Where do the boundaries of the mind end?

In the previous blog I discussed the idea that dualism was flawed and that some form of monism provided a much more satisfactory explanation of the ontology of the physical and the mental. According to this monist view, there is only one reality. Physicalists like to call it the physical and deny the mental altogether. I tend to avoid this and stick to the idea that there really is only one reality, its just when talking about it, or indeed practising Cognitive Science there are multiple levels of analysis that need to be accounted for in order to provide a satisfactory account; physical, phenomenal, functional, etc.

Now the immediate answer that most give as to where the boundaries of the mind end is that the boundaries lie within the skin. Since Turing’s work on computation and the invention of the digital computer there has been an analogy in Cognitive Science of something like, mindware is to brain as software is to hardware. In other words the workings of the human mind is like the software in a computer. The brain of course being the biological computer and its program being the mind. This of course is not to be taken too literally in a dualist sense. We are talking of studying mindware scientifically as a process that occurs in the brain not as some extra mental stuff. That aside; from this we should try to make computational models that correlate with the physical interactions in the brain. If we are successful we will have explained mindware.

There have been numerous attempts over the year to theorize and build computational models of the brain/mind, frequently with the help from AI simulations. Good old fashioned AI (GOFAI) followed Newell and Simon’s Physical Symbol System theory. The idea is a physical device that contains a set of symbols with combinable properties and a set of operations used to manipulate those symbols according to rules. The attractions of this were clear as folk psychological terms such as beliefs could be clearly implemented, actually becoming symbols in the computational models. Thus thought could be naturalized. However the biological implementation of such models was never clear and many researchers rejected it as a realistic model of human cognition.

In the 80s a new wave of computational theorists known as connectionists emerged. Their models were analogous to real human brain neural networks (although far simpler). Artificial neural networks consisted of simple nodes (like neural cells) linked in parallel interacting with higher levels via simple connection weights (like axons and dendrites). Units received input and passed their weights to higher levels (like electrochemical impulses). Today’s models have incorporated realistic temporal and biological features such as salient time delays and deliberate noise. There’s a lot to say about connectionism, and it definitely seems to provide a far more accurate model of computation in the brain, but I’ll leave it at that for the sake of this blog. No doubt with the huge growth in computer IP capacity we will see even more realistic models in the future alongside neuroscientific research.

However it seems that if we are to take a monist approach and perhaps even we don’t, the processes under study should leave the skin. The previous models mentioned above all missed a key factor in their research: “Embodiment”. Human brains are situated in a body that, with the help of a nervous system and sensory apparatus, takes in real world input and causally interacts with the external physical world. More recently then researchers have put focus on the interactions of brain, body and environment. The idea is that intelligent systems often don’t have to go through such rigours higher cognition of assessing the problem, weighing up the alternatives, working out the values, doing the calculations and then getting the answer; in order to achieve a goal. Most of the time such processes become automated in the dynamic reactions between body (from here on in this includes the brain and nervous system) and environment. Could it be possible that much of our incredibly complex behaviour is facilitated by lots and lots of very simple interactions between and within the body and the environment? Well dynamic system theorists argue so and that’s where much research is taking place currently with help from robotics and artificial life projects.

If we look at motor skills such as walking or throwing a ball it’s fairly clear to see how this is the case, and motor skill theory is no new thing. Take catching a ball; the ball comes towards the person, the visual system tracks it, sends a signal to a low level processing area of the visual cortex which unconsciously processes information and relays the signal to the arm and hand muscles which perfectly coordinate and the ball is caught. We all take such a process for granted but really it’s quite incredible how a collection of such simple processes can produce the result of a ball at 20 mph being caught out of the air. We can at least however understand how this all works in principle.

However what are the implications of such an extended theory of mind on higher cognition?

One of the most interesting I think is that when studying cognition we shouldn’t just look at brain computation, but we should take into account cognitive technology. Today we are immersed in a world of computers, mobile phones, etc. Through these cognitive tools we are able to solve tasks with incredible more efficiency than we could without. Think of the internet. Right now if you wanted to find out how to get somewhere you could open up Google and type your destination in or look it up on trainlink, or whatever. You would have the answer in a matter of seconds. 15 years ago you would have had to look up some numbers in the phone book, dialled the number on a landline probably which may or may not be near you, spoken to the operator or whatever and then that might have only been one part of your journey, etc. 150 years ago you might have to go down the road and find someone who knew how to get there, find someone else who could transport you there, etc. 1000 years ago… well you get the picture.

The idea is that as technology evolves so does our cognition and our ability to process information efficiently. It probably isn’t going to that long till we all have decent internet on our phones, thus when you’re in the middle of town and you want to know somthing you can just get your mobile out, open Google, search and there you go. The interesting question follows: Does the internet (which you now always have near immediate access to) count as part of your mind or at least your knowledge base. Most of course would answer no, just as they wouldn’t count a bit of paper with a number on it as part of your mind.

However yet further into the future there’s a good chance that people will be able to get chips in their brain that wires them up to the internet so they have immediate access at any time. It sounds like the stuff of science fiction, but I don’t think it can be ruled out. It’s certainly possible in principle and as technology evolves so will society’s values and thus it may well gain acceptance. Even if it never happens, the thought experiment is still there. Does the knowledge on the internet count as yours; does your mind extend into it? It’s hard to argue no unless you say the mind is only linked to the biological brain or you believe in a soul. Such a situation would mean you had the same instant access to information on the internet as you did with your biological brain. Such an invention, to coin a Jungian term, might well lead to an “unconscious collective”, or in fact better phrased; a “Conscious Collective”. Of course it may turn out that this never happens or that its impossible, but it does raise a very interesting point on the boundaries of the mind.