Enculturating the Supersized Mind

Edwin Hutchins 0 0 E. Hutchins (&) Department of Cognitive Science, University of California at San Diego , 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, CA 92093-0515, USA In the final pages of Supersizing the Mind, Clark describes Dawkins' ''mental flip.'' Dawkins asked biologists to abandon their focus on individual organisms and instead to imagine ''bodies falling transparent so as to reveal the near-seamless play of replicating DNA.'' By taking such a view, one might see that an organism is just a gene's way of replicating itself. Clark goes onto say that a similar mental flip is needed in the sciences of mind ''to cease to unreflectively privilege the inner, the biological, and the neural.'' In this view, ''[t]he human mind emerges as the productive interface of brain, body, and social and material world.'' Clark is to be congratulated for making this case and bolstering it with empirical evidence. From low-level processes of motor control to high-level processes of reasoning Clark shows us how cognitive processes are enacted in systems that transcend the boundaries of the individual organism. Supersizing the Mind delivers us to a point from which yet another ''mental flip'' is both possible and necessary. In this commentary I will try to describe this next flip and some of the things that become apparent when it is made. 1 The assembly of cognitive systems Clark introduces the Principle of Ecological Assembly (PEA) as a central motif in his argument. According to the PEA, the canny cognizer tends to recruit, on the spot, whatever mix of problem-solving resources will yield an acceptable result with a minimum of effort (p. 13).1 Clark exploits an important ambiguity in the meaning of 1 All page numbers refer to Supersizing the Mind (Clark 2008). the word assembly. Assembly can be either a process of putting things together, or the product that consists of the things that have been put together. His description of the principle does not commit to one reading or the other. Throughout Supersizing the Mind, Clark provides many examples of assemblies: products that then house extended cognitive processes, but he says less about the assembly processes. In fact, accounting for the organization of ecological assemblies is the central and unsolved problem in the book. The agent in Clarks description of ecological assembly is the canny cognizer, but who is that? Clark seems unsure how to answer that question. He addresses the question directly in Chap. 6 where he describes some clever experiments indicating that our problem-solving performances accord no special status or privilege to specific types of operations (motoric, perceptual, introspective) or modes of encoding (in the head or in the world) (p. 121). Clark dubs this indifference to the location and type of resource the Hypothesis of Cognitive Impartiality. He then notes that this hypothesis introduces a difficult problem, which Clark labels A Brain Teaser. He asks, Just what is it that is so potentially impartial concerning its sources of order and information? The answer looks to be the biological brain. So havent we (rather deliciously) ended up firmly privileging the biological brain in the very act of affirming its own impartiality? (p. 122, emphasis in the original). This ironic contradiction is presented with a flourish, as though it were a surprising result. In fact, the seeds of this brainteaser were sown a few pages earlier when Clark suggested, Let us make the (surely uncontroversial) assumption that the biological brain is, currently at least, the essential core element in all episodes of individual human cognitive activity (p. 118). In order to protect the claim of extended mind from this internal contradiction, Clark is careful to distinguish the two meanings of assembly as two separable problems: First, who or what controls the assembly process? And second, where is the cognitive process when the assembled product is functioning? In the text he gives the control of the assembly process to the biological brain while defending the distributed and extended nature of assembled cognitive systems. Meanwhile, in parenthesis and especially in footnotes, Clark shows a great deal of ambivalence about retreating to the biological brain. He says, in rejecting the vision of human cognitive processing as organism bound, we should not feel forced to deny that it is (in most, perhaps all, real-world cases) organism centered. It is indeed primarily the biological organism that, courtesy especially of its potent neural apparatus, spins and maintains (or more minimally, selects and exploits) the webs of additional structure that then form parts of the machinery that accomplishes its own cognizing.[fn 18] it is the biological human organism that spins, selects or maintains the webs of cognitive scaffolding that participate in the extended machinery of its own thought and reason.[fn 19] Individual cognizing, then, is organism centered even if it is not organism bound. (p. 123) What is a reader supposed to make of the hedges provided in parenthesis? The first parenthetical condition raises the question: are real-world performances sometimes not organism centered? The second asks: is it sometimes the case that something other than the biological organism that spins the webs that are exploited by individuals? The footnotes answer both of these parenthetically posed questions in the affirmative. Footnote 18 says, This is not to deny, of course, that much of the spinning is done by social groups of organisms spread out over long swaths of history (p. 243). Footnote 19 says, One difference [from spider webs] is that in the case of the webs of cognitive scaffolding, it is often the human organism acting in concert with existing webs of scaffolding that spins, selects, or maintains new layers of scaffolding, resulting in the powerful process that Sterelny (2004) dubs incremental downstream epistemic engineering (p. 243). Notice that what was initially presented as an all-or-nothing proposition is now a distributional question. How much spinning is done by social groups? How often is the spinning accomplished in concert with existing webs of scaffolding? Answering these empirical questions should be a central enterprise in cognitive science. Clark plays to the traditional brainbound interests in the text while also leaving himself a small trapdoor (opened inconspicuously in parenthetical comments and footnotes) through which he might slip into a less brainbound future. As with the hedge currently at least in the claim the biological brain is, currently at least, the essential core element Clarks uses parenthetical comments and footnotes to point to the (as yet unrealized) possibility that something other than the brain could be responsible for the dynamic organization of cognitive systems.2 A straightforward way to deal with this situation is to abandon the assumption that the biological brain is the essential core element. Doing (...truncated)