Andy Clark and The Extended Mind

[Magical Realist]

I'm very interested in this thesis, that cognition or the mind extends into the outer world beyond just our brains, and find alot of its arguments convincing. The notion that the mind is this sort of sealed off and internalist representation of the world seems woefully inadequate in explaining how we manage to get around and do things in the world. I have suspected for example for a long time that computers and more generally the Internet are extensions of our minds beyond our bodies and senses--a sort of prosthesis of the intellect and the social self beyond mere neurological events. Here's Clark's explanation of this exciting thesis:


https://www.google.com/search?q=andy+cla...juJRU,st:0

[C C]

Yeah, we store information outside our bodies, we learn from and are influenced by things outside us, and we surrender to being subordinate cogs in the mob mentality or societal hive-mind sometimes. But make no mistake about it, our agency is not "out there". When we're gone, so are our thought processes and experiences. After she's dead, the writings in Mom's diary or the kids having memories of her is not a continuation of what was transpiring in her head.

[Magical Realist]

Clark and Chalmers make a distinction between Extended Mind and Extended Consciousness. They don't support the latter, and for one of the reasons that follows:

"Andy Clark and David Chalmers (1998) (C&C, for short) argue that
objects located beyond one’s brain and body can serve as constitutive
parts of one’s mental states. In this sense, they argue the mind can
‘extend’ beyond what are traditionally thought to be its boundaries. But
they explicitly deny that an agent’s conscious mental states extend. A
decade later we find that their reason for doing so is their belief that
consciousness relies on neural processing that is too high in speed and
bandwidth to possibly be found beyond the brain (in Chalmers, 2008,
and Clark, 2009)."----- https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/305120945.pdf