Abstract
Externalism constitutes a major family of theories about how to conceive of the human mind in alternative ways. This chapter discusses externalism in the philosophy of mind and how it evolved during the twentieth century. It then examines approaches to the problem of consciousness from the perspective of externalism.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
Russell outlines his theory in Russell (1993, p. 167).
- 3.
See Burge ’s “Individualism and the Mental” in Chalmers (2002).
- 4.
A concern that Clark and Chalmers raise regarding the Internet is that it might not be reliable enough.
- 5.
Hurley is explicit about this in response to a comparison between Consciousness in Action and Clarke and Chalmers’s The Extended Mind: “I want to extend the consideration of more radical externalism to consciousness as well as thought”; see the online discussion with Timo Jarvilehto at http://host.uniroma3.it/progetti/kant/field/hurleysymp_jarvilehto.htm.
- 6.
Hurley states, “A unified consciousness need not depend on neuroanatomical unity, and neuroanatomical unity doesn’t rule out splits in consciousness” and “When the corpus callosum is intact within one body, we may have either a normal person with presumably normal unity of consciousness, or we may have a multiple personality patient who seems to support separate centers of consciousness” Hurley (2002), pp. 18 and 188, respectively.
- 7.
Bogen explains cross-cuing in the following way: “ ‘Crosscueing’ means that one hemisphere initiates a bodily behavior which can provide information to the other hemisphere” Bogen (1990).
- 8.
Hurley (2002, p. 162) states, “No account of life is given here: that is another substantive question” and refers the reader to Boden (1996) The Philosophy of Artificial Life, a work by artificial intelligence researcher Margaret Boden. The first sentence of that book reads, “Artificial Life (A-Life) uses informational concepts and computer modelling to study life in general, and terrestrial life in particular.”
- 9.
See the replies by Hurley to comments on her book by Timo Jarvilehto at http://host.uniroma3.it/progetti/kant/field/hurleysymp_jarvilehto.htm from a book symposium on Hurley (2002).
- 10.
Noë defines consciousness in the following way: “I use the term ‘consciousness’ to mean, roughly, experience. And I think of experience, broadly, as encompassing thinking, feeling, and the fact that a world ‘shows up’ for us in perception” (Noë 2009, p. 8).
- 11.
Noë states his position clearly: “My own view is that the suggestion that cells in a dish could be conscious or that you could have a conscious brain in a vat—is absurd; it’s time to overhaul our starting assumptions about what consciousness is if they lead us to such a conclusion” (Noë 2009, p. 12).
- 12.
It is illuminating to go back to early work of Francisco Varela to understand the core ideas of Hurley and Noë when they discuss the importance of viewing mind and consciousness in terms of environmentally embedded systems. They are influenced by Francisco Varela’s view of organisms as machines embedded in larger machines. This is how Varela (1979, p. 12) puts it in his Principles of Biological Autonomy: “If one says that there is a machine M in which there is a feedback loop through the environment, so that the effects of its output affect its input, one is in fact talking about a larger machine M′ which includes the environment and the feedback loop in its defining organization.” Hurley (2002, p. 404) includes this passage to illustrate how to think about cognitive states spreading across the external environment. Noë, in turn, gives Varela’s (1979) Principles of Biological Autonomy as the earliest work from which the enactive approach emerged that he allies himself with. See Noë and Thompson (2002, p. 5). Varela, in turn, confirms that it was in his Principles of Biological Autonomy that the enactive approach was originally proposed (Noë and Thompson 2002, p. 352).
- 13.
For an early discussion of dominance and deference, see Hurley and Noë (2003).
- 14.
See, for example, Brodal (2010, p. 50), an introductory neuroscience text, where it is stated that “It is customary to distinguish between short-term and long-term synaptic plasticity, without a sharp transition. Short-term plasticity lasts from less than a second to some minutes, whereas long-term plasticity can last for at least several weeks.”
- 15.
“All learning is likely to involve changes in the properties of existing synapses, formation of new ones, and removal of inappropriate ones. Such use-dependent plasticity continues throughout life and is the nervous system’s means of adapting to new and changing conditions, in both the body itself and the environment” (Brodal 2010, p. 154).
- 16.
Noë uses metaphors of economies, corporations, and information networks in the following way: “We now think of economies as globalized, corporations as internationalized, information networks as distributed. We ourselves are also dynamically distributed, boundary crossing, offloaded, and environmentally situated, by our very nature. What explains our inability until now to understand consciousness is that we’ve been searching for it in the wrong place” Noë (2009, p. 68).
- 17.
Searle discusses this topic in Mind: A Brief Introduction Searle (2004, pp. 178–192).
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Hedman, A. (2017). Externalism and Consciousness. In: Consciousness from a Broad Perspective. Studies in Neuroscience, Consciousness and Spirituality, vol 6. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-52975-2_8
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