The Extended Mind - Human Brains versus Zombies Computerland

Once upon a time, there was a young, cheerful girl. One night, she followed her parents to Manly Beach for a brisk walk. After half an hour or so, they all went back to the curb side to get some ice cream. As they reached the curb with street lights, they tried o sweep off all the sand from their feet, and put on their shoes. However, what the little girl found under her bare foot was beyond her imagination. It was a dead, splashed corpse of a cockroach attached to her foot. Her experience at such a young age has traumatised her forever.  Whenever she goes to the beach, she sees the moving pictures playing in her head vividly, as if it just happened yesterday. She can feel the same fear, the shear shock the exact way she felt during the time of the incident. Since the unfortunate event, she has never walked bare feet in any occasion - not even at her home. 

Yes, that girl was me. 

Thanks to that experience, I now have a condition diagnosed as 'phobia'. Simply looking at the word makes me sick, not to mention looking at its picture or seeing it in real life. We don't need to go in depth of my fears, but for the sake of this article, let's call this creature "C". What's interesting in my suffering, is the embodiment of my fears and shock from years ago when I was much younger. When I go to the beaches, I can clearly remember my emotions and reaction from the distant past when that incident took place. As much as I regret this has happened to my childhood, it is surprising how much trivial events and for how long our minds can remember. This experience has moved from habitual to the conscious, with shifting forms of attention, memory and sensations which enabled me to apply such panicking feelings to other similar situations, for instance, walking along a dark street alone at night and being constantly aware and afraid of giant 'C's attacking me out of nowhere. 

This material memory is a spirit with its life of its own, circulating outside the boundaries of my skin and skull (Clark and Chalmers 1998, p, 8). In the paper of Clark and Chalmers, the idea of the 'extended mind' is explained. It is the division point between the mind and the environment by promoting the view of active externalism (similar to semantic or "content" externalism) (1998, p, 11). Through this concept, it can be said that there is a separation between the mind, the body and the environment. Applying this to my experience, 'C's, as objects in the external environment, are utilised by my mind in a way that they can be seen as extensions of my mind (Noë 2006). My mind is designed to encompass every level of the 'cognitive process', which often includes the use of external environmental aids, such as the similar settings - a dark night, an isolation street- which engage me into the scenario of my childhood trauma. Because external objects play such a significant role in aiding cognitive processes, the mind and the environment act as a "coupled system", where the external objects must function with the same purpose as the internal processes (Chalmers 2009).

'Perception is not something that happens to us, or in us. It is something we do,' Alva Noë wrote (2006). In fact, none of my feelings towards 'C's are by choice. Rather, they are involuntary emotions attached due to the random events happened in my life. Instead of remembering the pictures, sensation and emotions of that night within the boundaries of my brain for recollection, I have been actively participating in an extended mine, where there is an archive of the incident through a recording. Just as Chalmers said,  “a lot of things that used to happen in our mind are now being offloaded into the world” (2009). Ultimately, I have been using the technology of an extended mind as a technical support for my haunted memory.

How do these 'cognitive technics' affect our interactions and communications with the world? One idea explored in the lecture is meta-communication, a way of communication that surrounds nominal verbal communication and carries additional meaning from non-verbal communication cues such as kinesics and paralinguistic elements (Segal, Smith, Boose and Jaffe 2013).  Meta-communication plays a crucial role in conveying and decoding the messages beyond the spoken words, sending second level messages about the meaning of first level messages. Cues like facial expressions, change of tone of voice, accompanying gestures, secondary signals sent to bystanders. They are the unspoken words that help us develop our perceptions, sensation and emotions in a conversation. According to Gregory Bateson (2000, p. 23), meta-communication may match, contradict or support the verbal communication. But how much of these silent communication is ignored, due to our technological advances? Technology has become such an integral part of our lives that sometimes, we might accidentally apply the rules in the reign of the online world into reality. Ever heard those irritating kids saying 'O.M.G.' instead of 'oh my god' in real life? How many of the non-verbal cues are ignored in transmitting our messages through the Internet? Our understanding of each other and the quality of communication have declined with the rise of 'cognitive technologies'.

Another example of these 'cognitive technologies' include is our smartphone. Instead of remembering what events to attend and their times and venues, we now put them down in eCalendars and get reminders beforehand. The outsourcing of memory into technology has brought about a concern of ' los[ing] an ever-greater part of our knowledge' which may make humans obsolete (Steiger n.d.).  Even though it is reasonable to have such skeptical concerns, there is actually a great chance of a new learning experience through these 'cognitive supports' outside of the boundaries of our minds. As Noë argued, our perception and perceptual consciousness are dependent on the capacities for action and thought (2006). To perceive, according to his enactive approach to perception, it is not merely to have sensations; it is to have sensations that we understand (Noë 2006). Although sometimes we have to switch off part of our brain to focus on another part, we can learn and explore more efficiently (Kay 2008), and have a better understanding of our sensations and about our past, present and future.

Word: Metacommunication


References:

Bateson, G. 2000, Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology,  University Of Chicago Press, USA.

Chalmers, D. 2009, ‘The Extended Mind Revisited [1/5], at Hong Kong, accessed 30 March 2013, Youtube, Hong Kong, < http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8S149IVHhmc >.

Clark, A. and Chalmers, D. J. 1998, 'The extended mind', Analysis,  Vol. 58, Issue 1, p. 7-19, accessed 30 March 2013, Wiley Online Library, <http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-8284.00096/abstract>.

Kay, A. 2008, 'Alan Kay on Learning', accessed 30 March 2013, Youtube, <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=50L44hEtVos>.

Noë, A. 2006, Action in Perception (Representation and Mind series), MIT Press, Cambridge.

Segal, J. Smith, M. Boose, G. and Jaffe, J. 2013, 'Nonverbal Communication', accessed 30 March 2013, Help Guide Org <http://www.helpguide.org/mental/eq6_nonverbal_communication.htm>.

Stiegler, B. n.d., ‘Anamnesis and Hypomnesis: Plato as the first thinker of the proletarianisation’, accessed 30 March 2013, Ars Industrialis Organisation, < http://arsindustrialis.org/anamnesis-and-hypomnesis >.