Thinking Differently about Thinking: The Mind-Expanding Ideas of Andy Clark | Hacker News Reader

Thinking Differently about Thinking: The Mind-Expanding Ideas of Andy Clark

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139 pointsoldgun33 comments

No mention of Wittgenstein, and the argument for the impossibility of a private language. All that material in Philosophical Investigations on how natural language is game like, and an essentially social practice, is highly relevant.

Or Heidegger, 'being-in-the-world-with-others' & all that.

Heidegger doesn't seem too far from the mark, judging by Andy Clark's 1997 "Being There":

http://www2.econ.iastate.edu/tesfatsi/BeingThere.AClark1998....

The title even seems to be a nod to Heidegger's "dasein" (as well as to Woody Allen).

Completely agreed. I write music, and even that is decipherable - not as coherently as words, but it's a fairly direct form of communication of a kind of thought: when people ask "what does it mean" the answer is always "whatever it makes you think about". Same as words, really, or "the brain had ideas of its own about what the world was like" as Clark determines. The contents of this article don't surprise me at all.

This article reminds me of a sci-fi series I read a million years ago, The Golden Queen by Dave Wolverton. In the series, some characters had a "mantle," an external mind worn on the head that could either passively impart knowledge to the wearer or actively help them develop a skill.

After I read the series I started thinking about notes and books and references as being a sort of external brain that I shouldn't be ashamed of utilizing if I needed to. Or maybe more like the secondary storage to my brain's RAM (long-term memory) and CPU cache (short-term memory.)

That isn't to say that I would actually recommend reading the Golden Queen. It was cheesy and campy, but it had a couple of neat ideas and a talking bear.

A few other SF books with the idea of an external co-brain:

- Psychohistorical Crisis by Donald Kingsbury (plays a major role)

- Accelerando by Charlie Stross (minor role)

- The Peace War, Marooned in Realtime by Vernor Vinge (relatively major roles)

edited for formatting

The important distinction drawn is between the brain, a physical organ that exists within each human, to the mind, which is at this point an interdisciplinary concept which is defined and explored by psychologists, neuroscientists, and philosophers alike.

In general, I find the intermixing of science and philosophy an increasingly common situation for those interested in "the mind." For me, it is hard to reconcile the falsifiable and evidence-based nature of science with the inherently linguistic nature of philosophy. Philosophers have come to this question not due to their knowledge of neurology or psychology, but rather to heap on more theory to the word "mind" itself.

My question is: What is the practical use of this theory of mind? How does it "expand" my mind to be reminded that I use tools and props? Since it is clearly not news that all of us use tools and props, is the author's primary insight to claim that these are part of the mind? How does that claim aid society?

To my mind (pardon the pun) what he's doing ultimately boils down to the study of personal identity.

What does it mean to 'me'? What does it mean to be 'you'? What are those differences really? What makes the 'me' of 10 years ago the same or different from the 'me' of this morning? And of the 'me' 20 years from now?

That, to me, is the really interesting question. And Derek Parfit basically answered it.

The way I see it is that my identity is a set of fallible memories which are stored in my brain. If I write some of those memories down in a notebook, journal or diary, have I extended my mind?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't see how. If I write about the first house I grew up in, and then forget all about it, can that old notebook recognise the extant building? If I hold the closed notebook in my hand, waft it around a bit, will we recognise the house? For recognition to happen there has to be some matching or prediction of sensory data by memory data. All of which takes place in a fairly small volume and time window, within the brain. Extended body, yes. Extended memory, yes. 'Extended mind', not so much. Not yet.

If I disconnect and remove the part of my brain that holds my memory of my house, and walk in front of my house while holding that part of my brain in my hand as lumpy inert matter that's not understood/wired to the rest of me, we won't recognize the house either.

A notebook is swap space that has to be causally linked to you somehow (through your eyes, etc) to be useful just like a part of your brain has to be linked to you (generally through direct wiring).

On a macro scale, those kinds of questions have given rise to a lot of the social progress we've experienced in the last century.

In the future, you'd expect a mature theory of mind to give direction to psychologists or neuroscientists. A rough analogy would be the way theoretical physicists interact with experimental physicists and chemists. It's difficult to create the experiment or speculate about a reaction without a point to jump from. In the same way, a psychologist looks to philosophy to ask "what are the most important questions to people, and how might that reflect in how they behave?"

> Philosophers have come to this question... > My question is: What is the practical use of this theory of mind?

The practical use is elevation of the professional status of Andy Clark, and ultimately to sell articles, books, and public appearances.

Can it be anything else in this world? It is far too nebulous to nail down in any concrete manner, so it's practical application is a money grab, and little more. I bet Andy knows this too, but a philosopher's got to eat, has to promote themselves professionally, and owns an ego too. Why not?

In practice, the question is what sort of lens cognitive scientists and neuroscientists use for studies. When conducting a scientific experiment, you have to make some assumptions about what system you're studying, how you're modeling it, and how you're connecting model to hypothesis to evidence via experimental design.

My favorite argument by Andy Clark specifically is his take on the Outfielder Problem: if you study the brain with a "disembodied", action-free theoretical lens, you have a really hard time parsimoniously explaining how an outfielder runs to catch a fly-ball. If you take the "embodied", "action-oriented" view, you see that solving cognitive problems using bodily and environmental resources via continually-updated motor planning is not only the theoretically elegant solution (the one that makes most precise use of the available sensory data, has the fewest parameters, is cheapest to compute), but simply resembles what we observe people actually doing (linear optical acceleration cancellation).

Thing is, you don't just use tools and props. From the perspective of your mind, they become a part of you, of your concept of self, even if only temporarily.

And the tools don't just exist without, your mind is built from tools within as well. There is a part of your mind that rationalizes things, for instance. Rationalization is a tool that other parts of your mind can draw on. I think this is quite clear if you've spent a good amount of time having to argue with your own thoughts, maybe that isn't a very common experience though.

Similarly there's a part of your mind that simulates experiences. It can be used by the part of your mind that makes predictions, and it can be used by the part of your mind that recollects.

Some people's minds use visual or auditory processing components to aid in arithmetic. It's sort of the human equivalent of doing computation on the GPU.

The biggest myth we tell ourselves, on which so much flawed philosophy is based in my opinion, is that we're a single thing. We like to think that what we are is something that is a whole unto itself, that can be isolated, and not, like everything else in the universe, a collection of interactions viewed from a particular perspective.

Indeed. As Clark always points out, the brain is three pounds of meat trapped in a black box made out of bone, given a few wires to the outside. A logically necessary part of its job is figuring out how to extend its reach outside the skull and entangle itself usefully with the inward-facing and outward-facing faculties of the body, and thence, via those outward-facing faculties (ie: motor systems in your arms or whatnot), with other stuff in the external world (not so different, since it's all outside the black box of bone, is it?) that can be organismically valuable, like a bicycle.

I notice that when I hit a bump on my bicycle I don't feel a force in my hands and conciously deduce that this must have been caused by the bicycle's tire hitting something. It seems more like I just feel it in my wheel.

I go "ouch" when my wife runs over a pothole while driving. It's a very neat trick, even after I've read things like Surfing Uncertainty and have an idea how it's done.

I think it's a good perspective if you're trying to build minds (ie, do AI research). There are lots of things that existing tools can do as well or better than biological minds, so there's no need to build these into the AI proper.

It's an obvious idea in robotics ("The world is its own model" as Dreyfus put it) but may be less obvious in general reinforcement learning research.

It's an abstraction. The question is: Is it a useful abstraction?

Clearly, we're all just made of atoms. But it's helpful to think about those atoms in an organized way.

It reminds me of the classic chain of abstractions in the sciences. One version:

  * Philosophy --> Math
  * Math --> Physics
  * Physics --> Chemistry
  * Chemistry --> Biology
  * Biology --> Psychology
  * Psychology --> Sociology

Where does this one fall? Maybe

  * Neurology --> Cogsci

Maybe a specific aspect of psychology or cognitive science. For example, the questions

  * "What is the role of environment in identity and coping?" 
  * "What would an artificial mind look like?"
  * "How do minds shape their environment?"

If the mind extends beyond our heads and into the devices we carry around and therefore into the cloud what about privacy?

It seems the distinction still remains between Inga and Otto in other words between the mind in our heads and the mind in our devices because for what’s in our heads we can always choose whether we want to tell others or not but for our devices even if we set our privacy settings we lose control of choice over who to share that information with as soon as we tell the cloud about it

It's not true that you can always choose whether to tell others or not. There are certain drugs that make you more talkative and even consuming too much alcohol makes you unable to control what you tell others. And it likely won't be long until a device is discovered that allows you to see others thoughts.

There are also some things you cannot know without telling others.

For instance finding out the address of MOMA in the first place may require asking someone or googling it.

The stronger version is that some interesting ideas can only come about by dialogue between specialists.

Sometimes a dilemma for scientists is whether to share and benefit from input but then perhaps give away the key insight to others. Q.v. Wilkes showing Crick Rosalind Franklin's DNA crystallograph.

Proper courtesy, accreditation and citation can in some cases avoid this - yet Wilkes told no-one he was working on Fermat's last theorem for many years until he thought he had a solution.

It is true some can always choose but maybe not everybody can, because people react differently to drugs and alcohol. Psychics can already read minds better than existing primitive devices. But AFAICT the gov does not employ them, at least not at scale, so don’t worry. I don’t believe actual mind reading device will ever exist, the closest will be like a synthetic / robotic AI brain with the same abilities as human psychic. Meaning it’s a synthetic AI not “device“ that you completely control. So if you want to read minds without people’s consent you better use psychics or torture.

If current mental prostheses develop over the years into full-fledged brain implants or whatever, we can expect to lose the privacy and freedom of thought unless we defend the principle now. My files are my augmented memory.

This is a good article for educating people that we need machines and implants to be complete beings. Classic illuminati thinking that people will most likely embrace once cute implants are available in white, rounded plastic with names such as memory pod :)

Please tell me more about these illuminati thinkers and their strain of thought

That would be 'illusory'.

For an interesting science-fictional take on some consequences and issues with providing people with attached outboard brains (in the context of Asimov's Foundation universe), read Donald Kingsbury's novel Psychohistorical Crisis.

The "extended mind" seems to me to be an extension of Richard Dawkins' idea of the "extended phenotype".

Does Andy Clark's hypothesis assert that self driving cars' neural networks must necessarily contain the minds of pedestrians ?

Perhaps instead the minds of drivers diffuse into their cars. That's already true for maps.

Pedestrians' minds rely on things like Walk signs and sidewalk texturing.

I learnt that modal adverts are terrible. Thanks.

Mind = software.

Pen & Pencil are just environment variables.

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