Clark and Chalmers on the Extended Mind

 2024-2 Social Ontology

 

1. Clark and Chalmers argue in favor of active externalism about the mind. In their argument they rely on the analogy between Inga’s use of memory and Otto’s use of a notebook. Do you think that the analogy holds and that it helps their case?                           

Clark and Chalmers defend active externalism, which holds that a coupled system formed by external links between a human organism and an external entity should be considered a cognitive system, with its processes counting equally as cognitive processes, whether or not they are wholly in the head. According to active externalism, the external features in a coupled system play an ineliminable role, being just as causally relevant as typical internal features of the brain. In other words, behavior will change completely if we change such external features.

To illustrate this, they compare Inga’s use of memory and Otto’s use of a notebook. For Otto, his memory is not as reliable as Inga’s because he is suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. Hence, his notebook plays the role usually played by a biological memory. Clark and Chalmers argue that the information in the notebook functions just like the information constituting an ordinary non-occurrent belief, and thereby Otto has just the same dispositional belief―that the museum was on 53rd Street―as Inga has. In other words, Otto has such a dispositional belief even before consulting his notebook. Because the belief relies on an external entity, the mind extends outside the human body in Otto’s case.

Although I acknowledge that this case is helpful in understanding their thesis, I also find it somewhat vague to assert that “Otto’s notebook plays the role usually played by a biological memory.” Does this mean that Otto is entirely unable to use his biological memory? Does it imply that Otto’s biological memory is fully replaced by his notebook? If so, is it plausible to assume that patients suffering from Alzheimer’s disease cannot use their memory at all? If not, what distinguishes Otto’s case from ordinary cases where we use notebooks as auxiliary tools? It would be much more beneficial if they clarified the extent to which Otto is unable to access his memory and, consequently, the extent to which he relies on his notebook..