1.6 Extending the Mind
Changing how you think about thinking changes how you think about writing.
Many cognitive scientists assume the disembodied mind and treat thinking as a sense-think-act cycle (Dawson, 2013, 2022). However, embodied cognitive scientists see problems with sense-think-act processing and propose an alternative: the sense-act cycle. Sense-act processing replaces internal thinking with acting on the world. If thinking involves a sense-act cycle, then you must reconsider the writing process.
A 20th century robot illustrates sense-act processing’s power (Grey Walter, 1950a, 1950b, 1951, 1963). Grey Walter named his robot Machina speculatrix, but others called it the Tortoise because it looked like a toy tractor surrounded by a tortoise-like shell. The Tortoise generated very complex behavior. The Daily Mail reported “the toys possess the senses of sight, hunger, touch, and memory. They can walk about the room avoiding obstacles, stroll round the garden, climb stairs, and feed themselves by automatically recharging six-volt accumulators from the light in the room. And they can dance a jig, go to sleep when tired, and give an electric shock if disturbed when they are not playful” (Holland, 2003a, p. 2090).
However, the Tortoise’s complex behavior did not arise from complex internal representations (a disembodied robot mind). It arose instead from direct links between two senses (detecting light and detecting touch) and two motors (one for steering, one for moving forward). Motor speeds changed depending upon whether the Tortoise sensed dim, moderate, or bright light. Motor speeds also changed when an obstacle bumped the Tortoise’s shell. The Tortoise demonstrated sense-act processing’s power, anticipating Herbert Simon’s parable of the ant (Simon, 1969).
In the parable of the ant, Simon (1969) asks how you might explain an ant’s complicated route while walking along a beach. Simon’s answer uses sense-act processing, not complex thinking – the ant turns when it encounters obstacles. Like the Tortoise, the ant directly converts what it senses about the world into motor activity. “Viewed as a geometric figure, the ant’s path is irregular, complex, hard to describe. But its complexity is really a complexity in the surface of the beach, not a complexity in the ant” (Simon, 1969, p. 24). Simon moves complexity from inside the ant’s head to outside in the ant’s world.
The Tortoise illustrates Simon’s parable by generating interesting behavior without representing the world. Building, storing, and manipulating representations requires time-consuming processing, which slows behaving down. Systems which behave without representing – without ‘thinking’ – can act quickly by simply reacting to the world. “Models of the world simply get in the way. It turns out to be better to use the world as its own model” (Brooks, 2002, p. 139).
Embodied cognitive science replaces sense-think-act processing with sense-act processing (Clark, 1997, 1999, 2003, 2008a; Shapiro, 2014, 2019). By adopting sense-act processing, embodied cognitive scientists generate theories which move the causes of complex behavior from internal thinking to the external world. As a result, embodied cognitive scientists propose the extended mind hypothesis (Clark & Chalmers, 1998). According to the extended mind hypothesis, no boundary exists between your mind and your world. “It is the human brain plus these chunks of external scaffolding that finally constitutes the smart, rational inference engine we call mind” (Clark, 1997, p. 180, his italics).
Changing how we think about thinking changes how we think about writing. The extended mind radically differs from the disembodied mind. As a result, ‘writing’ by an extended mind radically differs from ‘writing’ by a disembodied mind. How does the extended mind bring writing processes to life? What cognitive scaffolds can writers take advantage of?
