Speaking helps thinking: Embodied or Extended Cognition?

A 12/28/09 Scientific American 60 Second Science story here.

The comment that interests me the most comes near the end (at about 1:00), when Hopkin notes that "how these sketches and monologues help remains a statement waiting for a proof".  What I take this to mean, however, is that we don't know how the sketches and monologues help improve performance.  That, however, suggests to me that even if we say, "Ah, this is extended cognition," we still do not know how the sketches and monologues help improve performance.

How Thinking is Not Like Dancing

You cannot dance when you are paralyzed by neuromuscular blockade, but you still can think:

Complete neuromuscular block caused no observable impairment of consciousness, sensation, memory, or the ability to think and make decisions. Objective evidence supported this assertion, as subjects responded promptly to questions. When the experimenter misunderstood their answers, subjects recognized this and made a correction. Subjects successfully used a questionnaire with many branching points to communicate their needs. Subjects also accurately recalled specific events that occurred in the room while they were paralyzed. This unimpaired mental function is consistent with the reports of previous investigators. (Topulos, Lansing, & Banzett, 1993, p. 373)

Future Posts 6/28/10

I recently received my copy of The Cognitive Life of Things, edited by Malafouris and Renfrew, so I plan to post some "reading notes" on some of the papers in the coming days.

Women's Travel Award 2010 - Berlin School of Mind and Bra

Humboldt-Universitaet zu Berlin
Berlin School of Mind and Brain

Web:  www.mind-and-brain.de
Email:  admissions@mind-and-brain.de

The Berlin School of Mind and Brain is an international research school, which was founded in 2006 as part of Germany's Excellence Initiative. The School offers a unique three-year interdisciplinary doctoral program in English in the mind and brain sciences.

As part of the Berlin School of Mind and Brain's commitment to supporting women in science and the humanities, the School is delighted to announce a limited number of travel awards for female students who are interested in exploring the possibility of doctoral studies at the School.

Candidates will be invited to visit the School during the week of the 1-6 November 2010, and will have ample opportunities to meet with faculty and students relevant to their research interests, as well as have a chance to view the School's facilities, and to get a better sense of city itself. In addition, they will be encouraged to participate in Berlin Brain Days (1-3 November 2010), an annual event that brings together more than 200 doctoral students from across the neurosciences to discuss and present their work with senior international faculty. Successful applicants will receive partial reimbursement for travel expenses to help defray the costs of their visit.

In order to be eligible for this award you need to meet the basic eligibility criteria for applying to the School's doctoral program in January 2011 (in particular you need to have completed or be in the process of completing a Master's or equivalent degree in an area of study relevant to the School). Further details about eligibility criteria for study at the School can be found at: http://www.mind-and-brain.de/doctoral-program/application/requirements/. Applications (and questions) should be made to admissions@mind-and-brain.de; please include a short 1-2 page letter of application (detailing your background and research interests), your academic CV, as well as a maximum of two letters of recommendation.

The deadline for applications is 1 September 2010.

Further details about the School and its program can be found below. We look forward to hearing from you soon!

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Research within the School focuses on the interface between the humanities and the neurosciences. Of particular interest are research areas that fall on the borders between the mind sciences (e.g., philosophy, linguistics, behavioral and cognitive science, economics), and the brain sciences (e.g., neurophysiology, computational neuroscience, neurology, and neurobiology). Major topics of research within the program include: 'conscious and unconscious perception', 'decision-making', 'language', 'brain plasticity and lifespan ontogeny', 'mental disorders and brain dysfunction', and the 'philosophy of mind'. However, research is not limited to these areas, and students are strongly encouraged to develop and work at their own initiative on any projects that are relevant to interdisciplinary questions relating to mind and brain.

The School accepts eight-to-twelve doctoral candidates into its program each year. Here are some excellent reasons why students might wish to be considered for one of these highly sought after positions at the Berlin School of Mind and Brain:

* The School has a faculty comprised of 60 distinguished researchers, including four Max Planck directors, which cover the gamut of research within the mind and brain sciences.

* Research within the School is strongly embedded in the basic and clinical research conducted within the region allowing for strong synergistic research initiatives and opportunities. Hosted by the Humboldt University, the School's research program includes scientists from the Free University, the Technical University, the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience, the Max Planck Institute for Human Development (Berlin), the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences (Leipzig), and the nearby universities of Potsdam and Magdeburg.

* Students acquire a strong foundation for interdisciplinary work by attending eight one-week classes during the first half of their doctoral program, which cover all fields relevant for mind/brain-related research, and allow students to explore research methods and topics that they have not been previously exposed to. Each doctoral candidate is assigned two professorial advisors - one from the brain sciences, one from the mind sciences - in order to maximize the interdisciplinary impact of their work.

* Students meet with leading international researchers via the School's Distinguished Lecture Series, interactions with its senior visiting faculty, as well as by attending international workshops and meetings. As part of the School's commitment to maximizing students' research opportunities, the School also encourages and provides assistance for students to spend time studying and conducting research abroad during the course of their doctoral candidacy.

* Extensive practical services to international doctoral candidates are available, including assistance with visa applications, matriculation, health insurance, local authorities, scientific soft skill courses, and language classes.

Finally, there are good financial reasons for studying at the Berlin School of Mind and Brain:

* There are no tuition fees associated with the program.

* Administrative fees are very low. Administrative fees for attending the Humboldt University come to only approximately 250 Euros per semester.

* The School offers generous scholarships to the best applicants. Students who were not successful in winning one of the school's own scholarships will receive support in obtaining alternative sources of funding (e.g. a research post within a university department or with one of the School's research groups, or help in finding alternative funding sources for a scholarship).

Recent progress in the neurosciences has opened up new and exciting avenues for research that raise challenging conceptual and ethical questions calling for an interdisciplinary approach. The Berlin School of Mind and Brain offers a unique research and training environment for doctoral candidates to work at this exciting interface between the sciences and the humanities.

--
Patrick Wilken, PhD

Humboldt-Universitaet zu Berlin
Berlin School of Mind and Brain
Luisenstraße 56
D-10099 Berlin

www.mind-and-brain.de

Call for papers for Revista Internacional de Filosofía: The Extended Mind.

Deadline for submissions: October 1st, 2010

Notification of intent to submit including subject matter will be greatly appreciated as it will assist with the coordination and planning of the special issue of Revista Internacional de Filosofía

www.unioviedo.es/Teorema

The Extended Mind

In the decade or so since the publication of Clark and Chalmers' seminal paper, the extended mind thesis has had a highly significant influence on the philosophy of mind and cognitive science. This comes from the fact that it promotes a view of mind and cognition that breaks away from other such views popular in the late 20th century. Thus, the extended mind thesis promotes: one, functionalism, without the restrictions imposed by biological implementational structure; two, externalism, not only regarding mental contents, but also regarding the vehicles of content; and three, postcognitivism, where cognition is not simply a matter of internal symbol manipulation. The result is, thus, a view that could be labelled "situated and embodied functionalism".

Critics have reacted in different ways. Some have objected, on behalf of intracranialism, that the extended mind thesis is too radical, in that it flouts the distinction between intrinsic and derived intentionality in the characterization of the mental; or in that it mistakes extracranial aids to cognition for the real vehicles of cognition. Other critics, though, have argued that the development of Clark and Chalmers' insights has sometimes been too conservative, insofar as it supports a representationalist, rather than an antirepresentationalist, version of postcognitivism; or insofar as it continues to give pride of place to processes in the brain/CNS, precluding the extension of the idea of cognition to other less complicated life forms.

Teorema invites submissions on these and related topics for a special issue to be published in 2011. Papers must be written in English or in Spanish, and should not exceed 6000 words. For the presentation of their manuscripts, authors are requested to adhere to the details that can be found at www.uniovi.es/Teorema. Electronic submissions, both in .doc and .pdf formats and prepared for blind refereeing, must be sent to the Editor by October 1st, 2010. Notification of intent to submit including title (tentative) and subject matter (a brief abstract) will be greatly appreciated as it will assist with the coordination and planning of the special issue.

Contact details for queries and submissions: Teorema

Prof. Luis M. Valdés Villanueva
Director de teorema
Departamento de Filosofía
Universidad de Oviedo
E-33071 Oviedo (España)
E-mail: lmvaldes@uniovi.es

More on Nonlinearity and Mechanistic Explanation

The point is that the more localizability and decomposition fail, the harder mechanistic explanation will be, and a high degree of nonlinearity is bad news for both of these (C&S, 2008, p. 16).

Ok.  So, how is nonlinearity make localizability and decomposition harder?  I guess that if you can't decompose a system into parts, then maybe by the MDC and Bechtel definitions you can't have mechanistic explanation, so why does nonlinearity make composition harder?

(And really, decomposition could be harder with nonlinearity, but if it is still possible wouldn't that be enough to remove the block on mechanistic explanation?)

Nonlinearity and Mechanistic Explanation

So, nonlinearity is supposed to block mechanistic explanation:

A linear system can be decomposed into subsystems. Such decomposition fails however in the case of nonlinear systems. When the behaviors of the constituents of a system are highly coherent and correlated, the system cannot be treated even approximately as a collection of uncoupled individual parts. Instead, some particular global or nonlocal description is required, taking into account that individual constituents cannot be fully characterized without reference to larger scale structures of the system such as order parameters. (Chemero & Silberstein, 2008, p. 16).

But, why does decomposition fail in the case of nonlinear systems?  Think of a double pendulum.  Why can that not be decomposed into two pendulums?

It is not a part of mechanistic explanation that one treat systems as "a collection of uncoupled individual parts" if in fact they are a collection nonlinearly coupled parts. Rather, I would think that mechanistic explanations of systems of nonlinearly coupled components should involve treating them as systems of nonlinearly coupled components.  I know that it is common to think that nonlinearity causes explanatory problems, but it can't be that nonlinearity forces us to treat such systems as collections of uncoupled individual parts.

Moreover, in either the linear or the nonlinear cases, the MDC approach (and I think the Bechtel approach) to mechanistic explanation invokes higher level descriptions (global descriptions) which would be the things to be explained by the lower level mechanisms.  So, there is no "instead" about particular global or nonlocal descriptions.

Nor, need the mechanist "fully characterize" the individual constituents without reference to larger structure of the system.  Isn't that what "fully characterize" means one does?  Refer to the larger structure?

To repeat, however, I think there could be something problematic about nonlinear systems, but I don't see that C&S have put their finger on it.

In Memoriam: John Haugeland (1945-2010)

I have long thought that Haugeland's "Mind Embodied and Embedded" is one of the underappreciated papers in the extended cognition literature.

Obit.

So, Why Isn't the Methodology of Co-ordination Dynamics an Instance of Mechanistic Explanation?

The methodology of coordination dynamics is as follows. First, for the system as a whole, discover the key coordination variables and the dynamical equations of motion that best describes how coordination patterns change over time. Second, identify the individual coordinated elements (such as neurons, organs, clapping hands, pendulums, cars, birds, bees, fish, etc.) and discern their dynamics. As Kelso and Ensgtrom say, this is nontrivial because the individual coordinated elements are often themselves quite complex, and are often dependent upon the larger coordinated system of which they are components (2006, 109). They put the point even more strongly, “in the complex systems of coordination dynamics, there are no purely context-independent parts from which to derive a context-independent coordinative whole” (2006, 202). Third, derive the systemic dynamics from the description of the nonlinear coupling among the elements. It is this nonlinear coupling between elements that allows one to determine connections across different levels of description. It is important to note that, as in all dynamical explanation, discovering both the systemic dynamics and that of their component parts requires specifying boundary conditions that “establish the context for particular behaviors to arise” (Kelso and Engstrom 2006, 109). The behavior of the whole system ‘emerges’ from the nonlinear interactions among the elements of the system in a particular context where the elements and the contextual features are coupled and mutually codependent. The individual coordinating elements form a collective whole in the sense that microscopic degrees of freedom are reduced to a much smaller set of context dependent coordination variables or order parameters that greatly constrain the behavior of the elements. (Chemero & Silberstein, 2008, pp. 12-13).

So, if we understand C&S's "elements" as entities and their "dynamics" as the interactions among the entities, it looks like we are pretty far along the path to, say, the Machamer, Darden, Craver theory of mechanistic explanation in terms of entities and their activities.  So, why isn't the methodology of co-ordination dynamics an instance of mechanistic explanation?  I figure there could be an answer, but the contrast between mechanistic explanation and whatever rival C&S are offering does not seem to be all that stark.  And, what exactly is it?

Bechtel might not like this (cf., C&S, 2008, p. 16), but what reason is there?  For further comment on this, tune in tomorrow.

Irreducible Brain Components Leads to Cognitive Extension?

C&S write,

If it turns out that there are irreducible mechanisms (nonlocalizable or nondecomposable) at the highest levels within the brain then, because it is at roughly the same scale and there are many interactions at that shared level, it may be necessary to bring in the external environment as part of the cognitive mechanisms in question or at least as essential background for their function. (Chemero & Silberstein, 2008, p. 8).

I'm not getting the thinking here.  So, suppose there are some irreducible (cognitive?) mechanisms at the highest levels in the brain.  Why would this make it necessary to bring in the external environment as part of the cognitive mechanisms in question?  I'm not getting it.  C&S do hedge and throw in "it may be necessary", but still why may this be necessary?

There are other considerations given later, such as that mechanisms often function only in certain contexts, but this is a separate matter from the irreducibility consideration cited above.