind and consciousness.

To demonstrate this point, consider a hypothetical person who has a brain-connected technology that is connected to a pair of smart glasses. So the smart glasses, when perceiving another person walking down the street, immediately alerts the user’s brain through the neural link that the user has met that person before and knows that person’s name, which the smart glasses then provide to the user’s brain via the neural link.

In this case, the extended mind is a system of the smart glasses + brain via the physical connection of the neural link, and it is difficult to say that the person’s mind is limited to inside the body or it is limited to the person’s physical biology.

This is an ontological definition of the person’s mind, but not of the person’s consciousness, and Chalmers is careful to distinguish between the two in his formulation of this notion. In other words, the extended mind has not changed the individual’s consciousness at all, and the injection of information into the user’s mind would then provide a stimulus to the consciousness, but it is not a part of the consciousness any more than touching a cold metal surface is part of consciousness. It stimulates the consciousness with sensations of smooth metallic coldness, but the cold metal surface and the stimulated sensory nerves on the fingers stimulated are no more part of consciousness than the smart glasses in our EMH example.

A dichotomy has emerged between mind and consciousness, where the former is a system of processing and integration of sensory information that uses a variety of physical tools — the brain, fingers, nerves, notebooks, glasses, etc. — but it is entirely separate from consciousness. The brain and tools attached to the brain produce the mind, whether extended or not, which the consciousness then perceives.

The consciousness, then, is not the mind, and the mind is not consciousness.

Notebooks and nerves and fingers are not the only tools that do this. Language shapes and guides the mind. The limits of my language are the limits of my world and language’s limit points have had demonstrable physical effects on the brain, to the point that some very real psychobiological disorders are the result of the brain’s capacity for language.

The human mind is already extended; it has been extended for many thousands of years through the technology of language.

My brain plus my language are the extended mind which creates my world.

My consciousness is my perception of this extended mind, able to perceive the mind and constantly stimulated by the mind to choose to provide attention to one stimulus or another. If I have not just smart glasses but smart headphones and smart gloves and other smart devices providing me multiple inputs, my consciousness is being asked by these many devices to give it its attention.

The brain, with its various regions such as the frontal cortext, cerebrum, amygdala, etc. are also elements of the extended mind providing stimuli to ask my consciousness for attention. But my consciousness is not a part of any of those parts.

Consciousness, increasingly, appears meta-corporeal, neither a part of the body nor of the mind.