Re-mapping the mind: a probe into the nature and extent of mind

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis essay describes a long-standing conceptual impasse regarding the ontological status of “mind” at least since the time of Descartes. That impasse has roots in a mind–body dualism that casts the mind as an “ethereal substance,” or nonphysical entity located somewhere in the brain that translates sense data into thoughts-qua-representations, which then move the body accordingly. This outlook lost traction toward the end of the 20th century. However, a newly emboldened preoccupation with certain technological apparatuses has directed attention back onto the biological substrate of the brain. This article argues that this more purely physicalist stance that seeks to relocate representational features of memory, cognition, and consciousness in the brain confuses efforts to understand the nature of mind. After briefly describing representationalist and nonrepresentionalist theories of mind, a more nuanced, “nonlocalized,” or “extended representionalism” is proffered. This outlook, which was promoted by Gregory Bateson, J. J. Gibson, Marshall McLuhan, and other iconoclastic thinkers of the mid-20th century, is gathering legitimacy in the early 21st. The re-emergence and utility of this is then discussed as a conceptual fix to the localized, and much more reductive, representational theories now in vogue.