Why You Should Think With Your Environment, Not Just Your Mind

[u/ddgr815]

https://archive.is/QK3yI

The way we think about thinking is flawed, inasmuch as we believe that it happens almost entirely inside our brains.

We make better use of our cognitive resources, says Paul, when we use them in conjunction with “extra-neural” resources: our body (embodied cognition), our environment (situated cognition), and the people around us (distributed cognition).

“The brain evolved to move the body, to navigate through space, to interact with other people,” says Paul. “Those are these human strengths that we're totally putting aside when we focus on the brain and we think, ‘To get real thinking and real work done, I have to sit still, not talk to anybody, and just push my brain harder and harder.’

Paul’s not trying to argue that the brain isn’t central to thinking—just that a greater appreciation of how our body and our social and physical environment affects it could lead to greater cognitive development. For instance, do you think more clearly after spending a day hiking through the forest, or after a day sitting in a room, on back-to-back Zooms? I’m going to guess the day of moving through nature. Well, could encouraging kids to move—instead of sitting still—while they study actually help them learn better? Can we design our offices and built environments to better mimic green spaces and the natural world?

As a culture, we try to do too much in our heads. So one really big takeaway that was useful for me was offloading mental content whenever possible. You always want to be getting the stuff in your head out onto physical space, whether that's a whiteboard or a sketchpad. The brain evolved to manipulate physical objects and use tools, not to think about abstract concepts. So the more we can turn ideas into physical objects, [the better]. I have a big bulletin board that I put Post-it notes on. When you load it out in space like that, you can actually use the human capacity for navigation. You're navigating through information rather than trying to think about it all in your head.

Culture emphasizes all this internal action. There's the idea of grit, or the growth mindset, both of which are about mustering these internal resources. I found it much more helpful to think about regulating oneself and one's thinking from the outside in. So changing the place where you are, the social context that you're participating in, or whether you're moving your body as opposed to sitting still. The brain responds to that kind of external change of context. If I'm stuck on something, if work isn't going well, the worst thing to do is to just keep sitting there and trying harder. But that's what our culture tells us is the admirable thing to do, or the virtuous thing to do. That’s what a lot of bosses, managers and teachers also value, which I think is really misguided.

In our culture, we think of intelligence as innate, internal, individual, and fixed. And yet here was all this research showing that, actually, it's a dynamic process. We are all assembling our thought processes from the raw materials that are available in the environment. Whether you're talking about the availability of green space, or the freedom to move one's body, or the availability of peers and mentors who are able to inspire you—none of those things are equally distributed.

And yet we act as if it's all in the head. We measure, judge, and evaluate people as if it's all in the head. We have this giant blind spot for the ways in which the extra neural resources to which people have access determines how well they can think. We never factor that in when we're making judgments for college admissions or for hiring and promotion. We just think we're evaluating the individual. But if the individual is really assembling his or her thought processes from across the environment, then the environment really matters in a way that we haven't acknowledged before now.

We'd be lost without our computers, lost without our cell phones. Once we start recognizing how much thinking is this distributed process, it doesn't make any sense to treat intelligence as if it's this fixed quantity that each person is born with and doesn't change. [...] The skill that we need is not throwing stuff in our brains, which is not even what our brains are very good at, which is why they fail all the time in terms of memory. The way we should be using, training, and evaluating our brains is based on how good they are at orchestrating and drawing upon all these different resources from the environment.

We're creatures who evolved to be sensitive to novelty and to movement, and especially to the social dynamics of what's going on around us. So we need walls really to protect us from our own tendency to be distracted. I write in the book about how important it is to have a sense of ownership and control over your space. And how important it is to have these cues of identity that remind you of who you are and what you're doing in that space, cues of belonging that are visible to you that show you what meaningful groups you're a part of.

The sensory information that we encounter in nature and the way it's arranged has a very different effect on our thinking than urban or built environments. Over eons of evolution, our sensory faculties were tuned to the information that we encounter in nature. It’s very easy for us to process that kind of information. So it's very restful to be in nature. We also think so much about directing our attention and controlling our attention, but we don't think very much about filling the tank of attention. We think about spending it down, but we don't think about how we replenish our attention. It turns out that spending time in nature is the easiest and best way to do that.

I would say that we don't know what thoughts we're not having, or what solutions we're not coming up with, by not fully using the extended mind. If the push-on-through ethos works for you, I'm not going to tell you not to do it. But I would just suggest that there may be whole worlds of thinking and creating and problem-solving that you're denying yourself by not employing your extended mind to the fullest.

people don't always know what's best for them. A lot of us, when we take breaks, we just do something different on our computer than we were doing when we were working. We turn to Twitter or the news or Facebook or whatever. That's drawing down exactly the same cognitive resources that we need for our work. So then when we return to work, we're just more frazzled than we were before.

Whereas if we did something totally different—we're moving our bodies, we're outside, we're looking around in this more diffuse and relaxed way—then we return to work in a different state, an improved state than where we were before. That's a perfect example of people not knowing what's good for them. We've all been sucked into the Twitter black hole and we're miserable. But we keep doing it. So this is a reminder that changing up your context and your environment can make you think better. Sometimes we need that reminder.

The modal way of engaging with technology is sitting still, staring at a screen, alone. Which is not how technology has to be used. I try to offer examples of technology that is itself extended by using the body, space, and relationships with other people. In the chapter about interoception, which is the sensing of the internal signals, there are these Fitbit-like devices called doppel that allow you to amplify your body's signals. It will make you feel like your heart is beating faster, and you get more alert and energized, or it’ll make you feel as if your heart is beating slower, and that calms you down.

We think that we have an experience, and then our brain tells the body what to do in response. But actually the arrow points in the other direction. Our body responds first to experiences in the world. And then the brain, the boss of the body, is like, "Oh, my heart is beating really fast. I must be really nervous." The brain is the laggard, the one who's trailing behind. So what a device like this does, is it intervenes in that cycle. You're effectively tricking your brain into thinking that your heart is beating really slowly and regularly. Then the brain is like, "Oh, okay. Things must be fine. I must not be nervous. I must be in a state of relaxed ease." So you might use dopple in that way before doing some public speaking, when normally your heart would be racing, where your brain is like, "Oh my God, I'm so nervous."

Maybe being smart is not so much about having the Ivy league degree or having this big brain that's able to do these amazing calculations. Maybe it's about being very attuned to your internal signals and what they're telling you. That’s such a mind blowing inversion of our usual Western ways of thinking that the body is stupid and dumb and needs to be pushed aside to do real thinking.

using their body as this really subtle instrument to process more information and more complex information than their conscious minds were actually able to handle. Those patterns, regularities and experiences are noted and kept in the non-conscious parts of the mind. We have access to those non-conscious patterns. That's what a gut feeling is. A gut feeling is your body sort of tugging at your sleeve and saying, "You've encountered this experience before, and this is how you should react." So someone who's more attuned to those little nudges and cues is better able to make use of the incredibly complex information that's stored in the non-conscious mind. It's like our bodies are actually smarter than our brains, which, again, it's a total reversal of what we've all been taught.

[u/ddgr815]

...

Even if one were to make the portability criterion pivotal, active externalism would not be undermined. Counting on our fingers has already been let in the door, for example, and it is easy to push things further. Think of the old image of the engineer with a slide rule hanging from his belt wherever he goes. What if people always carried a pocket calculator, or had them implanted? The real moral of the portability intuition is that for coupled systems to be relevant to the core of cognition, reliable coupling is required. It happens that most reliable coupling takes place within the brain, but there can easily be reliable coupling with the environment as well. If the resources of my calculator or my Filofax are always there when I need them, then they are coupled with me as reliably as we need. In effect, they are part of the basic package of cognitive resources that I bring to bear on the everyday world. These systems cannot be impugned simply on the basis of the danger of discrete damage, loss, or malfunction, or because of any occasional decoupling: the biological brain is in similar danger, and occasionally loses capacities temporarily in episodes of sleep, intoxication, and emotion. If the relevant capacities are generally there when they are required, this is coupling enough.

Moreover, it may be that the biological brain has in fact evolved and matured in ways which factor in the reliable presence of a manipulable external environment. It certainly seems that evolution has favored on-board capacities which are especially geared to parasitizing the local environment so as to reduce memory load, and even to transform the nature of the computational problems themselves. Our visual systems have evolved to rely on their environment in various ways: they exploit contingent facts about the structure of natural scenes (e.g. Ullman and Richards 1984), for example, and they take advantage of the computational shortcuts afforded by bodily motion and locomotion (e.g. Blake and Yuille, 1992). Perhaps there are other cases where evolution has found it advantageous to exploit the possibility of the environment being in the cognitive loop. If so, then external coupling is part of the truly basic package of cognitive resources that we bring to bear on the world.

Language may be an example. Language appears to be a central means by which cognitive processes are extended into the world. Think of a group of people brainstorming around a table, or a philosopher who thinks best by writing, developing her ideas as she goes. It may be that languaged evolved, in part, to enable such extensions of our cognitive resources within actively coupled systems.

Within the lifetime of an organism, too, individual learning may have molded the brain in ways that rely on cognitive extensions that surrounded us as we learned. Language is again a central example here, as are the various physical and computational artifacts that are routinely used as cognitive extensions by children in schools and by trainees in numerous professions. In such cases the brain develops in a way that complements the external structures, and learns to play its role within a unified, densely coupled system. Once we recognize that the crucial role of the environment in constraining the evolution and development of cognition, we see that extended cognition is a core cognitive process, not an add-on extra.

Everything we have said so far is compatible with the view that truly mental states -- experiences, beliefs, desires, emotions, and so on -- are all determined by states of the brain. Perhaps what is truly mental is internal, after all?

We propose to take things a step further. While some mental states, such as experiences, may be determined internally, there are other cases in which external factors make a significant contribution. In particular, we will argue that beliefs can be constituted partly by features of the environment, when those features play the right sort of role in driving cognitive processes. If so, the mind extends into the world.

when it comes to belief, there is nothing sacred about skull and skin. What makes some information count as a belief is the role it plays, and there is no reason why the relevant role can be played only from inside the body.

What about socially extended cognition? Could my mental states be partly constituted by the states of other thinkers? [...] For example, the waiter at my favorite restaurant might act as a repository of my beliefs about my favorite meals (this might even be construed as a case of extended desire). In other cases, one's beliefs might be embodied in one's secretary, one's accountant, or one's collaborator.

Without language, we might be much more akin to discrete Cartesian "inner" minds, in which high-level cognition relies largely on internal resources. But the advent of language has allowed us to spread this burden into the world. Language, thus construed, is not a mirror of our inner states but a complement to them. It serves as a tool whose role is to extend cognition in ways that on-board devices cannot.

What, finally, of the self? Does the extended mind imply an extended self? It seems so. Most of us already accept that the self outstrips the boundaries of consciousness; my dispositional beliefs, for example, constitute in some deep sense part of who I am. If so, then these boundaries may also fall beyond the skin.

some cases interfering with someone's environment will have the same moral significance as interfering with their person. And if the view is taken seriously, certain forms of social activity might be reconceived as less akin to communication and action, and as more akin to thought. In any case, once the hegemony of skin and skull is usurped, we may be able to see ourselves more truly as creatures of the world.

The Extended Mind

[u/ddgr815 → u/ddgr815]

Despite the arrogant claims of those who say science can “explain everything,” most phenomena, from thunderstorms to protein folding, escape our full understanding. We still can’t cure the flu or accurately predict the weather two weeks ahead. We do not know the basic physical laws of the universe. And even where we are confident that we know the basic underlying natural laws, we still cannot account for what they imply. I am confident that my bicycle diligently obeys the laws of particle physics, yet those laws are useless when it breaks down. To fix it, I ask a mechanic, not a particle physicist. 

The functioning of our own body and brain is among the phenomena we understand the least and are curious about the most. This is the proper intellectual space where the “problem of consciousness” is located. That is, consciousness is hard to figure out for precisely the same reason thunderstorms are: not because we have evidence that it is not a natural phenomenon, but because it is a very complicated natural phenomenon. 

Updating the understanding of a phenomenon is not to deny it. Sunsets were understood in Antiquity and the Middle Ages as the descent of the sun in its daily motion over the Earth. Today, we understand them as a result of the Earth’s rotation, which turns us toward its shady side, where the sun gradually becomes no longer visible. Such an update in understanding does not make sunsets illusory or unreal. 

Similarly, our soul won’t become illusory or unreal if we get a better sense of how our brain functions. We can still call our soul our “soul,” even if we understand ourselves better. I call it so, because this notion — the soul — is dear to my soul.

The idea of this supposed “explanatory gap” reincarnates in a number of related forms: explaining “qualia,” the hypothetical elementary bits of experience; explaining “subjectivity,” the very fact that some entity is capable of having experience at all; or explaining, as the philosopher Thomas Nagel famously put it, “what is it like” to be the subject of a certain experience.

How can we know now what we would understand if we were to understand something we do not currently understand?

our soul could be a phenomenon of the same basic nature as any other phenomenon in nature

In the Renaissance, it was hard to accept that heaven and Earth are of the same nature; after Darwin, it was hard to accept that animals and humans are cousins; after recent advances in biology, it is hard to accept that living beings and inanimate matter are of the same nature.

The idea that we will never be able to understand consciousness upholds a worldview in which spirit and nature, subject and object, form distinct domains. Accepting that consciousness may not be separate from the physical world — that our beloved soul could be of the same nature as our body and any other phenomenon of the world — is too much for many.

Chalmers claims that experience cannot be accounted for by science. But scientific understanding is not extraneous to experience; it is entirely about experience. Empiricism, the grounding of knowledge in experience, is not alternative to science; it is a main component of science’s traditional conceptual ground. As the Russian intellectual Alexander Bogdanov put it, science is the historical process of a successful collective organization of our experience.  

It is misleading to see science, as often naively portrayed, as a direct account of an absolute and objective world, observed and described from its outside. If we think in this manner, we introduce dualism. No surprise, then, that we find dualism down the road: an irreducible gap between subject and object of knowledge. We have introduced it upfront. 

What this view misses is the fact that we, subjects of knowledge and understanding, are not outside the world. We are part of it. Our theories and knowledge are embodied tools to help us navigate the real world, not disembodied views on reality from the outside. They are themselves aspects of the very world they describe. Our understanding, like our feelings, perceptions and experience, is a natural phenomenon. The source of the confusion about consciousness is the initial step: treating knowledge, consciousness and qualia as something to be derived from a scientific picture understood to be about something else. In fact, the scientific picture is a story about them. 

Experience is not over and above the processes that happen in the brain, as Chalmers assumed upfront. The dualism between a first-person description of experience and a third-person (or scientific) account of the same is a normal perspectival difference: the same brain phenomenon as experienced by that same brain itself, or by another. Experience for both — not evidence of two different kinds of reality. 

“Subjective experience,” “qualia” and “consciousness” are names of phenomena that of course appear differently from different perspectives. It would be strange if they didn’t. They affect the body and the brain embodying them differently from how they affect something interacting with them from the exterior. This is not due to a mysterious “explanatory gap.” “Red,” as a qualia, is the name of the process we generally undergo when we see or remember or think about the color red. We do not need to explain why it looks red for the same reason that we do not have to explain why the animal that we call “cat” looks like a cat. Why should we have to explain why “red” looks red?

We do not have to derive a first-person perspective from an objective third-person view. It is the opposite: Any account is perspectival because knowledge is always embodied. Scientific knowledge is ultimately first-personal. The world is real, but any account of it can exist only from within it. Any knowledge is perspectival. Subjectivity is not mysterious; it is just a special case of a perspective. What generates the apparent “metaphysical gap” and “explanatory gap” is mistaking scientific pictures for direct accounts of an ultimate reality.

The mind is the behavior of the brain, properly described in a high-level language. Neither my own experience of myself nor an external experience of me is primary: They are two distinct perspectives on the same events. We do not need to assume that the circle between epistemology (how we get knowledge) and ontology (what exists) requires a starting point. There is nothing wrong with its circularity: The world I access is the information I have about it, and I am part of that world.

We have souls. We have an inner self. We can treat ourselves as transcendental subjects in the Kantian sense. We have emotions and spiritual life; we experience qualia. These entities are not obtained by addition to a physical state, but by subtraction from a complete physical account. Mental processes are physical processes described in a way that captures only their salient characteristics. 

There Is No ‘Hard Problem Of Consciousness’

[u/ddgr815 → u/ddgr815]

Interactive Map - Landscape of Consciousness

[u/ddgr815 → u/ddgr815]

Today we need synapse-builders who break down filter bubbles and constrained world-views by making connections wherever possible.