extended mind
In plain wordsThe idea that the mind can reach beyond the head into tools we rely on — a notebook, a phone, perhaps an AI assistant — when they play the same role that memory or reasoning would.
The thesis that cognitive processes, and even standing beliefs, can be partly constituted by resources outside the brain and body when those resources are coupled with the agent in the right way. Andy Clark and David Chalmers's example is Otto, a man with memory impairment who consults a notebook to find a museum's address: because the notebook plays the role that biological memory plays for Inga, who simply remembers, they argue that its entries count as Otto's beliefs. Proposed conditions include that the resource be reliably available, routinely consulted and automatically trusted. Critics object that the thesis confuses causal contribution with constitution and would inflate the mind without limit. With smartphones, search engines and AI assistants that remember, draft and reason for their users, it figures in debates over cognitive offloading, dependence and whether AI augments or replaces human thinking.
Origin
Proposed by Andy Clark and David Chalmers in 'The Extended Mind' (Analysis, 1998), building on ideas of distributed and situated cognition from Edwin Hutchins and others; Clark developed it in Supersizing the Mind (2008).
Related
- embodied cognitionembodied cognition, n.: The idea that thinking is not something the brain does on its own: the body, its senses and movements, and its surroundings play a real part in how we think and understand.
- intelligence augmentationintelligence augmentation, n.: Using computers to make people smarter and more capable rather than building machines that think on their own: AI as a tool for human minds.
- agent memoryagent memory, n.: The ways an AI assistant or agent keeps information — your preferences, past conversations, lessons from earlier tasks — and brings it back later, beyond what fits in a single conversation.
- co-intelligenceco-intelligence, n.: Ethan Mollick's term for working and thinking alongside AI as a partner — treating it like a capable but odd colleague whose strengths and blind spots you learn through experience.
- cognitive sciencecognitive science, n.: The scientific study of how minds work — how we reason, use language, remember and see — combining psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, philosophy, anthropology and artificial intelligence.
Sources
- Clark, A. & Chalmers, D. (1998). The Extended Mind. Analysis 58(1), 7–19.
Mentioned in
David ChalmersDavid Chalmers, prop. n.: An Australian philosopher who named the 'hard problem' of consciousness — why physical processes feel like anything at all — and who asks whether AI systems could be conscious., embodied cognitionembodied cognition, n.: The idea that thinking is not something the brain does on its own: the body, its senses and movements, and its surroundings play a real part in how we think and understand., intelligence augmentationintelligence augmentation, n.: Using computers to make people smarter and more capable rather than building machines that think on their own: AI as a tool for human minds., externalizationexternalization, n.: Moving an AI agent's know-how and memory out of the model itself and into files, tools and rules around it, so the whole system can do more than the model alone.