Superfunctionalizing the Mind

Symphony of Matter and Mind. Part Five., 2021

The brain is the source of sensations, emotions, desires, thoughts, memories, movement and behavior control. All these are aspects of the process we call the Mind. Despite a vast amount of data on the nervous system functioning down to the molecular level, no concept has yet uncovered the physical mechanism and the technology of this process. With this aim in sight, the author continues to develop the Teleological Transduction Theory. The book contains hypotheses about the physical nature of the Mind and provides examples of how physics manifests in the nervous system physiology. It also shows how the Mind’s algorithm produces a reality model with constant updating based on incoming data and performs the self-learning functions. The theory encompasses the physical processes that create the enormous capacity, speed and multi-level complexity of our memory. It solves the riddle of how the brain forms and reproduces a vast number of representations almost instantly. A significant part of the book is devoted to the teleology of all these technological solutions. Building a model of reality is not an end to itself. The final goal is to act based on this model. The nervous system specializes in controlling the body and organizing purposeful movement. But how does it perform the function? The book contains hypotheses about the technology and physical mechanism that create the observed speed and efficiency of motion control. Taking all these aspects together, the proposed theory claims to finally cover the explanatory gap about the physical nature of the Mind.

In this seminar, we explore the idea that mind and cognition are not (merely) inside the head but "distributed" across brain, body, and the wider world such as tools, artifacts, language, media, cultural practices, norms, group structures, and social institutions. The first part of our course is organized around Andy Clark's flagship presentation of the "extended mind" thesis, introducing contemporary debates over "distributed cognition" (DC) as part of a larger trend to regard mental phenomena as embodied, embedded, extended, enactive, and affective (4EA). The DC framework offers an opportunity to integrate sciences and humanities through illuminating accounts that combine biologically and culturally situated aspects of mind-and thus erode traditional separations between "inner vs. outer", "nature vs. nurture", and "active mind vs. inert matter". We engage this approach in the middle part of our course by working, selectively, though a 4-volume series on the history of distributed cognition ranging from antiquity to the 20 th c. (http://www.hdc.ed.ac.uk/). In the final part, we use DC as a platform to drill more deeply into speculative questions about the role technology plays in the formation of the human condition, such as its increasing "cyborganization" and potential transition into a post/transhuman era. For example, is it an apt variation on the "homo faber" theme to say we make "things" as much as they make us? And will posterity consider the "mind-technology" problem as a historical successor to the early modern "mind-body" problem?

Philosophical Review, 2010

286 INDEX Tedrake, R., 8 Telepresence, 207. See also Control; Coupling Tetris, viii, 48, 70-75, 77-80, 85, 93,117, 137,153, 214, 221, 238, 279. See also Dovetailing Thelen, E., xxiv-xxv, 10,125,129,165, 233~235, 241, 247 Thompson, A., 211 Thompson, E., ...

2013

Digital technology has made various forms of convergence possible that would not otherwise have been possible, such as the convergence of hardware devices, media, and various applications. The most interesting form of convergence, however, is that between digital devices, such as the iPhone, and their human users. If one considers a smartphone an externalization of one's own cognitive processes, there is a convergence between subject and instrument, between one's cognitive subjectivity and a device that assists or substitutes for one's cognitive activities. The convergence of human beings and digital technology requires reexamining the boundaries of humans, instruments, and environments in a fundamental way. As the boundaries between self and instrument become vague and unclear, a new approach to the self becomes necessary. Recently, there have been several attempts in philosophy and psychology to understand the human mind as extending into the external world. For example, Andy Clark and David Chalmers (1998) claim that when we perform cognitive activities with the help of external tools, the extra-cranial states or processes involved in those tools may be regarded as parts of our mind or our cognitive processes. The so-called "extended mind thesis" by Clark and Chalmers in their article "The Extended Mind" contends that our mind is not confined within an organism (inside our body) or our brain, but it can be extended outward over the boundary of our skin (pp. 7-19). In the foreword to Andy Clark's Supersizing the Mind, for example, Chalmers (2008) claims, "My iPhone is not my tool, or at least it is not wholly my tool. Parts of it have become parts of me" (p. x). This amounts to the claim that if external devices such as iPhones are coupled with our brains in an appropriate way, such devices themselves can be considered parts of our minds.

Current Biology, 2015

Journal of Cognition and Culture, 2014

Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science, 2010

In this paper, I would like to propose the idea of "extended mind" for a new paradigm of psychology. Kohler (Integrative Psychology & Behavioral Science 44:39-57, 2010) correctly pointed out the serious problems of the machine paradigm, and proposed the "organic" view as a new paradigm. But the term "organic" signifying the processes inside the body, is inadequate to express the characteristic of human mind. The recent philosophy of mind suggests that the mind is realized neither only in the brain nor only in the body, but in the whole system of brain-body-environment, namely, in the "extended mind". The characteristic of human mind resides in the interaction with the mediating tools, artifacts, and the humanized environment. We should propose an "extended mind approach" or an "ecological approach to humanized environment" as a new paradigm for a psychology.