Extended Cognition and Extended Consciousness∗

It’s a pleasure to contribute this paper to Andy Clark and his Critics. Andy has been an influential figure for me ever since I read his first book Microcognition while I was in graduate school. A few years later I took up my first job as a post-doctoral fellow working with him in the newly initiated Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology program at Washington University in St Louis. We had a lot of adventures, but the one that seems to have left the most traces is our joint paper on “The Extended Mind”, which argued that cognitive processes can extend outside the brain and the body to include objects that we interact with in our environment. I recently came across hard copies of two early drafts of “The Extended Mind” in my files. The first draft was by Andy on his own, and is covered in handwritten comments by me. The second draft is a co-authored version with revisions by me, and is covered in handwritten comments by Andy. (I have put these two online at consc.net/papers/e-drafts.html.) There were many further iterations after that. The whole thing is a wonderful record of distributed and extended cognition, involving a complex cognitive process spread between Andy, me, various notes on paper, and computer files. I’m proud to have played a role in constituting this process. That said, I have to acknowledge that as with many cases of distributed cognition, there was an individual at the core who set the whole process into motion and who bears primary responsbility, and that individual was Andy. I am still very much sympathetic with the extended mind thesis, though I also have some doubts about its truth that I articulated in my foreword to Andy’s 2008 book Supersizing the Mind. I will return to those doubts shortly, but here I will focus especially on two other issues. First, what exactly is the extended mind thesis? Second, are there cases of extended consciousness, and if not, why not? In addressing the first issue, I will be criticizing and revising the statement of the thesis in our original article. In addressing the second issue, I will be criticizing and revising a thesis that both of us have endorsed separately in more recent work. So these remarks will to some 0To appear in (M. Colombo, E. Irvine, and M. Stapleton, eds.) Andy Clark and His Critics.