One of the challenging features of coming to grips with the hypothesis of extended cognition is sifting through the many ambiguous claims that appear in the literature. The most familiar, of course, is the claim that cognitive processes depend on bodily and environmental processes. Is this dependence constitutive, as the EC folks maintain, or merely causal, as Rupert, Adams, Aizawa, and others maintain?
The term "cognitive resource" has an ambiguity as well. This can be brought out through the parallel case of "computational resource". In a dual core processor of a standard desktop computer, each processor would be a computational resources and both would realize computational processing. Computational processes take place in both CPUs. But, note that the hard disk of a standard desktop computer is also a computational resource, but it is not one in which computational processes take place. The process of computation takes place in the CPU(s). So, you can have a computational resource in which computation does not take place, but which is merely a tool for the bona fide computational processes in the CPU.
So, return to the case of a cognitive resource. The question is what kind of cognitive resource is, say, the non-neural parts of the body? Are the non-neural parts of the body a cognitive resource in which cognitive processing takes place (as in the parallel case of a dual core processor) or are they cognitive resources that are mere tools for the bona fide cognitive processes in the brain (as in the parallel case of the computer's hard disk)? This is yet another way of getting at what is at issue in the EC debate. The use of the phrase "cognitive resource" threatens to mask the issue.
I'll ask my question from Gary's blog here again, as it seems relevant to this post. You seem ok with the idea (at least in principle) of non-neural cognitive processing, which struck me as odd given the attempt to 'bound' cognition. Your answer there suggested that, so long as the non-neural stuff was manipulating a non-derived-content bearing representation, then it's cognition and why worry about neurons?
ReplyDeleteA couple of things, for my own clarification mostly:
Assuming you mean fairly normal, cognitive psychology type representations, what else do you think might be capable of implementing this?
Your worry here is that without a mark of the cognitive, there's no way to tell the difference between processor and tool? Plus the idea that this sort of processor resource, while technically possible, simply doesn't occur?
"Assuming you mean fairly normal, cognitive psychology type representations, what else do you think might be capable of implementing this?"
ReplyDeleteComputers or robots are the most likely things.
"Your worry here is that without a mark of the cognitive, there's no way to tell the difference between processor and tool?"
Yes, to a first approximation. Colin Allen has an approach wherein one provides a cognitive theory, then shows how that might be extended/embodied, so one can technically get around that. But, I guess the more general idea is really that one has to have a cognitive theory.
"Plus the idea that this sort of processor resource, while technically possible, simply doesn't occur?"
Precisely.
(Sorry not to have gotten back to Gary's blog, but I was on the road the past two days and prepping just before that.)
"Your worry here is that without a mark of the cognitive, there's no way to tell the difference between processor and tool?"
ReplyDeleteThis idea is not entirely idiosyncratic. So, as I've noted a coupled of times on this blog. Andy Clark, at least at times, wants to separate mere tools from cognitive extensions by appeal to the idea that when one "trusts" and "is glued to" "informational resources", then one has cognitive extension; otherwise, one has mere tool use. My example is a recipe versus an oven in baking a cake.
Mark Rowlands, in his "Extended Mind and the Mark of the Cognitive", also seems to want to appeal to information processors as cognitive extensions, but other sorts of things as mere tools. The oven/recipe example would work here too.
And, in principle, Runeson might want to get in on this act. He might say that a cognitive extension is a "smart mechanism", where a mere tool is something other than a "smart mechanism". Maybe a rote mechanism.
In a week or so, however, I'll have up a bunch of posts on Runeson. Some of these will be critical, but others (I hope) more in the way of clarification/exposition.
No worries on delays, I've been travelling too. This just seemed a more useful place to ask the question :)
ReplyDeleteBut that's all about what I thought, so that's ok. I agree that one needs a theory of cognition to do this stuff, for exactly the reasons you think it here, but we will disagree, I think, on what that might look like :)
It's good we can agree on something.
ReplyDeleteSo, why don't you work up a post for your blog on what separates a tool from a cognitive or perceptual processor?
As the resident cognitive psychologist on Andrew's and my blog, I'm working on such a post right now. Travelling and staring a new job have occupied most of my time recently, but I'll have something shortly...
ReplyDeleteExcellent!
ReplyDelete