What if the way we commonly think about human relationships – to each other and to the world – is fundamentally wrong? What if policies – either put into practice by governments or by organisations within their workplaces – are destined to regularly fail, due to totally false assumptions about how we, as humans, are constituted? In politics, questioning our underlying models of human cognition and action is a very rare thing – and yet could be crucial to a coherent and flourishing society.

Socio-economic policies should be appropriate to the type of beings that humans are: this includes the ways we act individually and collectively but also, at a much more minute level of analysis, the ways our bodies and minds work. This is an obvious claim and yet one which is overlooked by those working in policy – likely due to a number of factors, including: 

1. 1. the speed and churn of politics, entailing that the issue of more accurate accounts of human cognition is a long way down the list of a given week’s talking points.
   2. macro-scale policies being privileged as large(r) scale levers for change – rather than starting from the mind-scale, which, as hyper-local, is seemingly too atomised to be impactful.
   3. a general dependency on the news media setting the tone and agenda for politics, which, in turn, is dominated by ad revenue incentives and the need to shock or aggravate rather than inform or educate. 
   4. Etcetera, etcetera. 

At least part of the problem, no doubt, is also the persistence and dominance of a certain understanding of the mind that we have inherited unconsciously from centuries of discursive and practical shifts (the history of which we can’t explore here. See: Michel Foucault, Hans Jonas, Merlin Donald, and others for more on that). 

This common understanding of mind – broadly one of individualised subjectivity, enclosed – at best – by a sensing body and affected by an ontologically distinct environment, is almost certainly wrong. To describe it, we can revive a term first deployed by materialist philosophers of mind: ‘folk psychology’. Interesting comparisons can be made between this notion and the notions of ‘folk politics’ and even Antonio Gramsci’s treatment of ‘folklore’. All three of these concepts refer to incoherent understandings that are nonetheless very common and form an uncritically accepted bedrock of our conceptions of the world.

One leading area of the philosophy mind that has grown from strength to strength over the past few decades relates to the concept of cognitive extension beyond and through the brain and the body – known as the extended mind theory (EMT). It was pioneered by two philosophers – Andy Clark and David Chalmers, who both published books in 2023 that broach this area once again, albeit from different angles (see bibliography).

EMT is a plausible and well-argued hypothesis, or framework, that posits that the mind is not limited to the ‘skull and skin’ boundary, but is also constituted by cognitive processes that traverse and include external tools and resources used by the coordinating organism as part of practical and/or ‘epistemic’ action (the two can often one and the same). A cognitive process can be one where the brain and nervous system coordinate and integrate external resources in a connected feedback loop for a particular outcome (a thought/ a calculation / a message / a piece of information retrieved); there is no need, so goes EMT, to be ‘skin and skull chauvinists’ in this regard – as these feedback loops often cross from brain, to other parts of the body and then also integrate worldly tools or other environmental material.

It’s not an overstatement to say that EMT has transformed the entire subdiscipline of the philosophy of mind – after an initial period of rejection and marginality. It has now been used to explain a variety of phenomena, such as how we use external tools to outsource things like calculation, how we actualise a thought or series of thoughts, how we remember things and how we communicate with others.

To illustrate both the intuitiveness of this framework as well as its innovations, we can point to something very familiar to many of us: the use of pen and paper for thinking. We might want to explain – with our common concept of the mind – that a written note is merely the “expression” of thoughts that were “had” within the brain – with the writing itself being a mere recording of these. But is this really the case? For EMT, it is ‘not always that fully formed thoughts get committed to paper. Rather the paper provides a medium in which, this time via some kind of coupled neural-scribbling-reading unfolding, we are enabled to explore ways of thinking that might otherwise be unavailable to us’ (2010, p. 126). ‘The simple pencil provides a stable, robust, real-time responsive means of offloading key intermediate results of processing onto a notepad, a loop we can repeat again and again as we build up more and more complex thoughts and ideas. As that process unfolds, brain, body, pencil, and notepad act as a new and potent whole.” (2023, p.198). Anyone who uses note-taking as a method of thinking will understand this position as intuitively correct – and yet following through the consequences of identifying this as a tech-human cognitive process of the mind has yet to become accepted as common sense. This is the simple but revolutionary idea of extended cognition in a nutshell.

Another example of this kind of mental extension is when we use a calculator to solve a maths problem (and before digital and mechanical calculators, the abacus). The calculator or abacus does the addition, multiplication and subtraction for us, allowing us to solve the problem quickly and easily – without burning a lot of energy and time by processing the steps ‘in-house’, in our brains. Similarly, when we use a map to find our way around a city, the map is part of our extended mind. The map helps us to remember the layout of the city – it is an external representation available for recall, as opposed to an internal representation held within the brain – and it allows us to navigate more effectively (rather than, for example, laboriously using only our eyes and on-board memory). These tools are so integral to thought that when we take away the maps and the calculators, those cognitive processes can no longer happen.

We are experts at this kind of outsourcing. Clark, in his recent book again:

“Over cultural-evolutionary time we have built a world of artifacts and tools that very neatly complement the capacities of our biological brains, allowing us to lean on the world in ever-more-complex ways. (2023, p. 198) 

To be crystal clear, this is a model of mind where the brain is at the centre of this extended, plug-and-play network. The brain is at the core but it is not exhaustive of mind – in case anyone is worried about this being an Object Oriented Ontology, Actor Network Theory or new materialist account of objects having agency. As Clark puts it: ‘it is the human brain plus these chunks of external scaffolding that finally constitutes the smart, rational inference engine we call mind’ (1997, p. 180). Equally, we are not talking about consciousness extending out into the world (we are clearly spatially situated), but other core functions of our minds like memory, calculation, communication and belief.

Clark himself has spent several books fleshing out the case of EMT, using countless scientific experiments around perception, memory, ‘phantom limbs’, child psychology, language and agent-based modelling and robotics. I urge you to go and read the founding paper ‘The Extended Mind’ and then Being There and Supersizing the Mind to get started with this, if you’re interested.

Moving closer to ‘why should we care about all of this?’ it is clear that an extended model of mind is particularly appropriate to those who have different or damaged ‘on-board’ hardware, e.g. our brains or nervous systems, or those whose physical make-up requires adjustment in order to operate independently. Clark recalls how in the early 1990s a colleague, Dr. Carolyn Baum, was studying people with dementia and their cognitive functioning in a New York context. There appeared to be a mystery in Dr. Baum’s view:

Despite the severity of many of these cases, they were frequently found to be doing well despite living alone in the inner city. Yet their performance on all the standard tests and protocols suggested they should simply not have been able to cope.

When Baum visited them at their home addresses, the riddle was solved. Their homes were a model of what would today be called “supportive environments.” These were homes full of helpful props and aids that had been designed either by the dementia sufferers or, quite often, by their loved ones. These included message centers, where they stored notes about what to do and when; numerous photos of family and friends with notes of names and relationships; internal doors and cupboards that were complete with labels and pictures; memory books, in which to record new events, meetings, and plans; and open-storage strategies—meaning that crucial items such as pots, pans…were always kept in plain view. They were also using simple daily routines such as getting the same bus to and from the same store to buy essentials and food. (Clark, 2023)

In the case of these patients, their home environments were what are known as ‘cognitive scaffoldings’: external hardware that allows for more smooth and effective navigation, mainly through outsourcing one’s memory, which has been adapted to work well with the specific ‘on-board’ hardware of the brain. 

So effective are these scaffoldings that when they are removed (as often happens when, for example, the person is suddenly relocated to a care home) mental health and the ability to cope can plummet.

When their relied-upon cognitive scaffolding is removed, these individuals can feel lost, bewildered. The extended model of mind can make sense of this: part of their mind has been removed from reach! 

Clark asks us to bring ourselves closer to the study’s participants’ experience: imagine if all of us had the same neural make-up as those with dementia. Requiring extensive environmental and technological augmentation in order to optimise our capacities, we would likely set about creating such a world around us: we would create an arsenal of equipment that stores our memories, that nudges us towards certain dispositions and reduces distress. But, and here is the reveal, is this not exactly what we have done, in a less dementia-oriented way?

With that thought experiment in mind, take another look at the stuff that currently surrounds you in your own life and work. There may be notebooks, smartphone apps, GPS devices, and more. All these elements come together to enable you successfully to pursue your own life and projects. This shows that normal healthy brains lean heavily on a wide variety of non neural props and resources too. (Clark, 2023, p. 200)

Let’s cash this out: from the point of view wherein the mind is extended, and the self-world boundary is fuzzy, disablement is partly (though not exclusively) a function of our technological and environmental niche-building – where such construction has not been carried out to its fullest, most equitable extent: we still design civic spaces, workplaces and homes which disable a great many people. As the social model of disablement has already established, to be disabled is not an individual malady, but is overwhelmingly about the context within which it is situated: this is social and cultural yes, but it is also about the built environment and the use, or lack, of technology.

The extended model of mind thus has the potential to help us better address disablement – by turning normally disabling environments (or environments that are enabling only for some) into enabling ones for all. If we work not from a model of mind as brain and skin-bound, but one of porous, social and technological minds, then abledness and disabledness is understood as a spectrum within which we all sit. The navigation of the challenges posed by our particular physical/cognitive makeup is dependent on our collective – i.e. political – choices as to what environments and technologies get created. 

The example of the dementia patients – extended out to a wider range of neural makeups – demonstrates to us that damage to the external cognitive scaffolding – the worlds we shape and are shaped by – around us can amount to very real damage to our minds and selves; the same is true, we could claim, of the withdrawal of, or decision not to implement, the requisite cognitive supports.

It is clear how an extended theory of cognition logically poses wider questions of technology, infrastructure and access in a far more integral and intimate way than usual discussions of the “rights” of the citizen and “social services” usually afford. External physical hardware, built environment niches and other supports (e.g. software) that facilitate cognitive and bodily capacity are now seen not as ‘external factors’ but constitutional to individual lives.

What might this mean for thinking through the city, for example? What could this mean for the care home, public transport systems, “welfare” services and more? In an early version of the thesis, Clark experiments with what this could all mean socially:

It is natural to wonder, however, just how much leverage (if any) this approach offers for understanding the most advanced and distinctive aspects of human cognition—not walking, reaching, wall following, and visual search, but voting, consumer choice, planning a two-week vacation, running a country, and so on. (1997. P. 179)

Organizations, factories, offices, institutions, and such are the large-scale scaffolds of our distinctive cognitive success. But as surely as these larger wholes inform and scaffold individual thought, they themselves are structured and informed by the communicative acts of individuals and by episodes of solitary problem solving. One crucial project for the cognitive sciences of the embodied mind is to begin the hard task of understanding and analyzing this complex reciprocal relationship. (1997, pp. 186-7)

We can’t answer Clark’s questions here, but we can put forward some hypotheses in this line of thinking – cracking open new questions that this updated, more appropriate form of cognition poses for policy, and specifically for regimes of ownership and control. I’ll dive into this in the next post.

Will Stronge is Autonomy’s Director of Research.