Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science, forthcoming Persons and the Extended-Mind Thesis

Cognitive scientists have become increasingly enamored of the idea of extended minds. The extended-mind thesis (EM) is the claim that mentality need not be situated just in the brain, or even within the boundaries of the skin. EM is the modal claim that it is possible that the mind is not bound by skull or skin. EM is quite radical: A mind is a collection of processes that easily extends to tools, programs, other minds, language. Cognitive states may have all sorts of components—neural, bodily, environmental. The heart of the extended-mind thesis is that we biological creatures can “couple” with nonbiological entities or features of our environment and thereby expand the entities that we are. Some versions do away with enduring agents altogether: “Extended selves” are relatively transitory couplings of biological organisms and external resources. (Clark and Chalmers, 1998, p. 18) Although there is a huge and complex literature on the idea of an extended mind—both pro and con—I’ll focus on some of Andy Clark’s work, especially the article he wrote with David Chalmers in 1998, “The Extended Mind.”