The cognitive cost of extending an evolutionary mind into the environment.

Cognitive Processing
Mitch Parsell

Abstract

Clark and Chalmers (1998) have argued that mental states can be extended outside an organism's skin. In response to some worries about the availability, reliability and portability of such extended resources, Clark (2005) offers a set of rough criteria that non-biological objects must fulfil to legitimately ground mental states. One such criterion is that the information retrieved from these non-biological sources be (more or less) automatically endorsed. But Sterelny (2003, 2005) has persuasively argued that the extended sphere is epistemologically opaque: a domain of contested truth and deliberate deception. As such, retrieving information from this domain requires the deployment of social guards for the information to remain reliable. But deploying such guards would seem to endanger endorsability by increasing cognitive load. Here I demonstrate that deploying social guards does not increase cognitive load if the guards are implemented in a highly distributed connectionist economy or off-loaded to the external environment.

References

Aug 1, 1968·The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology·P C Wason
Aug 31, 1999·Journal of Abnormal Psychology·L Cosmides, J Tooby
May 18, 2000·Cognition·J Fodor
Jun 24, 2004·Proceedings. Biological Sciences·Hugo J RaineyPeter J B Slater

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Citations

Oct 25, 2016·Frontiers in Psychology·Stephen M Fiore, Travis J Wiltshire
Mar 13, 2012·Medical Hypotheses·María-Angeles AllerJaime Arias
Jan 19, 2008·Australasian Psychiatry : Bulletin of Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists·Amanda Bray
Jan 6, 2011·The Behavioral and Brain Sciences·Doug Jones

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