Michael Wheeler's presentation in Sorbonne, "Philosophy of the Web" seminar, March 31 2012.

1. Cognitive Extension
and the Web-Enabled
Mind
Mike Wheeler
School of Arts and Humanities:
Philosophy
University of Stirling

2. Poor Memory or Adaptive Memory?
 There is evidence that, in an era of laptops, tablets and
smartphones, with powerful Internet search engines,
our organic brains tend to internally store not the
information about a topic, but rather how to find that
information using the available technology
 See data from Sparrow, Liu and Wegner (2011), ‘Google
Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having
Information at Our Fingertips’, Science 333 (6043).
 The Guardian reported this research under the heading
‘Poor Memory? Blame Google’.
 By contrast, the experimenters talk of “an adaptive use
of memory” in which “the computer and online search
engines [should be counted] as an external memory
system that can be accessed at will”

3. Technologies Are (Part of) Us
 Clark’s description of human beings as natural born
cyborgs reminds us that it is of our very nature as
evolved and embodied cognitive creatures to create
tools which support and enhance our raw organic
intelligence by dovetailing with our brains and bodies
to form shifting human-artefact coalitions operating
over various time-scales.
 This is no less true of our engagement with the
abacus, the book or the slide-rule than it is of our
engagement with the laptop, the tablet or the
smartphone.

4. Defining the Positions
 Embedded Cognition (the default view): the distinctive
adaptive richness and flexibility of intelligent behaviour
is regularly, and perhaps sometimes necessarily,
causally dependent on (a) non-neural bodily structures
and/or movements, and/or on (b) the bodily
exploitation of environmental props or scaffolds.
 Extended Cognition: there are actual (in this world)
cases of intelligent action in which thinking and
thoughts (more precisely, the material vehicles that
realize thinking and thoughts) are spatially distributed
over brain, body and world, in such a way that the
external (beyond-the-skin) factors concerned are
rightly accorded cognitive status.

5. Cognitive Self-Stimulation
 As Clark (Supersizing the Mind) explains, cognitive
self-stimulation occurs when
a) neural systems are causally responsible for
producing certain bodily movements and
(sometimes) beyond-the-skin structures and events
which are then recycled as inputs to those and/or
other neural systems, and
b) this feedback process sustains sophisticated brain-
body or brain-body-environment loops of
exploitation, co-ordination and mutual entrainment,
with various problem-solving benefits.

6. Self-Stimulation and Cognitive
Extension
 Clark introduces his treatment self-stimulation in the case
of gesture as a “worked out example of extended
cognizing in action”
 But his cornerstone claim is that the “key distinction
between “merely impacting” some inner cognitive process
and forming a proper part of an extended cognitive
process looks much less clear . . . in cases involving the
systematic effects of self-generated external structure on
thought and reason” (Supersizing the Mind)
 So his argument is actually that where there is cognitive
self-stimulation (e.g. in gesturing), there is no clear
distinction between cognitive embeddedness and
cognitive extension.

7. A Different Interpretation
 In cases of cognitive self-stimulation:
 (i) the distinction between cognitive embeddedness and
cognitive extension is eroded in such a way that
whatever evidence there is that tells in favour of the
embedded view, tells equally in favour of the extended
view, and
 (ii) under such circumstances, we are theoretically
permitted to adopt the extended view.
 But (i) flouts the causal-constitutive distinction
 And (ii) flouts the thought that the embedded view is
the default position in the debate

8. A Line of Response
 The empirical evidence of self-stimulation that supposedly
undermines the embeddedness-extension distinction also
undermines the causal-constitutive distinction.
 “Sometimes, all coupling does is provide a channel
allowing externally originating inputs to drive cognitive
processing along. But in a wide range of the most
interesting cases, there is a crucially important
complication. These are the cases where we confront a
recognizably cognitive process, running in some agent,
that creates outputs (speech, gesture, expressive
movements, written words) that, re-cycled as inputs,
drive the cognitive process along. In such cases, any
intuitive ban on counting inputs as parts of [cognitive]
mechanisms seems wrong.” (Clark)

9. Arguing for Cognitive Extension I:
the Parity Principle (PP)
 “If, as we confront some task, a part of the world
functions as a process which, were it to go on in the
head, we would have no hesitation in accepting as
part of the cognitive process, then that part of the
world is (for that time) part of the cognitive
process.”
Clark, Supersizing the Mind
(drawing on Clark and Chalmers, ‘The Extended
Mind’)
 Notice that parity considerations cut both ways

10. Arguing for Cognitive Extension II:
Extended Functionalism
 PP depends on the multiple realizability
of the mental
 Functionalism in the philosophy of
mind provides a well-established
platform for securing multiple
realizability.

11. Thinking Through Parity
 But PP, even if an explicitly functionalist register,
doesn’t solve the problem of determining which
functional differences matter when deciding what
counts as cognitive
 A way forward: we understand the relevant concept of
parity not as ‘parity with the inner simpliciter’, but
rather as ‘parity with the inner, with respect to some
sort of locationally uncommitted account of what
counts as cognitive’.
 PP itself is ‘merely’ an heuristic device designed to free
our intuitions from neural chauvinism

12. Folk Intuitions
 If an environmental protester had stolen
the plans of Heathrow Terminal 5, would
the folk have been concerned about the
whereabouts of part of Richard Rogers’
mind?
 A plausible explanation: our folk grip on
the cognitive involves an internalist
presumption

13. Arguing for Cognitive Extension III:
a Mark of the Cognitive
 A proposal: what the hypothesis of cognitive extension
needs is some kind of scientifically informed theory that
tells us which functional differences are relevant to
judgments of parity and which aren’t.
 More specifically: first we give a scientifically informed
account of what it is to be part of a cognitive system, one
that is independent of where any candidate element
happens to be spatially located. Then we look to see
where cognition falls.
 This is what Adams and Aizawa (The Bounds of
Cognition) have dubbed a mark of the cognitive

14. Cognitive Self-Stimulation as a
Mark of the Cognitive
 So maybe we could adopt the view that being
the kind of self-generated input that supports a
process of cognitive self-stimulation is a mark of
the cognitive
 But is this an independently plausible claim?
 Problem: a self-generated input in a cognitive
self-stimulating loop may very well make its
turbo-charging contribution to thought while
remaining non-cognitive in character.

15. Hybrid Mechanisms
 Now recall Clark’s claim that, in cases of cognitive self-
stimulation, “any intuitive ban on counting inputs as
parts of [cognitive] mechanisms seems wrong.”
 It is unclear that the right to add the term ‘cognitive’ has
been earned here.
 Embedded and extended theorists agree that self-
generated inputs that support cognitive self-stimulating
loops operate within well-defined mechanisms that
turbo-charge thinking.
 For the embedded theorist, however, the properly
cognitive mechanisms in play are sub-systems of larger,
performance-enhancing loops, where the latter are not
cognitive mechanisms in their own right, even though
they contain cognitive mechanisms.

16. Embedded Rowers
 Consider Baca and Kornfeind’s self-stimulating rowing
training loop for the acquisition and honing of bodily
skills.
 Although the self-generated inputs are key aspects of
the mechanism by which the rower is tuned for
improved performance, there is no temptation to
categorize those inputs as realizers of the observed
bodily adaptation, as opposed to elements that have a
critical causal impact on that adaptation.
 Why should things carve up any differently when the
focus of attention is a self-stimulating loop that
enhances thought?

17. From Symbolic Coupling…
 So can we provide a scientifically informed mark of the
cognitive?
 Bechtel argues that cognitive achievements such as
mathematical reasoning, natural language processing and
natural deduction, are the result of sensorimotor-mediated
interactions between internal neural (connectionist)
networks and suites of external symbols.
 Now consider the phenomenon of systematicity
 The “property of systematicity, and the compositional
syntax and semantics that underlie that property, might
best be attributed to natural languages themselves but not
to the mental mechanisms involved in language use”
(Bechtel, Natural Deduction in Connectionist Systems)
 Is this a case of cognitive extension?

18. …to Extended Physical Symbol Systems
 PP would suggest so, but, as know, PP provides only an
incomplete argument. We need a mark of the cognitive.
 Here is a possible mark of the cognitive: a physical
symbol system (PSS), when sufficiently complex and
suitably organized, and when placed in the operating
context of a complete cognitive architecture, has the
necessary and sufficient means for certain aspects of
cognition.
 I claim that the Bechtel-style network-plus-symbol-
system architecture is an instantiation of an extended
PSS and thus, if we adopt the above mark of the
cognitive, it’s an instantiation of an extended cognitive
system (or subsystem)
 Notice that questions of revisionism no longer (obviously)
favour the embedded view

19. Riding the Waves
 So-called second wave ExC downplays PP in favour of
considerations such as complementarity
 Sutton (‘Exograms and Interdisciplinarity’): “in extended
cognitive systems, external states and processes need
not mimic or replicate the formats, dynamics, or
functions of inner states and processes”, so “different
components of the overall… system can play quite
different roles and have different properties while
coupling in collective and complementary contributions
to flexible thinking and acting”.
 But by placing the stress on difference in this way –
even necessary difference – the second-wavers risk
being trapped within an embedded internalist prison

20. Three Issues
1. Integration into an individual cognitive
architecture
2. Portability versus Reliability
3. Agency and Cognitive Ownership

21. Education and Technology: a Slippery
Slope or a Cognitive Incline?
 Pen and Paper
 Slide Rules
 Limited capability generic calculators
 Restricted Internet Access
 Largely unrestricted Internet access
 The user’s own smartphone
 Mainlined Google
 One way of focussing the issue here is to ask under
what conditions our children’s intelligence should be
formally examined

22. Crossing the Line
 Swimsuits that improved stability and
buoyancy, while reducing drag to a minimum,
were outlawed by swimming’s governing body
FINA after the 2009 World Championships.
 FINA stated that it “[wished] to recall the main
and core principle that swimming is a sport
essentially based on the physical performance
of the athlete”
 Perhaps education is a process essentially
based on the unaided cognitive performance of
the learner

23. This Time it’s Personal
 One might argue that generic technology is permissible
in an exam setting, but individualized technology isn’t.
 If the extended cognition view is correct, however, this
may be unsustainable
 The extent to which some external element is
configured so as to interlock seamlessly with the
desires, preferences and other personality traits that are
realized within the rest of the putative cognitive system
will be one factor in determining whether the cognitive
system includes that external element.
 Put crudely, individual tailoring will, if other conditions
are met, indicate that the technology in question counts
as part of the learner’s mind (and surely we want to
allow that into the examination hall).

24. Dwellers on the Threshold
 Increasingly, architects will be designing buildings that,
via embedded, Internet-enabled computers,
autonomously modify our spatial and cognitive
environments in the light of what those buildings
‘believe’ about the needs, goals and desires of their
users.
 “An intelligent building is… a building that has the
ability to respond (output) on time according to
processed information that is measured and received
from exterior and interior environments by multi-input
information detectors and sources to achieve users’
needs and with the ability to learn.” (Sherbini and
Krawczyk, Overview of Intelligent Architecture, 2004)

25. The Cybertecture Egg
 Planned building from James Law Cybertecture
International
 “Integrates technology, multimedia, intelligent
systems and user interactivity to create
customizable living and working spaces that
focus on experience.”
 http://gazette-world.blogspot.com/2008/05/hi-
tech-building-from-james-law.html
 Interactive features that monitor occupant’s
vital health statistics (e.g. blood pressure,
weight).
 Users can customize their views with real time
virtual scenery.

26. Ambient Assisted Living
 Consider research from the Ambient Assisted Living
Research Department at the Fraunhofer Institute for
Experimental Software Engineering, Kaiserslautern
 An intelligent home automation system that uses a
network of hidden sensors to monitor the daily routine of
the occupants, detecting and assessing risks.
 Sensors automatically report data to a control centre
somewhere in the house. So, e.g., the system can tell if
someone has fallen and is able to send that information to
a designated contact person.
 The bathroom has a toilet that recognizes the user and
adjusts to the proper height, a light that turns on and off
automatically, and a tap that turns itself off to save water.
 It also contains a mirror with illuminated pictograms to
help those who are easily confused remember what to do
next, such as brush their teeth, wash, shave or take
medication.

27. From Portability to Reliability
 The portability objection to cognitive extension: a
material element may count as part of the vehicle of a
cognitive state or process only if you carry (or at least
are able to carry) that material element around with you
 This cuts the cognitive cake as follows: your brain meets
this necessary condition; intelligent architecture doesn’t.
 But consider mobile access to the Internet
 The message: a material state or process may count as
part of the vehicle of a cognitive trait only if that state or
process meets a dynamic reliability condition.
 Intelligent architecture may meet this necessary
condition

28. Interactive Architecture:
Usman Haque
 Haque argues that we need to shift from
reactive architecture to a genuinely interactive
architecture
 Single-loop interaction: particular outputs for
particular inputs determined in advance
 Multiple-loop interaction: depends upon the
openness and the continuation of cycles of
response, and on the ability of each system,
while interacting, to have access to and to
modify each other’s goals

29. Talk to the Walls
 “I concede that reactive or single-loop devices that satisfy our
creature comforts are useful for functional goals (I am thinking
here of Bill Gate's technologically-saturated mansion; or building
management systems that seek to optimise sunlight
distribution; or thermostats that regulate internal temperature).
Such systems satisfy very particular efficiency criteria that are
determined during, and limited by, the design process.
However, if one wants occupants of a building to have the
sensation of agency and of contributing to the organisation of a
building, then the most stimulating and potentially productive
situation would be a system in which people build up their
spaces through "conversations" with the environment, where
the history of interactions builds new possibilities for sharing
goals and sharing outcomes. In such architectural systems,
inhabitants themselves would be able to determine efficiency
criteria.” (Haque, Architecture, Interaction, Systems, 2006)

30. Paskian Systems
 “In such systems, there may be an environmental
sensor/actuator device which monitors a space and is able
to alter it. However, rather than simply doing exactly what
we tell it (which relies on us knowing exactly what we
want within the terms of the machine, i.e. within the terms
of the original designer) or alternatively it telling us exactly
what it thinks we need (which relies on the machine
interpreting our desires, leading to the usual human-
machine inequality, or, as some would say, mistreatment),
a Paskian system would provide us with a method for
comparing our conception of spatial conditions with the
designed machine’s conception of the space” (Haque,
Architecture, Interaction, Systems, 2006)

31. Paskian Systems and Cognitive
Extension
 Although non-Paskian intelligent architecture may qualify
as proper parts of the dweller’s cognitive economy,
Haque’s Paskian architectural systems will not.
 This is because of the very conditions that make possible
the capacity of Paskian systems to enter into richly
interactive dialogues, the fact that they may operate with
categorizations and goal-states that diverge from those
of their human users (e.g. Haque’s own Evolving Sonic
Environment).
 Paskian systems exhibit a kind of agency that raises
questions of cognitive ownership and thus prevents them
from being incorporated into the cognitive systems that
are centred on their human users.

32. "I go up", said the elevator, "or
down."
"Good," said Zaphod, "We're going
up."
"Or down," the elevator reminded
him.
"Yeah, OK, up please."
There was a moment of silence.
"Down's very nice," suggested the
elevator hopefully.
"Oh yeah?"
"Super."
Conversation with an elevator
"Good," said Zaphod, "Now will
you take us up?" designed by the Sirius
"May I ask you," inquired the Cybernetics Corporation
elevator in its sweetest, most
reasonable voice, "if you've The Restaurant at the End of
considered all the possibilities the Universe, Douglas Adams
that down might offer you?"

33. A Possible Response
 The conclusion drawn here is too strong
 Consider collaborative activities in which no one individual
could complete the cognitive task.
 Hutchins’ ship navigation example (Cognition in the Wild,
1995) provides a paradigmatic case
 This may look like an instance of cognitive extension
 If it is, then we can resuscitate the idea of extended
Paskian systems
 However:
 (i) The fact that no one individual could complete the
task is not relevant to securing cognitive extension
 (ii) Hutchins’ example is a case of an unowned or
group-owned distributed cognitive process, not of
cognitive extension as standardly understood
 (Tentative) conclusion: where there’s more than one will,
there’s no way to cognitive extension