Abstract
In discussing the famous case of Otto, a patient with Alzheimer’s disease who carries around a notebook to keep important information, Clark and Chalmers argue that some of Otto’s beliefs are physically realized in the notebook. In other words, some of Otto’s beliefs are extended into the environment. Their main argument is a functionalist one. Some of Otto’s beliefs are physically realized in the notebook because, first, some of the beliefs of Inga, a healthy person who remembers important information in her head, are physically realized in her internal memory storage, and, second, there is no relevant functional difference between the role of the notebook for Otto and the role of the internal memory storage for Inga. The paper presents a new objection to this argument. I call it “the systems reply” to the functionalist argument since it is structurally analogous to the “the systems reply” to Searle’s Chinese room argument. According to the systems reply to the functionalist argument, what actually follows from their argument is not that beliefs of Otto are physically realized in the notebook but rather that the beliefs of the hybrid system consisting of Otto and his notebook are physically realized in the notebook. This paper also discusses Sprevak’s claim that the functionalist argument entails radical versions of extended mental states and shows that his argument is also vulnerable to the systems reply.
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Notes
But, the functionalist argument might not be as crucial in the discussion of other sorts of mental or cognitive extensions as in the discussion of extended beliefs. See, for example, Palermos (2014).
The claim is incompatible with content externalism when “P” in the definition of doxastic equivalence refers to wide content. This is because, according to content externalism, functional equivalence does not guarantee the equivalence of wide content. Thus, content externalists might want to regard “P” as referring to narrow content rather than wide content.
Rupert might simply reject CC functionalism and argue that such psychological effects do create a significant functional difference (cf., Rupert 2013). In this paper, however, I will not discuss this option. This paper is not about whether CC functionalism is good but rather about whether CC functionalism entails OEB.
Copeland (2002) distinguishes “the logical reply” from “the systems reply”. “The logical reply” is a claim about what strong AI entails; strong AI entails that the hybrid system, rather than John, understands Chinese. “The systems reply” is not just about what strong AI entails, but also about the truth of what is entailed; it is true that the hybrid system, rather than John, understands Chinese. The SR in my terminology corresponds to “the logical reply”, and not to “the systems reply”, in Copeland’s distinction. The SR in my terminology is a claim about what strong AI entails, not about the truth of what is entailed.
Certainly, the belief is stored in some mechanisms or storages, such as long-term memory. But, there is a gap between the idea that my belief that Obama is the President of the United States is stored in long-term memory and the idea that long-term memory believes it.
The two cases are, strictly speaking, not completely equivalent. A difference is that retrieving the information involves visual systems in the Martian’s case but not in Mark’s case. This could be a reason for attributing the belief that Alpha Centauri A is bigger than the sun to Mark but not to the Martian. (But Clark, Chalmers, and Sprevak would disagree. See the next section for more details.) However, my claim here is that this cannot be a reason for attributing the belief to the Martian but not to Mark.
Here is a toy example. Let us think about the functional role that is characterized by a simple transition of internal states with no inputs and outputs; ABAB. Let us also think about an arbitrary object, O, that goes through four physical states, S1–S4, during a certain time interval. Now, there is a simple way to show that the object O realizes the functional role ABAB during the interval. By introducing a disjunctive physical state P as the disjunction of S1 and S3, and another disjunctive physical state Q as the disjunction of S2 and S4, we can say that O, in the time interval, goes through PQPQ and thereby realizes the functional role ABAB in the sense that there is a mapping from the internal states of O to the functional role. With some changes, this argument can be applied to much more complicated functional roles with inputs and outputs. See Godfrey-Smith (2009) for details.
A similar thought was expressed by Colombetti and Roberts: “it is the joint system Otto-plus-notebook that is functionally equivalent to (plays the same role as) Inga’s internal memory system” (Colombetti and Roberts 2014, p. 1249).
Chalmers (2008), however, is not fully satisfied with this answer: “[w]e consider this sort of worry briefly in ‘The Extended Mind,’ suggesting that Otto’s access to the notebook need not be seen as perceptual. But this is surely too quick: there is no denying that Otto sees the notebook and reads from it, just as there is no denying that Otto reaches for the notebook and writes in it. So there is certainly perception and action taking place here” (Chalmers 2008, p. xi).
A terminological note: According to the OAS objection, Otto is identical to the hybrid system consisting of the notebook and the biological subject. In the context of the OAS objection, I call the biological subject “biological Otto” and distinguish him from “Otto” who is the hybrid subject.
The other conditions are “any information thus retrieved [is] more-or-less automatically endorsed” and “information contained in the resource should be easily accessible as and when required” (Clark 2010a, p. 46).
Sutton suggests a similar idea when he talks about “the 3rd wave of extended mind”; “[i]f there is to be a distinct 3rd wave of EM [extended mind], it might be a deterritorialized cognitive science which deals with the propagation of deformed and reformatted representations, and which dissolves individuals into peculiar loci of coordination and coalescence among multiple structured media” (Sutton 2010, p. 213).
At the very least, they deny the sufficiency of the current technology. Adams and Aizawa argue that; “[c]urrent human use of pencils and paper, computers, watches, telescopes, and hearing aids are all properly understood as cases in which cognitive processes interact with non- cognitive processes” (Adams and Aizawa 2009, p. 78).
This argument assumes that “extended” mental states are the states of human subjects, such as Otto, rather than the states of hybrid systems, such as the Otto-notebook system. One might deny this assumption and argue that “extended” mental states can be the states of hybrid systems. I do not rule out this way of using the term “extended”. But, as I have already pointed out, the idea of “extended” mind, understood this way, is not very remarkable. The idea seems to be just a restatement of what many functionalists have already accepted.
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Acknowledgments
Early versions of this paper were presented at The Tokyo Colloquium of Cognitive Philosophy (February 13, 2015, at University of Tokyo) and Korean Society for Analytic Philosophy 2015 Spring Meeting (May 23, 2015, at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies). I learned a lot from the comments by Woojin Han and Makoto Kureha. I thank two anonymous referees for insightful suggestions. I am a JSPS Research fellow, and this work is supported by JSPS KAKENHI (15J03906).
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Miyazono, K. Does functionalism entail extended mind?. Synthese 194, 3523–3541 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-015-0971-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-015-0971-2