“I Is Someone Else”: Constituting the Extended Mind’s Fourth Wave, with Hegel

Abstract

We seek to constitute the extended mind’s fourth wave, socially distributed group cognition, and we do so by thinking with Hegel. The extended mind theory’s first wave invokes the parity principle, which maintains that processes that occur external to the organism’s skin should be considered mental if they are regarded as mental when they occur inside the organism. The second wave appeals to the complementarity principle, which claims that what is crucial is that these processes together constitute a cognitive system. The first two waves assume that cognitive systems have well-defined territories or boundaries, and that internal and external processes do not switch location. The third wave rejects these assumptions, holding instead that internal processes are not privileged, and internal and external processes can switch, and that processes can be distributed among individuals. The fourth wave would advocate socially distributed group cognition. Groups are deterritorialized collective agents; they are ineliminatively and irreducibly real, they have mental states. Individuals constitute groups, but groups also constitute individuals. What counts as an individual and a group is a function of the level of analysis. And they are conflicted. Essays in Philosophy 17(2) 157 Essays Philos (2016)17:156-191 | DOI: 10.7710/1526-0569.1560 Published online: 8 July 2016. © Fritzman & Thornburg 2016 Contact authors: fritzman@lclark.edu, kristin.parvazian@gmail.com To work now? Never, never: I’m on strike. Right now, I’m encrapulating myself as much as possible. Why? I want to be a poet, and I’m working to turn myself into a seer: you won’t understand at all, and it’s unlikely that I’ll be able to explain it to you. It has to do with making your way toward the unknown by a derangement of all the senses. The suffering is tremendous, but one must bear up against it, to be born a poet, and I know that’s what I am. It’s not at all my fault. It’s wrong to say I think: one should say I am thought. Forgive the pun. I is someone else. Tough luck to the wood that becomes a violin, and to hell with the unaware who quibble over what they’re completely missing anyway!i dversaries of the extended mind emphasize the importance of the “persisting individual” to cognitive science. They urge that this is incompatible with the extended mind’s transient couplings and hook-ups, linking individuals and aspects of their environments, thereby constituting cognitive systems. Yet, in the nineteenth century, Arthur Rimbaud recognized that individuals are constitutively conjoined to others, always already, who are themselves so conjoined, and that an individual’s persistence is that of a A “I Is Someone Else” | Fritzman & Thornburg 158 continuing process, not a substance. Metaphor: individuals are not trees, much less petrified wood, but rhizomes.ii Asparagus and ginger are rhizomes, Indian lotus too. With uncanny insight, Hindus not only portray Viṣṇu (the god of preservation) and Lakṣmī (the goddess of prosperity) on lotuses, they also depict the universe’s creation as a lotus emerging from Viṣṇu’s navel. Although not his main point, Rimbaud saw that a violin constitutively depends on its wood. And, his main point: I does not think; rather, I is thought’s result. In the “Preface” to the Elements of the Philosophy of Right, Hegel cautions his readers to not expect philosophy to give advice about what should be done.iii This is so, he explains, because philosophy’s comprehension is always retrospective, discerning an era’s essential characteristics only after they have already fully developed. So, it might be anticipated that a project of thinking with Hegel about the extended mind could at most discern what others have already achieved— articulating, clarifying, and making explicit—but that it would not advance the discussion. The extended mind would clarify Hegel’s concept of Geist (“spirit” or “mind”), and his concept of “right” (Recht roughly, social mores and law) serves as an exemplar of the extended mind.iv This could seem like a system of mirrors, mutually illuminating each other— and impatient readers might wonder when the smoke will be introduced. Nevertheless, the project of making things explicit can be valuable, articulating and then synthesizing, thereby making way for further conceptual advance. Moreover, Hegelians have defended the extended mind from Mark Sprevak’s argument that the extended mind is overly permissive in its attributions of mental states, and that—since functionalism entails the extended mind—both should be rejected.v Essays in Philosophy 17(2) 159 Naturally, Hegelians worry, not that the extended mind is too liberal in its attributions of mental states, but rather that it is too conservative. We will discuss the extended mind’s first two waves, suggesting that they really constitute one wave, explain that the third wave is well under way, and show that the resources are in place for a fourth wave. We suggest that the fourth wave is conflicted, constituted, as it were, by various interfering waves.