19743
|
A notebook counts as memory, if is available to consciousness and guides our actions [Clark/Chalmers]
|
|
Full Idea:
Beliefs are partly constituted by features of the environment. ....a notebook plays for one person the same role that memory plays for another. ...The information is reliably there, available to consciousness, and to guide action, just as belief is.
|
|
From:
A Clark / D Chalmers (The Extended Mind [1998], §4)
|
|
A reaction:
This is the modern externalist approach to beliefs (along with broad content and external cognition systems). Not quite what we used to mean by beliefs, but we'll get used to it. I believe Plato wrote what it said in his books. Is memory just a role?
|
8875
|
Sense experiences must have conceptual content, since they are possible reasons for judgements [Brewer,B]
|
|
Full Idea:
Given that sense experiential states do provide reasons for empirical beliefs, they must have conceptual content, ...where a mental state with conceptual content is one where the content is of a possible judgement by the subject.
|
|
From:
Bill Brewer (Perceptual experience has conceptual content [2005], I)
|
|
A reaction:
This is, I believe, wrong. Even complex observations, like a pool of blood, only become reasons when they have been interpreted. Otherwise they are just the raw ingredients of evidence. How could an uninterpreted red patch be a 'reason'?
|
19741
|
If something in the world could equally have been a mental process, it is part of our cognition [Clark/Chalmers]
|
|
Full Idea:
If, as we confront some task, a part of the world functions as a process which, were it done in the head, we would have no hesitation in recognising as part of the cognitive process, then that part of the world is part of the cognitive process.
|
|
From:
A Clark / D Chalmers (The Extended Mind [1998], §2)
|
|
A reaction:
In some sense they are obviously right that our cognitive activities spill out into books, calculators, record-keeping. It seems more like an invitation to shift the meaning of the word 'mind', than a proof that we have got it wrong.
|
19742
|
Consciousness may not extend beyond the head, but cognition need not be conscious [Clark/Chalmers]
|
|
Full Idea:
Many identify the cognitive with the conscious, and it seems far from plausible that consciousness extends outside the head in these cases. But not every cognitive process, at least on standard usage, is a conscious process.
|
|
From:
A Clark / D Chalmers (The Extended Mind [1998], §3)
|
|
A reaction:
This gives you two sorts of externalism about mind to consider. No, three, if you say there is extended conceptual content, then extended cognition processes, then extended consciousness. Depends what you mean by 'consciousness'.
|