Attuning to the World: The Diachronic Constitution of the Extended Conscious Mind

Abstract

It is a near consensus among materialist philosophers of mind that consciousness must somehow be constituted by internal neural processes, even if we remain unsure quite how this works. Even friends of the extended mind theory have argued that when it comes to the material substrate of conscious experience, the boundary of skin and skull is likely to prove somehow to be privileged. Such arguments have, however, typically conceived of the constitution of consciousness in synchronic terms, making a firm separation between proximate mechanisms and their ultimate causes. We argue that the processes involved in the constitution of some conscious experiences are diachronic, not synchronic. We focus on what we call phenomenal attunement in this paperthe feeling of being at home in a familiar, culturally constructed environment. Such a feeling is missing in cases of culture shock. Phenomenal attunement is a structure of our conscious experience of the world that is ubiquitous and taken for granted. We will argue that it is constituted by cycles of embodied and world-involving engagement whose dynamics are constrained by cultural practices. Thus, it follows that an essential structure of the conscious mind, the absence of which profoundly transforms conscious experience, is extended.

Coordination dynamics of multi-agent interaction in a musical ensemble

“…The collective cognition (c.f. 36 , 37 ) that takes place in order to generate the coordinated music makes the group function a little bit like one large mind 38 , 39 (c.f. 40 ).…”

Decision-Making in the Human-Machine Interface

“…Thus, as urged by Gibson (1979) and others, the domain of analysis when studying the human mind should not be solely the human organism itself but, instead, the entire organism-environment system. A human’s cognitive operations, their moral choices, their sense of self, perhaps even their consciousness, may be processes that are generated by the interaction of physical material both inside the skull and outside the skull ( O’Regan and Noë, 2001 ; Clark, 2004 ; Aspell et al, 2009 ; Kirchhoff and Kiverstein, 2020 ; Spivey, 2020 ).…”

Why the extended mind is nothing special but is central

“…The idea that the mind extends socially has also been advanced, in a different guise, in Kirchhoff and Kiverstein's recent Extended Consciousness and Predictive Processing (Kirchhoff & Kiverstein, 2019). In this compelling book and other publications (2019,2020,2021), Kirchhoff and Kiverstein have put forward two important claims about the extended mind: that consciousness as well as cognition extends beyond the brain; and that the increasingly powerful framework of predictive processing is compatible with, and actually mandates, the extended mind (pace views to the contrary (Hohwy, 2013)).…”

“…Of course, philosophers who consider 'memory' to be a system of stored representations about the world would take this as a blow to the whole idea of the extended mind because it suggests internalism. But Kirchhoff and Kiverstein's (2019; position -in line with sensorimotor enactivism -is that the extended mind thesis only holds on non-representationalist grounds, and, more to the point, that it applies to conscious experience (Di Paolo, 2009;Silberstein & Chemero, 2012;Ward, 2012). From an enactive perspective, conscious experience is a process that emerges in interaction with the environment to which the brain is coupled through cycles of action and perception.…”