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Tallis in Wonderland

Extending The Mind

Raymond Tallis considers the mind in the body & beyond.

Over the years I have devoted many (perhaps too many) columns to discussing various philosophers’ doomed attempts to explain how mind can arise out of the matter of the brain. But in recent years, the hunt for the substrate of the mind has extended beyond the brain.

The most popular extra-cerebral destination for mind is the rest of the body – an approach called ‘enactivism’. Enactivism is a broad church, but its central tenet is encapsulated with characteristic brilliance by Adam Rostowski (with whom I have had happy hours of agreement and disagreement): “Enactivists eschew the… view of cognition as a brain-bound set of information-processing capabilities explained in terms of neurally-realized computation over internal representation” (In press).

Some (not all) enactivists embrace the ‘four Es’, according to which mental processes are:

a) Embodied: mental processes involve not just the brain but also other bodily structures and processes;

b) Embedded: mental processes function only in relation to an external environment;

c) Enacted: mental processes involve not only events in the nervous system, but also what the organism is doing; and

d) Extended: mental processes extend into the organism’s environment.

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