Introduction to the Concept of the Extended Mind

Part I of the Extended Mind Series

Considering 'mind' as a field of living relationships, extending beyond the body.

This series will explore the concept of 'mind as a field', in contrast to 'mind as thoughts within a head', through a variety of theoretical and practical examples.

The Concept of Mind in Our Time

In our time, 'mind' is commonly conceptualised as something quite separate from the body, and indeed separate from the world around us. For many, it is an unexamined concept, taken for granted to refer to the array of thoughts and ideas privately experienced by an individual, in their 'head'. An ill-defined space, hidden away from the purview of our regular every-day sense perceptions, commonly spoken of in a manner that would suggest it is a distinct ‘thing’. This way of thinking about mind tends to walk hand in hand with a fairly mechanical understanding of our surrounding environment - a world that is felt to be exterior, and distinctly separate from what we consider 'ourselves'.

Take a moment to reflect upon the structure that seems to be inferred when people talk about their minds, and what is meant when someone refers to something as being “just in their head”. Does the inference of the mind being within or of the head resonate with you? Do people's thoughts seem private to you? Can you trace the common-place idea of 'mind in the head' to a fundamental theory, a fundamental experience that truly explains why we consider it so?

Could it be, that in the absence of thorough investigation and scrutiny, people have sub-consciously allowed common phrases and figures of speech to shape what they understand this fundamental component of the organism to be? Has a phantom been lurking un-checked and un-challenged in our worldviews? Has this phantom found a home in you?

It is curious to consider that the imagining of mind as a kind of hidden chamber of thoughts and images, trapped in a head, distinct from the surrounding environment is ill-supported by the fields of psychology, psychoanalysis, neuroscience, and physics in our time. This concept is also far removed from how mind was understood to relate to the greater organism and the cosmos by our own ancestors for many thousands of years. So where on earth did it come from?

Rather than take the position that people have been somehow led astray or have been brainwashed so that they cannot see their own nature and take control of their lives, let us proceed with the perspective that the unexamined mind is a result of how humanity has directed its focus and oriented its language for the past few thousand years.

The Extended Mind Series

One could chase their tale for all eternity attempting to define 'mind', getting caught up in one paradox after another, ad infinitum. Instead of diving into that endless pit in this series, we are going to explore how some basic, perhaps mindlessly simple, observations about nature and human experience can bring to bear an alternate working conception of 'mind' and a renewed experience of daily life.

As will be the case through all writings and media found in Arcanum of Kryptos, all examples and themes will be explored as simply and clearly as possible, but the emergent message, understanding, or 'point' behind each work will not necessarily be made explicit. It is therefore essential that you consider yourself co-investigator, co-explorer in all matters, and endeavour to participate in a process of creating a web of seemingly disparate understandings, so that deeper, more integrated, and unquestionably persistent understandings may be realised in time.

Why Should We Care About Our Model of Mind?

Our models of the structures and dynamics of life heavily influence how we interact with the world. The mechanics and nuances of these models affect our priorities, attitudes, and actions. If a model we use to navigate life is heavily dissonant with what we might consider 'truth' or 'nature', then we are likely making the experience of life unduly difficult and miserable for ourselves… and quite likely, those around us.

Not only is it in our interest to interrogate, test and optimise the models we use to navigate life, if we want to be responsible for ourselves and our effects in this world, we inevitably must view it as our duty.

Where Does the Organism Begin and End?

When attempting to study and understand a particular animal in the field of biology, one can isolate the physical form of the organism away from its environment, say be killing it and dissecting it, to identify its solid component parts. This can reveal a great deal about the physiology, diet, and even shed light on the behaviours of an animal, but it can never truly unveil the totality of the organism. In order to fully understand an animal, physiological component parts must be studied in combination with behaviours, energy and nutrient cycles, key relationships, habitat / environment, and the shared history of all these factors. The particulars of one component cannot be explained without reference to all the others.

So where does 'the organism' begin and end?

If one is honestly inquiring, one may find that the beginning and the end of an organism are formalities of language, not underlying realities. When all complexity is considered, the beginning and end of an organism are but lines drawn in the sand - lines drawn so that we may have a way of thinking and talking about 'the organism'.

It seems that the more comprehensively you attempt to account for the entirety of an organism, the less distinct your model of 'the organism' becomes. If you begin to apply this principle to animals, people, places, events, ideas - the more individual 'entities’ or 'things' seem to be more aptly considered as expressions of processes rather than discrete units bouncing around a world of distinct 'things'. This can be an odd dynamic to consider as it is antithetical to the common sentiment that the more thorough and rigorous the enquiry into a 'thing', the more explicit and defined the result.

We find ourselves in a period in human history where the communal focus, guided by common language, tends towards viewing the world through a lens that apprehends animals, people, places, events, ideas (etc.) as distinct component parts of the world, rather than expressions of processes. It is not hard to understand why this might be the case; the developments of the scientific process, scientific thinking and rationality have led to incredible developments in internal and external tools for humanity over the past one to two thousand years. In a way, it is necessary to create distinct models and to 'draw lines in the sand' to perform a scientific study at all - the focus of a study must be clarified, and variables must be identified and controlled for a study to have any rigour and achieve an interpretable and repeatable result. And there is nothing wrong with this. But should we forget that our models and names for 'distinct things' are but tools of our own creation, we can easily become seduced by a narrow and stagnant view of a highly dynamic world.

~ In Hinduism, the term "maya" means "that which is not" and refers to the seductive, magical power of the world of form/phenomenon to convince mortals that is reality, when in reality, it is illusion.

The Pre-Eminent Game

The game of distinct competing things.

Acute vision has been an incredible advantage for homo sapiens in an evolutionary context, and this likely plays heavily into why so many people seem to sub-consciously consider what is seen as most fundamental. Indeed, our vision and ability to distinguish between forms and colours likely laid somewhat of an evolutionary foundation for our departure from the belly of the wild many thousands of years ago. Better vision and the ability to differentiate colours and forms made us better hunters, more able to detect predators, and better at identifying foods and medicinal plants that were life-giving rather than life-taking. It contributed to our developed coordination, ability to throw, and our proficiency in building tools and structures. Those that had keen vision were more likely to succeed in the struggle for survival and reproduction, and over time our stature and visual acuity made hominids literally, and figuratively, stand apart from other animals.

So, our most developed and unique sense - our vision - presents to us a world of things and entities, and our ability to distinguish between these has correlated with survival success throughout our development. In essence there has been an innate reward and advantage in developed vision and paying attention to the world of forms that such vision presented to us.

But as we know and feel, the world extends well beyond what is seen…

When the world is apprehended as a sea of distinct material entities, then the purpose of these entities appears to be survival or self-preservation, and the game of life; competition.

The Game of Distinct Competing Things Convinces us of the Primacy of the Game of Self and Other

If you run with a model of the world as an environment of distinct competing things, you find it is quite natural to logically simplify the fundamental components of the world down to two distinct parts, perhaps at the core of all other distinctions: SELF and OTHER. These are likely to be, in your personal experience of being a person moment to moment, the two most prime and obvious distinct parts of the world. Much of your sensory experience only serves as testament to the solidity of this fundamental distinction.

If no anti-model or experimentation is applied to loosen up this world-model, then the experience of life can keep piling on evidence in support of the separateness of SELF from the world. And life can feel endlessly, endlessly isolating…

But we certainly shouldn't resign ourselves to this runaway process and call it 'life'. Undoubtedly, you've heard of the expression "you see what you want to see". This expression applies here, only what we 'want' to see isn't really being guided by our conscious selves, it is being dictated by a (likely unexamined) subconscious model.

So let us examine our models of life and mind by considering some thought experiments.

Mind in the Head - Little Head and Big Head

Consider yourself standing in a field in the countryside. Your senses detect information about the surrounding environment which is processed by your brain. The brain creates a simulation of sorts with this information. This simulation is your experience of the world, and the world is only known to you through this experience. Let us consider the moment-to-moment scope of this experience your 'Extended Mind'. You could almost imagine a perceptual field, a great sphere around your body, and all it touches is your 'Extended Mind'.

Thus, with you standing in a field, your living 'Extended Mind' encompasses the field, the buzzing bees you can see and hear about you, the smell of dirt and aromatic flowers, the forest you can see beyond the field, the mountains you can see beyond that, the sky you can see above you, the sounds of the wind passing through the trees and long grass, the sun you can see and feel beaming down upon you, and so on.

Now this simulation, you might imagine, is 'in your head' if you do consider mind or consciousness to be generated/read by the brain. If we take this to be so, we arrive at the logical inference that in fact you have two heads...

1. BIG HEAD - The head that holds the brain which is receiving all this information and generating your experience of the world; and

2. LITTLE HEAD - The head that you can reach up and touch - the big old thing sitting atop your body - which is within this field of experience, which is of course within head #1.

So, as Robert Anton Wilson once put to us… Which one is our real head? Our big head or our little head? (***link to talk at end of post***)

If we run with this model for a moment, we can ask ourselves:

• Why do we seem to ignore the ‘big head’ and identify so readily with the ‘little head’?

• If we believe our mind to be within our head, which one is it in? The ‘big head’ or the ‘little head’?

An alternative model of how your field of experience operates has been discussed by the likes Rupert Sheldrake (***link to talk at end of post***) - consider that the information arising from our environment, detected by the senses, is processed by the brain but is then projected back out into the environment. A world-field is overlayed upon the phenomena and forms from which the sense information came to us. In this model, we operate as co-contributors to the formality of a form or process occurring in the world. In contrast to the first model, we don’t seem to have two heads, rather just one, suspended in a world-field comprised of constant interaction, exchange, and communication. This world-field extending beyond our bodies appears to us as external but is really a unified and living field of which we are essentially co-creators.

You might have heard it many times over from various self-proclaimed gurus that “you create your own reality”, and perhaps you thought this sounded attractive and empowering at the time. But it is also quite likely that the next time you went walking down the street and stepped on a huge pile of doggy doo, you thought “shit, I didn’t create that!”.

So, the part of us that extends beyond the body and is co-creator of the world as we know it is, typically, subconscious. The key here is that it is conscious on some level, and that it is essentially of the ‘mind’.

Opening Doorways

What we might be detecting here is that such thought experiments, when used to search for the location of our minds, seem to draw us into some sort of unresolvable intellectual bind. Have either of these really helped to locate our minds?... Mu.

They key to understanding what is going on here is to identify that these experiments are merely building upon our existing unexamined assumptions and categories, drawing them out way beyond their capacity to be useful in explaining our lives.

So, should we be getting into a panic about how many heads you own? Two heads? Perhaps Infinite heads?... NO.

These kind of thought experiments should ideally lead us to:

1.     Relax any concrete ideas of what or where our mind is.

• We’ve started to get a sense that when we define mind as ‘in the head’, we get stuck chasing our tails trying to work out where our head is.

• We really have to acknowledge that we do not know.

2.     Welcome in the world that we would normally consider external to us, into the sphere of what we consider ourselves.

• The world beyond the physical organism obviously appears to us as physically distinct from ourselves, but we must nonetheless acknowledge it as within, or being in and of itself, our Extended Mind.

Relevant Links and Resources:

• Robert Anton Wilson - Thinking Allowed Interview - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0uImc27Ico

• Rupert Sheldrake - Discussion on Mind Beyond the Brain - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-5gnp5l2kc