The iPhone Mind

Maybe you locate consciousness entirely within the brain. I much prefer the Radical Behaviorist notion (yes, there are some of us still alive) by which consciousness, to the extent one can meaningfully talk about it, is "located" in the behavior, public and private, of the whole organism acting in a social context. That which we call a mind is the emergent property of behaving (rather than "the mind is what the brain does", the mind is what the person does); it is not causal but caused, a fuzzy category of public and private behaviors which allows us to speak of consciousness as inferred from observation of that fuzzy set of behaviors.

Nice to see Chalmers catching up to Skinner.

I'd say that neuroscientists implicity agree with the weak form of this argument. We don't study the brain in isolation, we study how it responds to the environment. Light is necessary for the eyes to function, sound for the ears, etc. That's well accepted and should satisfy Noe.

I'd say however that Chalmers is being a bit more provocative. He is almost saying that light is a part of sight, but I think he would distinguish himself form this idea by saying he is talking about a special form of physical object which can hold complex patterns. I'm not sure I agree with him. A meaningful definition of mind isn't simply the storage of patterns, then a single written word would have to be said to have a mind. Rather pattern storage is just one requirement.

There's also the problem of individuality. If you remind me of a dentist appointment, or teach me a fact, do we have two minds or one? It seems to me to keep the definition of mind meaningful we would have to say two. In that way, even though the iPhone certainly affects your mind, I'd say that considering it part of your mind starts to degrade the meaning of a definition of mind.

Very nice post and i believe you have to explore more philsophical related themes like this one.

My answer is more like intestines, but Noe, Chalmers and Clark put bold, sound and powerful arguments to the contrary.

Actually I've always hated the whole concept of "mind." I think it complicates matters far more than they need to be. There is no mind that is a separate physical entity from the brain (see Damasio's "Descartes' Error"). "Mind" is merely a metaphor for the processes of the brain, and while it may be useful in thinking about some issues, such as how we interact with the iPhone, it is fundamentally imprecise and, in my opinion, skews our understanding of mental life into this ethereal realm that is utterly unnecessary. The brain is complicated enough that its physical nature allows for all of the things embodied by the "mind" idea, but they are still the result of the biology of the brain. For example, we can talk in somewhat concrete terms about how hallucinations are produced by the brain, so when we look at the iPhone and "see" all of these "mind" functions, even if we can't talk about the exact sequence of synaptic firings that produce that perception, we can still root them in the firing of neurons within our own physical brains.

Here's just one example of how the idea of "mind" has adverse effects on our world: the way we deal with mental illness is so utterly ridiculous because it is not generally viewed as being solely the result of physical processes in the brain gone awry. The mind concept has turned mental illness into an intangible faultiness of the spirit or will, which isn't deserving of insurance coverage.

The idea of mind that can only exist as an "extended organ" is certainly interesting and could be a useful philosophical tool, but let's ground it in the brain. To answer your question, the "function of the brain" cannot be understood in isolation simply because it never exists in isolation (and the idea of a lone "function" is also pretty loose). It is the product of our constantly changing sensory perceptions (the outside world) interacting with our stored sensory perceptions (memory) and the genetics and epigenetics that result in the wiring and electrical properties of our neuronal circuits (including, importantly, their plasticity). A synapse or simple circuit, however, can be understood in isolation to a very large extent. This is the level at which most neuroscientists work, and while they should all implicity understand that isolating these circuits fundamentally disrupts what we can say about the whole brain, you're right that most of them do not give enough thought to these philosophical issues.

Isn't this what the distributed cognition researchers at UCSD (and others) have been saying for a long time?
http://hci.ucsd.edu/hutchins/

The notion of an extended mind has been around for a long time.

In Plato's Phaedrus, written around 370 BC, Socrates tells of an old Egyptian legend of the god Theuth and King Thamus. The god has just invented writing, and is trying convince Thamus to introduce this new invention to mankind. Theuth tells Thamus, "[I]t is an elixir of memory and wisdom that I have discovered." [source] But Thamus replies, "You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding." [source]

Socrates, and by extension Plato, argue the dualist position on the side of King Thamus. And thus, 2400 years later, most people regard the the notion of an extended mind as counterintuitive. But the idea itself has quite a pedigree.

As Holland writes on the confirmation of identity through the use of technology we can see how the photographic technology has contributed to that. Holland writes, we confirmed and explored 'that sense of selfhood which is an indispensable feature of a modern sensibility.' The use of the search engine and or iphone is metaphorically applicable to the search for self. The photograph itself fits also within that metaphor. Holland continues,

'The twentieth-century consumer-led economy has shifted these new individuals away from a culture based on work and self-discipline to one based on libidinous gratification which encourages us all to identify our pleasures in order to develop and refine them... These changes are reflected in the images we produce of ourselves, the uses we make of them, and our search through the Internet for material relevant to ourselves.'

Wells, L., (2004). Photography. New York: Routledge. P 119.

Remember Lashley's engrams? Merlin Donald uses the term "exograms" to describe bits of externally stored memory. Exograms are made by humans, and change the humans who use them. From cave drawings, to clay tablets, to money, to the iPhone: all are exographic representations, and all have produced profound cultural change. Two of Donald's books make for wonderful reading: "Origins of the Modern Mind", 1991, and "A Mind So Rare", 2001.
To H.P.: When the god Theuth convinced King Thamus to give humans the gift of writing, did he know that learning to read and write would fundamentally change how the human brain is wired?
Whether the elixir is of memory or of reminding, no doubt, it's a powerful cocktail. Ask anyone who is addicted to their iPhone.

I think the mind is like money, and I really like the way Hofstadter describes it in I Am a Strange Loop.

thanks for bringing this topic into public discourse. :)

the question as posed (is the brain like money or is it like intestines) is misleading. money is an object whose meaning and value are conferred upon it; intestines are organic matter which serve a plurality of functions but only in coordination with the entire body and all the chemicals, hormones, synaptic firings, and so on that go along with any biological process. neither has meaning or value, or is able to "perform its function" in isolation from the system of which it is a member.

as jonah pointed out in his first book and his previous post, it is a dialectic.

so is the brain. the brain is unable to function without being embodied... the brain -IS- the body entire, and although we can spatially locate a mass that seems to 'the brain,' it would be a mistake to say that the identity of that mass is entirely distinct from all the other components of the bod). further, the brain is unable to function without be in the world. (empirical support for this: the effect of sensory deprivation on the body. it leads to death.) the brain IS the world entire (at least as it comes into contact with it) -- this is in support of (my understanding of) chalmers, i should say. there are lines of demarcation, but they become fuzzier and fuzzier the more you look at it.

this does raise a slippery-slope with regards to identity. where does the (your) brain begin and end? are you distinct from your surroundings? from other persons? if so...how? what makes you, you?

(and this is just the brain we're talking about. which i suppose we're taking to be synonomous with mind...)

It seems to me that pretty much everything in the universe can be considered like Noe's dollar bill. Consider a star: Is it a thing of grandeur exhibiting beauty and profound physical processes? Or just some kind of unruly seething mass of matter and energy that means nothing. I would say it has no meaning unless considered by a conscious mind. The same can be said of a brain. In the absence of minds contemplating it-- including the mind that dwells in it-- how could it have any particular meaning? It's just a soggy biological mass. Seems to me that Niels Bohr's idea of complementarity comes into play here: that many events and issues can be looked at in fundamentally contradictory ways. Both ways are correct, and until we come up with a deeper unifying meaning, we're stuck with both. As whether the brain is like an intestine, why just the other day my girlfriend told me my brain was full of crap. So maybe that view is right too!

Too much input - into the necessary functional output -
The ears are too close of a passage to the brain:
and from evolution we have not immunized ourselves with
respect to their once survival instinct importance. I can wiggle my right ear with an admissable degree of conscious movement. I believe that the ears with their tenacle hairs within have purpose beyond our recognition. They are an unexplored pathway as to the supreme message center to the brain they could provide. The future will recognize this with sublingual at the same time.

Yes, my nose twitches and any good haunted Celtic is prophetic. Hopefully without my graphic dreams.

Anyway, Happy New Year - may you find as much stimulation
as I plan to dig up as an artist. Not dead yet, and if this leaves Jonah open to comment - beware the season of the prophetesse - Lee Pirozzi

So the knife and the cooking pot would be extensions of the intestine, much like text and the iphone are extensions of the brain.

Are illiterates on a raw-meme diet?

Without cultural context, could anyone really be full of crap?

Is that food-processor/word-processor thing more than just a coincidence?

The mind is just a pervasive electrical buzz. It's the perceptible involuntary squeal the brain emits when tickled by external and internal stimuli. Genetics, society, culture etc. provide the input, and the brain provides the medium through which the whole subjective drama is played. And what a gaudy self-obsessed melodrama it so often is... Consciousness is its attempt at being coherent and melodic amid all the garbled nonsense of white background noise.

I basically agree with glow owl : we can't draw a clear, neat line between the mind and the world. What we call the mind is usually understood as what "makes" the thinking about everything else, but I don't see any well-defined border between the subject ("mind"), the action ("thinking"), the object (the "world") and the result ("thoughts"). As Richard says, there's no "world" as we understand it without a meaning, and no meaning without a mind. It's all tangled. I think identity and the sentiment of individuality can simply be understood as some kind of patterns evolved to fit the communication needs of complex lifeforms on Earth. They are the base bricks of our specific cognitive and social architecture, but not a requirement of cognition in itself.

wow, well said, neuromancer. that was illuminating. !

Mind is the big deal in Buddhism and Tibetan Buddhism has formal investigations one does 'on the cushion' to investigate the nature of one's mind. The idea here is that everyone has a mind and one can and should look at it and discover for one's self its nature rather than beleive the teachings. These exercises are called Mahamudra (great symbol or seal) investigations and surprisingly, there is a good online description called "Mahamudra Vision" by Veena Gokhale, about a weekend workshop in which the investigations were done.

What's the difference between an iPhone and a piece of paper? Paper is only external memory, while an iPhone can run algorithms on its own. Does that mean running software on your computer is like adding a room onto your mind? Should I consider the server room at Google part of my mind as well?

Gut!

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