Abstract
It is a near consensus among materialist philosophers of mind that consciousness must somehow be constituted by internal neural processes, even if we remain unsure quite how this works. Even friends of the extended mind theory have argued that when it comes to the material substrate of conscious experience, the boundary of skin and skull is likely to prove somehow to be privileged. Such arguments have, however, typically conceived of the constitution of consciousness in synchronic terms, making a firm separation between proximate mechanisms and their ultimate causes. We argue that the processes involved in the constitution of some conscious experiences are diachronic, not synchronic. We focus on what we call phenomenal attunement in this paper—the feeling of being at home in a familiar, culturally constructed environment. Such a feeling is missing in cases of culture shock. Phenomenal attunement is a structure of our conscious experience of the world that is ubiquitous and taken for granted. We will argue that it is constituted by cycles of embodied and world-involving engagement whose dynamics are constrained by cultural practices. Thus, it follows that an essential structure of the conscious mind, the absence of which profoundly transforms conscious experience, is extended.
Highlights
In this paper, we set out to defend the thesis of the extended conscious mind (ECM)
Arguments for the extended mind have tended to limit bouts of extended cognition to short, synchronic timescales. We argue that this focus on the synchronic is problematic, as it precludes dynamical processes unfolding over longer periods of time, from being more than ultimate causes against which the brain assembles the elements that make up extended minds
We have argued that the experience of phenomenal attunement is constituted by coupling to the cultural environment
Summary
We set out to defend the thesis of the extended conscious mind (ECM). We do so because we take it that the mind in general is first and foremost widely and diachronically constituted. We suggest by contrast that extended minds are constituted by temporally unfolding processes, and the Pac-Man intuition provides the wrong model for thinking about the internalization of cultural forms of knowledge. Internal models as they are embodied in living beings are tasked with always having to maintain a grip on the fluctuations in the dynamics of their local environments. It ignores how the coupling of the agent to the environment in perception and action is a dynamic process that unfolds over multiple interacting timescales It abstracts away from the wider pattern of practice that is a constraint on the situated actions people perform over shorter timescales.
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