The extended mind is the idea, put forward by the philosophers Andy Clark and David Chalmers in 1998, that the mind does not stop at the skin and skull, and that when a notebook, a tool or another person does for us what memory or thought would otherwise do inside the head, it can be counted as part of the mind itself. Later philosophers have made the case that feelings can extend too, into diaries, instruments and music. Therapeutic Shamanism agrees that a person is not sealed inside their skin, and adds that the world a mind reaches into is itself conscious, not inert matter.
What is the extended mind? #
The claim that some of the things outside our bodies can be part of our minds. Clark and Chalmers opened their paper “The Extended Mind” (1998) with a question, “Where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin?” Their answer was that the usual line, drawn at the skin, is drawn in the wrong place.1
Their example is two people going to a museum in New York. Inga hears about an exhibition, remembers that the museum is on 53rd Street, and sets off. Otto has Alzheimer’s disease and keeps everything he needs to remember in a notebook he carries everywhere. He hears about the same exhibition, looks up the address in his notebook, and sets off too. Clark and Chalmers held that the notebook “plays for Otto the same role that memory plays for Inga”, so that the information in it is part of Otto’s memory, just as the information in Inga’s brain is part of hers.2
Behind this lies what came to be called the parity principle. If something out in the world does a job which, “were it done in the head, we would have no hesitation in recognizing as part of the cognitive process”, then it is part of that process. On this view a person and the tools they rely on form one coupled system, and the authors suggested that, once the boundary of skin and skull is given up, we might see ourselves more truly as “creatures of the world”.3
Where did the idea come from? #
It belongs to a wider movement in philosophy and cognitive science, often called ‘4E’ cognition,4 the view that the mind is embodied, embedded, enacted and extended, not a control centre shut away in the head building pictures of an outside world. Others had pointed in the same direction, among them the philosopher Daniel Dennett. He held that the main source of human intelligence is not a bigger brain but our habit of off-loading as much thinking as possible into the world around us, into marks, tools and devices that store and process our meanings for us.5
Clark and Chalmers also saw language as one of the main ways minds extend,6 and asked whether another person’s beliefs could do for someone what Otto’s notebook does for him. Clark himself went on to describe humans as natural “cyborgs of an unassuming stripe”, creatures whose reasoning has always been bound up with the tools and technologies they make.7
Can feelings extend too? #
Some philosophers think so. Giovanna Colombetti and Tom Roberts pointed out that almost all the argument had been about thinking, believing and remembering, and almost none about feeling. They imagined a woman who writes down everything her parents do that angers her, so that the diary reliably keeps her resentment alive whenever she reads it, and a musician improvising whilst grieving, where the sound she makes shapes what she feels, which shapes the next phrase. On the same reasoning that makes Otto’s notebook part of his memory, they held, a diary or an instrument can be part of the material make-up of an emotion, a mood or even a temperament.8
The philosopher Joel Krueger made the same case for music. Our bodies lock on to a rhythm, falling into step with it the way two pendulum clocks hung side by side fall into time, and people moving together in time come to feel together. Music, on his account, is not only something that causes a feeling from outside; it can become part of how the feeling is made. His strongest example is people born with Moebius syndrome, who cannot move the muscles of the face and so cannot make an emotional expression, and who report using music to reach feelings otherwise hard for them to reach.9
Is the extended mind widely accepted? #
No, it is still disputed. The philosophers Frederick Adams and Kenneth Aizawa hold that it confuses what causes thinking with what thinking is made of. A pencil helps a mathematician work out a sum, but that does not make the pencil part of the mathematician’s mind; something can be relied on without being part of the system that relies on it. Others worry about ‘cognitive bloat’, that on this reasoning the whole internet might end up counting as part of someone’s mind.10 Clark himself has argued that consciousness, unlike memory, probably does not extend beyond the brain.11
The idea’s defenders reply that coupling alone was never the test. In Supersizing the Mind (2008) Clark answered that an outside thing counts only when it plays the right working role, as Otto’s notebook does, and that nothing says memory has to be made of neurons. Krueger, for his part, finds the causation objection less formidable than is often assumed, “dangerously close to being question-begging”.12
How does the extended mind connect with Therapeutic Shamanism? #
In the refusal to treat the skin as the edge of a person. In Therapeutic Shamanism, the more someone journeys and experiences being things like Otter, Oak Tree, Ocean or Obsidian, the more the narrow sense of ‘I’ loosens. They begin to experience that they are part of Human, part of Animal and part of a much bigger whole, a community, a great Tribe of all the PeoplesThe Peoples. The Animal People, Plant People, Standing People (the Trees) and Stone People: our elder kin, of whom the Human People are the youngest and least wise. A family, not a hierarchy. Read the full answer and a part of Mother EarthMother Earth. The sacred Feminine pole: pure potential, from whom all the Peoples arise. The Lower-World is her realm, and she is all the realms: “The Earth is indeed our Mother.” More about this.13 And in shamanic reality everything is connected to, and a part of, everything else; things that look separate in ordinary reality are “protrusions from a deeper interconnected web of energy”.14 See What is the inner tribe? and What does it mean to say the world is alive and full of persons?
The drum gives a concrete case. Played at a steady beat of around four beats a second, with many overtones and undertones, it helps the brain into a journeying state, and the sounds often begin to cross over into colours, images, sensations and even smells. In that sense the shamanic drum is “a beautifully crafted piece of technology”, perfected over thousands of years and used the world over to help people into a rich, meditative state.15 Krueger’s account of how a rhythm from outside can become part of how a feeling is made is close to this, though his subject is music in general, not shamanic drumming. See What role do drumming, movement and other methods play in journeying?
Where does Therapeutic Shamanism see further, or differently? #
In what the mind extends into. The extended mind, as Clark and Chalmers set it out, is a human mind reaching out into notebooks, notation, computers and other tools, almost all of them made by humans. The things a mind extends into are treated as tools and stores, and the other minds that come into it, in the question of socially extended cognition, are other humans. Therapeutic Shamanism starts from somewhere else. Everything is made of Spirit, and Spirit is conscious, so everything is conscious, animals, plants, rocks, rivers and even a mobile phone or a chair, each in its own way, very different from ours.16 On this account a drum, a river or a forest is not only something a human mind extends into; it is conscious itself, in its own way.
The two also differ on what makes humans distinctive. In his 2001 paper Clark held that what sets human reasoning apart from simpler animal adaptation is its deep partnership with the tools and technologies humans make. Therapeutic Shamanism sees humans as one people among the Animal, Plant and Stone PeopleStone People. All physical matter: mountains, sea, rivers, clouds, sun and stars: the oldest and widest of the Peoples. As some animist cultures put it, ‘we are just the Stone People, dancing for a while’. Read the full answer, part of the web of life, and treats the sense of being set apart as part of the problem. See What is the myth of human supremacy? and Who are the Animal, Plant and Stone People?
