The Renaissance Extended Mind

Miranda Anderson

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781349577842, 9781137412843
• eBook ISBN: 9781137412850
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Library & Information Science

The Renaissance Extended Mind explores the parallels and contrasts between current philosophical notions of the mind as extended across brain, body and world, and analogous notions in literary, philosophical, and scientific texts circulating between the fifteenth century and early-seventeenth century.

1

The Extended Mind

In Mindware the philosopher Andy Clark presents a paradigm of how scholars construct academic works, such as this one:

The brain supported some rereading of old texts, materials, and notes. While rereading these, it responded by generating a few fragmentary ideas and criticisms. These ideas and criticisms were then stored as more marks on paper, in margins, on computer discs, etc. The brain then played a role in reorganizing these data on clean sheets, adding new on-line reactions and ideas. The cycle of reading, responding, and external reorganization is repeated, again and again. Finally, there is a product. A story, argument or theory. But this intellectual product owes a lot to those repeated loops out into the environment. Credit belongs to the embodied, embedded agent in the world. (142)

The particular paradigm Clark proposes is of a cognitive system that consists of brain, body and world: the extended mind hypothesis (EM). EM’s proposal is that human cognitive processes can be constituted by coalitions of biological and non-biological resources, rather than being confined to neural circuitry.

In the opening quotation, Clark presents the means by which an academic work or theory develops, in order to demonstrate the use by the subject of the tools of pen, paper and computer to externalise thoughts in a stable form that allows for further reflection, and clearer and higher level thoughts on the original murky and mundane ones. The suggestion is that rather than a disembodied or brain-bound intellect pouring preformed ideas onto the page, the tools used participate in the development of secondary thoughts. The extent to which tools become a part of the process of cognition is reflected in the fact that tools which are used repeatedly become transparent in use (2003b, 37, 48). Provided nothing goes wrong, as you write you do not normally think of the pen or the keyboard as separate objects, as your flow or stutter of thoughts appear on the page or screen – any more than you think of the neural synapses firing in your brain, or the hands that you are using to control the pen, or type the letters, or hold this page. Furthermore, the words used are themselves another form of mind tool, since language itself is a fundamental part of the human cognitive repertoire that makes possible the initial concretisation of an idea.

This proposal expands on a theory called distributed cognition, which was developed in the 1990s by the cognitive anthropologist Ed Hutchins, and the term is sometimes used interchangeably with extended mind. In his study of ship navigation, Cognition in the Wild, Hutchins made a case for the human cognitive system as embodied and extended into the material world through equipment and other social agents. Hutchins describes navigation tools as artefacts that incorporate within them aspects of the expertise necessary for accurate calculations to be made, while the navigation team operate collectively as a cognitive and computational system (155, xiv). Unlike Clark, his research in this area has primarily focused on technical working environments and tasks, such as the navigation team on board a ship collectively plotting its course into a harbour; therefore, while still a useful resource, this limits the wider applicability of Hutchins’ proposals to the literary focus of this study.

Clark first encountered such ideas in a particular passage by Rumelhart and colleagues in their 1986 paper on parallel distributed processing (PDP) (Clark 2001, 142). The PDP model renewed interest in connectionism, a computational theory of mind which more generally describes mental phenomena as emerging from an interconnected network of elementary nodes, in distinction to earlier classical models that conceived of cognition as involving the operation of language-like structures. The PDP model posits that the neural system consists of distributed networks of nodes processing information in parallel with knowledge stored in the interacting weighted connections between nodes. This can more easily be conceptualised through comparing it with the way that through sport we can reinforce muscle connections; similarly through experience we can reinforce neural connections and create new pathways. The passage referred to by Clark describes the tendency of the associative and pattern-completing brain to rely on external resources to overcome its limitations. It depicts our typical use of a pen and paper as tools to complete difficult mathematical sums: we divide the task into simple pattern completing sections easily perceivable and manageable by our brain and store the accumulation of data on paper.

Each cycle of this operation involves first creating a representation through manipulation of the environment, then a processing of this (actual physical) representation by means of our well tuned perceptual apparatus leading to a further modification of this representation. By doing this we reduce a very abstract conceptual problem to a series of operations that are very concrete ... Indeed, on this view, the external environment becomes a key extension to our mind. (Rumelhart et al., 45–6)

Rumelhart and his co-authors go on to explain that because human brains are good at pattern matching, modelling the world and manipulating the environment, we tend to use external or internalised mental models to reason (46). Hutchins also credits this passage with influencing his theory, paraphrasing it here:

These tools permit the people using them to do the tasks that need to be done while doing the kinds of things people are good at: recognizing patterns, modelling simple dynamics of the world, and manipulating objects in the environment. (155)

Although both Hutchins and Clark were indebted to a connectionist theory of the architecture of the brain in outlining their respective theories of the mind as distributed or extended, most connectionists remain internalists about cognition (Shapiro, 28–50). Michael Wheeler describes that most research in orthodox cognitive science remains ‘recognizably Cartesian in character’, in terms of a number of principles, including an ‘explanatory dualism’, that posits ‘a divide between mind and the rest of nature’ (2005, 14, 27). Yet, Clark argues that while cognitive systems may always have connectionist core systems, other kinds of representational and computational resources can also come to act ‘as proper parts of more complex, hybrid, distributed, cognitive wholes’: the connectionist core is an important part of the story (2008c, 107). Predictive processing models (PP), which have their roots in connectionism, share the notion of ‘neural networks with back-propagation algorithms, which are error-correcting ways of classifying incoming data’ (Hohwy, 7; Clark 2013, 182, 189). Recently Clark has turned to this bidirectional hierarchical account to explain how a combination of top-down predictive models and bottom-up sensory information that corrects errors in the downward models, may be the mechanism that enables extended cognition (2013).

The possibility of diverse resources acting as part of the cognitive system was originally highlighted in Andy Clark and David Chalmers’ seminal paper, ‘The Extended Mind’, in which they suggested the Parity Principle as a rule of thumb:

If, as we confront some task, a part of the world functions as a process which, were it done in the head, we would have no hesitation in recognizing as part of the cognitive process, then that part of the world is (so we claim) part of the cognitive process. (8; italics in original)

In ‘Memento’s Revenge’ Clark elaborated that the external cognitive resource should also be ‘reliably available and typically invoked’, ‘more-or-less automatically endorsed’ and ‘easily accessible’, although he then points out cases in which such constraints do not necessarily hold for internal cognitive resources, as have others (for instance, see Gallagher 2013, 5–6). Many critics and some proponents of EM misinterpreted parity as necessarily implying process-level identity; that is, that the external cognitive resource must act in the same way as the internal cognitive resource, and EM has consequently often been characterised simply as a form of extended functionalism. But in Supersizing the Mind Clark restates that the idea was always only that the external resource must work in such a way that if it was internal we would count it as a cognitive process (77–8, 91). Elsewhere Clark explains that it is best to consider the external resource having the same form of functionality ‘as at most part of a sufficient condition for cognitive extension, rather than as a necessary feature’ (1998a, 99). External resources can be radically unlike the internal ones, as Clark describes, the brain ‘must learn to interface with the external media in ways that maximally exploit their particular capacities’; they can be ‘alien but complementary’ (1997, 220). Thus, while a computer does not store or compute information in the same way as the brain, it can for that very reason be useful in supplementing neural capacities. Through their differences, as well as similarities, various forms of representational and computational resources supplement biological limitations.

In consequence, EM places in question the meanings of the terms ‘external’ and ‘internal’. Although used conventionally here as skull or skin boundary markers, ‘internal’ in this context could instead be understood to refer to the contributory factors to the cognitive system at that particular moment in time. John Sutton argues that the various forms EM resources can take allow us to break down traditional boundaries between the object and subject; to explore the heterogeneity of interactions; and to analyse the boundaries between the inner and outer, and the natural and artificial ‘as hard-won and fragile developmental and cultural achievements, always open to renegotiation’ (2005). EM persistently invites and explores the question: ‘Where does the Mind Stop and the Rest of the World Begin?’ (Clark 1997, 213).

This question of where the mind stops and the world begins is also evident in various early twentieth-century influences on proponents of embodied, embedded, enactive and extended accounts, including: Heidegger’s human ‘being-in-the-world’; Merleau-Ponty’s connatural ‘body-subject’ whose consciousness of the world occurs through the medium of the body; and Vygotsky’s educative and sociocultural ‘Zone of Proximal Development’, also known as ‘scaffolding’, in which the intrapsychological is a product of the interpsychological. While there is insufficient space here to discuss the complexities of the theories proposed by these thinkers, the common element amongst them is their rejection of the traditional conception of the disembodied Cartesian cogito in favour of a view of human cognition as a predicate of our active engagement in the world. As with the other thinkers discussed in this chapter, they have in various ways led to the reconceptualisation of the mind as enabled or constituted by the body, objects, words or other social agents.

As discussed in the preface, in this book an expansive approach has been taken in its use of the term extended mind, including under the umbrella of EM exploration of the cognitive roles of the body, and environmental, linguistic, social, and technological resources and settings. All these forms of cognitive processes are of significance to an understanding of human cognition, and this follows the use of the word ‘extended’ in the Renaissance. While the current philosophical notion of EM has become restricted to only extreme instances which demonstrate constitution of cognition, Renaissance notions of cognitive and subject extensions are alert to and indicate through this and similar terms both a range of resources and a range of kinds of contribution to cognition. A recent term for an inclusive approach is 4E, which was coined to encompass embodied, embedded, enactive and extended understandings of the mind, although again as this field develops incompatibilities between different approaches are being raised, contended and negotiated. 4E approaches hold in common the notion that the mind is not just in the head, although they vary in the scope of the factors included as significant (just the body, or the body and the world) and the extent of the claims that are made about these factors’ roles, such as their replacement, causation or constitution of cognitive processes (Shapiro 2011). Ongoing debates and discussions regarding the associations and distinctions amongst the current notions of the mind will be considered as a means to illuminate, and in relation to tensions amongst, the various notions of the mind circulating in the Renaissance.

The following sections of this chapter explore a wide range of research that provides evidence of the extent to which cognition is physically, socioculturally and technologically constituted and the neurological mechanisms that enable this cognitive flexibility. This invites a reconsideration of other theories that involve assumptions or speculations about the relationship between the mind, body and world. The later chapters first consider the impact of these ideas on existing psychoanalytical and cognitive literary methodologies before turning to the parallels with Renaissance thinking and texts. Points of comparison newly illuminate Renaissance concepts of cognition and subjectivity, and in turn Renaissance precursors to current notions demonstrate the ways in which similar issues have been expressed in a different context or are merely contingent. This chapter also addresses Adler and Gross’ charge of the lack of scientific research drawn on in literary studies that purport to use cognitive theory by providing background to the theoretical reconfigurations proposed (202). Our starting point in the next section is an examination of how the distributed nature of cognition in the brain relates to theories about polyphonic consciousness and how the illusory conceit of a singular stream of consciousness is linked to the illusion of subjectivity as transparent and fixed. This will be discussed in relation to psychoanalytic theories in Chapter 2 and in the later chapters in relation to Renaissance conjectures about the brain, which, though based on a less well developed scientific basis, describe the brain’s operations as distributed, fluid and plastic; and, then as now, this led to questions about the variability, opacity and heteronomy of the subject.

1.1 Mind, consciousness and self

As you sit there in your chair you are more or less aware of the feeling of your legs against its surface, of the surge and murmur of sounds in the room around you and beyond, of the meanings of the words along which your eyes flit, and of a multitude of other thoughts forming and passing. Your eyes circuit the room before you focus back on the book in your hands, as you try to ignore the faint buzz of a computer in the background, the vague yearning for a coffee and the crick in your neck. Tactile, proprioceptive, auditory, visual and language understanding experiences are just a few of the many modes of consciousness that you are experiencing now, as you check these words against your sense of yourself at this moment in time and against the continually adjusted narrative that stretches from the past into the future. Entering into the slender round of bone encasing your brain we discover myriad forms of cognitive processing traversing your neurological pathways, some conscious and many more non-conscious, with varying levels of autonomy and degrees of direct or indirect interactions with stimuli within and around you.

Here in the brain we begin the search for the elusive ‘self’ or ‘subject’, through an examination of a few recent theories on how brain processes work. One way in which the slipperiness of the self can be countered is by dissecting it into more manageable pieces; although this can mistakenly lead to the question as to which of these is the ‘real’ self. Similar difficulties plague the terms ‘mind’ and ‘consciousness’ as shall be seen. The intention of this section is to present research that suggests that the self does not exist solely in any particular piece, nor does it stop at the skull or skin boundary. Evidence for this lies in the plasticity and diversity of neurological and physiological processes, which enables our co-opting of sociocultural and technological resources.

An intense and complex debate in cognitive science continues over the nature of consciousness, and in particular about phenomenal consciousness, qualia or the ‘what-it’s-likeness’ of experiencing something, which also tends to be tied to the idea of being a subject, and especially of being a subject of a particular kind. David Chalmers describes as ‘the hard problem’ the questions of why and how subjective qualitative experience arises (200–3). Concerning the disputes over qualia, Daniel Dennett comments: ‘It is just astonishing to see how often “academic” discussions of phenomenological controversies degenerate into desk-thumping cacophony, with everybody talking past everybody else’ (1991, 67). In fact, this debate wavers hither and thither to such an extent that Clark declares: ‘the word “consciousness” does not seem to aim at a single, steady target’ (2001, 171). A similar argument about the mind is observed by Clark and Jesse Prinz in their unpublished joint paper, which worries that it has become a ‘terminally unstable term’ since according to the diversity of tastes around, the mind was either being shrunk too small or bloated too big: ‘there is no unified, coherent understanding of the very idea of “mind” at work in various philosophical and scientific projects all of which claim to be studying aspects of the mental’ (qtd. in Clark 2008a, 37). The too-small-for-some version, Clark suggests, would claim that the mind is restricted to the few neural structures that are arguably most directly responsible for our sense of self and would locate one’s self in the neural structure known as the anterior cingulated gyrus (2003b, 214). The too-big-for-others version is what is being argued for here as just right: neural, biological, material, sociocultural, environmental and technological resources dynamically enable and constitute cognition and subjectivity. Such disputes over the more or less dispersed nature of entities such as consciousness, the self and the mind are not new but continue enduring human concerns, as shall become evident in Chapter 3.

EM has been influenced by connectionism which is based on neuroscientific discoveries about the brain’s complex connectivity which in turn was made possible (aptly enough) by technological developments. An increase in knowledge of the brain initially came through lesion studies which allowed neuroscientists to roughly connect lesions in one area of the brain with certain mental defects caused, which suggested their usual local functional specialisation; this technique led to an overly modularised view of the functioning of the brain. Since then further research has literally added more detail to our picture, through using new equipment with a broad range of temporal and spatial scales, such as: positron emission topography (PET), which maps chemical changes and blood flow; electroencephalography (EEG), which measures electrical activity; magnetoencephalography (MEG), which records magnetic fields; magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which detect increases in blood flow. With the more powerful new fMRI equipment we can now see a mirroring of our brain in real-time action (Damasio 2000, 14). Even so, what can be measured is still limited, since each of these methods have restricted practical applications and can only operate across certain temporal and spatial scales, with some of the more fine-grained invasive methods, such as single cell recording, not performed on humans.

Nonetheless, these new technologies have revealed that the brain works neither as a single network nor as a series of entirely independent modules: the intraconnected areas of the brain are also interconnected. Within specialised modules (for exam...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  The Extended Mind
• 2  Extending Literary Theory and the Psychoanalytic Tradition
• 3  Renaissance Subjects: Ensouled and Embodied
• 4  Renaissance Language and Memory Forms
• 5  Renaissance Intrasubjectivity and Intersubjectivity
• 6  Shakespeare: Natural-Born Mirrors
• 7  Shakespeare: Perspectives and Words of Glass
• Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Index