Extended cognition
Extended cognition concerns the extension of mental processes and mind beyond the body to include the environment in which an organism is embedded and the organism's interaction with that environment. As described by Rowlands, mental processes are:[1]
- Embodied involving more than the brain, including a more general involvement of bodily structures and processes.
- Embedded functioning only in a related external environment.
- Enacted involving not only neural processes, but also things an organism does.
- Extended into the organism's environment.
It has been customary to think of the mind as a processing center that creates mental representations of reality and uses them to control the body's behavior. The field of extended cognition focuses upon the processes involved in this creation, and subsumes these processes as part of 'mind'. As a result, mind is no longer confined to the brain or body, but involves interaction with the environment. At a 'low' level, like motor learning, haptic perception, and psycholinguistics the body is obviously involved in cognition, but it is equally obvious that there is a 'high' level where cultural factors play a role.[2]
References
- ↑ Mark Rowlands (2010). “Chapter 3: The mind embedded”, The new science of the mind: From extended mind to embodied phenomenology. MIT Press, 51 ff. ISBN 0262014556.
- ↑ Carl Ratner (2011). Macro Cultural Psychology: A Political Philosophy of Mind. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0199706298. “Culture produces the mind; brain circuitry does not. The mind-body problem of how the physical body/brain produces mental, subjective qualia, is the wrong way to frame the origin of consciousness.”