my mind on books

A new book from MIT Press reflects the current state of debate on the extended mind concept & I’ve collected some related titles and links below: The Extended Mind (Life and Mind: Philosophical Issues in Biology and Psychology), ed. by Richard Menary (MIT Press, 2010) (link for UK)

Product description from the publisher:

Where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin? In their famous 1998 paper “The Extended Mind,” philosophers Andy Clark and David Chalmers posed this question and answered it provocatively: cognitive processes “ain’t all in the head.” The environment has an active role in driving cognition; cognition is sometimes made up of neural, bodily, and environmental processes. Their argument excited a vigorous debate among philosophers, both supporters and detractors. This volume brings together for the first time the best responses to Clark and Chalmers’s bold proposal. These responses, together with the original paper by Clark and Chalmers, offer a valuable overview of the latest research on the extended mind thesis. The contributors first discuss (and answer) objections raised to Clark and Chalmers’s thesis. Andy Clark himself responds to critics in an essay that uses the movie Memento’s amnesia-aiding notes and tattoos to illustrate the workings of the extended mind. Contributors then consider the different directions in which the extended mind project might be taken, including the need for an approach that focuses on cognitive activity and practice.

Contributors: Fred Adams, Ken Aizawa, David Chalmers, Andy Clark, Stephen Cowley, Susan Hurley, James Ladyman, Richard Menary, John Preston, Don Ross, Mark Rowlands, Rob Rupert, David Spurrett, John Sutton, Michael Wheeler, Rob Wilson

Table of contents & sample chapter (Introduction) at MIT Press

• link to original 1998 paper by Clark & Chalmers
• two related books by Andy Clark: (1) My introduction to the idea was in Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence (Oxford University Press, 2003, 2004). (link for UK)

  Product description from the publisher:

  From Robocop to the Terminator to Eve 8, no image better captures our deepest fears about technology than the cyborg, the person who is both flesh and metal, brain and electronics. But philosopher and cognitive scientist Andy Clark sees it differently. Cyborgs, he writes, are not something to be feared–we already are cyborgs. In Natural-Born Cyborgs, Clark argues that what makes humans so different from other species is our capacity to fully incorporate tools and supporting cultural practices into our existence. Technology as simple as writing on a sketchpad, as familiar as Google or a cellular phone, and as potentially revolutionary as mind-extending neural implants–all exploit our brains’ astonishingly plastic nature. Our minds are primed to seek out and incorporate non-biological resources, so that we actually think and feel through our best technologies. Drawing on his expertise in cognitive science, Clark demonstrates that our sense of self and of physical presence can be expanded to a remarkable extent, placing the long-existing telephone and the emerging technology of telepresence on the same continuum. He explores ways in which we have adapted our lives to make use of technology (the measurement of time, for example, has wrought enormous changes in human existence), as well as ways in which increasingly fluid technologies can adapt to individual users during normal use. Bio-technological unions, Clark argues, are evolving with a speed never seen before in history. As we enter an age of wearable computers, sensory augmentation, wireless devices, intelligent environments, thought-controlled prosthetics, and rapid-fire information search and retrieval, the line between the user and her tools grows thinner day by day. “”This double whammy of plastic brains and increasingly responsive and well-fitted tools creates an unprecedented opportunity for ever-closer kinds of human-machine merger,”” he writes, arguing that such a merger is entirely natural. A stunning new look at the human brain and the human self, Natural Born Cyborgs reveals how our technology is indeed inseparable from who we are and how we think.

  
  (2) Clark’s more recent book – Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension (Philosophy of the Mind) (Oxford University Press, 2008) (link for UK)

  When historian Charles Weiner found pages of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman’s notes, he saw it as a “record” of Feynman’s work. Feynman himself, however, insisted that the notes were not a record but the work itself. In Supersizing the Mind, Andy Clark argues that our thinking doesn’t happen only in our heads but that “certain forms of human cognizing include inextricable tangles of feedback, feed-forward and feed-around loops: loops that promiscuously criss-cross the boundaries of brain, body and world.” The pen and paper of Feynman’s thought are just such feedback loops, physical machinery that shape the flow of thought and enlarge the boundaries of mind. Drawing upon recent work in psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, robotics, human-computer systems, and beyond, Supersizing the Mind offers both a tour of the emerging cognitive landscape and a sustained argument in favor of a conception of mind that is extended rather than “brain-bound.” The importance of this new perspective is profound. If our minds themselves can include aspects of our social and physical environments, then the kinds of social and physical environments we create can reconfigure our minds and our capacity for thought and reason.

• two more books on the extended mind:
  The Extended Mind: The Emergence of Language, the Human Mind, and Culture (Toronto Studies in Semiotics and Communication) by Robert K. Logan (U of Toronto Press, 2008) (link for UK)
  Cognitive Systems and the Extended Mind (Philosophy of Mind) by Robert D. Rupert (Oxford University Press, 2009) (link for UK)
• Plus a forthcoming book (Oct) by philosopher Mark Rowlands: The New Science of the Mind: From Extended Mind to Embodied Phenomenology (Bradford Books) (link for UK)
• additional links –

  Extended Mind at PhilPapers

  “Extended Mind” at Wikipedia

  [added 6/27] “Extended mind hypothesis” at Brain Hammer (from Key Terms in Philosophy of Mind)

Psychological essentialism has been getting some attention lately as a result of Paul Bloom’s recent book How Pleasure Works. See, for example, Jonah Lehrer on essentialism in ‘How Pleasure Works’ at the Frontal Cortex, or the discussion between Bloom and Peter D. Kramer at Slate.
(How Pleasure Works at amazon.co.uk)

When I saw Lehrer’s review I happened to be reading another book that draws on essentialism, this time to explain irrational beliefs: SuperSense: Why We Believe in the Unbelievable by Bruce M. Hood. (Supersense at amazon.co.uk) A paperback edition is to be issued later this month with the title The Science of Superstition: How the Developing Brain Creates Supernatural Beliefs.

Here is an excerpt from SuperSense (p246-247):

Throughout this book I have been arguing that beliefs in the supernatural are a consequence of reasoning processes about natural properties and events in our world. This includes a mind design for detecting patterns and inferring structures where there may be none. Our naive theories form the basis of our supernatural beliefs, and culture and experience simply work to reinforce what we intuitively hold to be correct. This is why the sense of being stared at is such an interesting model for the origin and development of supernaturalism. Children are not told that humans can detect unseen gaze. In fact, it’s not something they readily report that they can do. Nevertheless, young children and many adults think that vision works by something leaving the eyes. So when they experience episodes of seeming to detect unseen gaze, this belief simply emerges naturally as an unquestioned ability. It is not even considered supernatural by most people. Children were not told to think this. This model shows how the combination of intuitive theories, pattern detecting, and eventual support from culture produces a universal supernatural belief.
I think that something very similar may be going on for other supernatural beliefs. The notion of psychological contamination we examined in earlier chapters emerges naturally out of psychological essentialism, which has its roots in our naive biological reasoning. Again, this way of thinking is not something that we teach our children. Intuitive dualism and the idea that the mind can exist independently of the body is another. All of these ways of thinking are both naturally emerging and yet supernatural in their explanations of the world.
… We may put away childish things, as Corinthians suggests, but we never entirely get rid of them. Education can give us a new understanding and even progress to a scientific viewpoint, but development, distress, damage, and disease show that we keep many skeletons in our mental closet. If those misconceptions involve our understanding of the properties and limits of the material world, the living world, and the mental world, there is a good chance that they can form the basis of adult supernatural beliefs.

Bloom’s earlier book is Descartes’ Baby: How the Science of Child Development Explains What Makes Us Human, originally published by Basic Books in 2004. (Descartes’ Baby at amazon.co.uk)

Product description from the publisher:

All humans see the world in two fundamentally different ways: even babies have a rich understanding of both the physical and social worlds. They expect objects to obey principles of physics, and they’re startled when things disappear or defy gravity. Yet they can also read emotions and respond with anger, sympathy, and joy.

In Descartes’ Baby, Bloom draws on a wealth of scientific discoveries to show how these two ways of knowing give rise to such uniquely human traits as humor, disgust, religion, art, and morality. How our dualist perspective, developed throughout our lives, profoundly influences our thoughts, feelings, and actions is the subject of this richly rewarding book.

Another book on psychological essentialism is The Essential Child: Origins of Essentialism in Everyday Thought (Oxford in Cognitive Development) by Susan Gelman (Oxford University Press, 2005). (The Essential Child at amazon.co.uk)

Product description from the publisher:

Essentialism is the idea that certain categories, such as “dog,” “man,” or “intelligence,” have an underlying reality or true nature that gives objects their identity. Where does this idea come from? In this book, Susan Gelman argues that essentialism is an early cognitive bias. Young children’s concepts reflect a deep commitment to essentialism, and this commitment leads children to look beyond the obvious in many converging ways: when learning words, generalizing knowledge to new category members, reasoning about the insides of things, contemplating the role of nature versus nurture, and constructing causal explanations. Gelman argues against the standard view of children as concrete or focused on the obvious, instead claiming that children have an early, powerful tendency to search for hidden, non-obvious features of things. She also attacks claims that children build up their knowledge of the world based on simple, associative learning strategies, arguing that children’s concepts are embedded in rich folk theories. Parents don’t explicitly teach children to essentialize; instead, during the preschool years, children spontaneously construct concepts and beliefs that reflect an essentialist bias. Essentialist accounts have been offered, in one form or another, for thousands of years, extending back at least to Aristotle and Plato. Yet this book is the first to address the issues surrounding essentialism from a psychological perspective. Gelman synthesizes over 15 years of empirical research on essentialism into a unified framework and explores the broader lessons that the research imparts concerning, among other things, human concepts, children’s thinking, and the ways in which language influences thought. This volume will appeal to developmental, cognitive, and social psychologists, as well as to scholars in cognitive science and philosophy.

Free Will and Consciousness: How Might They Work? ed. by Roy F. Baumeister, Alfred R. Mele, and Kathleen D. Vohs (Oxford University Press, 2010). Contributors include John Searle and Merlin Donald.

(link for UK)

Product description from the publisher:

This volume is aimed at readers who wish to move beyond debates about the existence of free will and the efficacy of consciousness and closer to appreciating how free will and consciousness might operate. It draws from philosophy and psychology, the two fields that have grappled most fundamentally with these issues. In this wide-ranging volume, the contributors explore such issues as how free will is connected to rational choice, planning, and self-control; roles for consciousness in decision making; the nature and power of conscious deciding; connections among free will, consciousness, and quantum mechanics; why free will and consciousness might have evolved; how consciousness develops in individuals; the experience of free will; effects on behavior of the belief that free will is an illusion; and connections between free will and moral responsibility in lay thinking. Collectively, these state-of-the-art chapters by accomplished psychologists and philosophers provide a glimpse into the future of research on free will and consciousness.

See also: Free will & determinism books at Amazon.com

Free will & determinism books at Amazon.co.uk

The Twenty-four Hour Mind: The Role of Sleep and Dreaming in Our Emotional Lives by Rosalind Cartwright (Oxford University Press, 2010)

(link for UK)

Product description from the publisher:

In January of 1999, an otherwise nonviolent man under great stress at work brutally murdered his wife in their backyard. He then went back to bed, awakening only when police entered his home. He claimed to have no memory of the event because, while his body was awake at the time, his mind was not. He had been sleepwalking.

In The Twenty-four Hour Mind, sleep scientist Rosalind Cartwright brings together decades of research into the bizarre sleep disorders known as parasomnias to propose a new theory of how the human mind works consistently throughout waking and sleeping hours. Thanks to increasingly sophisticated EEG and brain imaging technologies, we now know that our minds do not simply “turn off” during sleep. Rather, they continue to be active, and research has indicated that one of the primary purposes of sleep is to aid in regulating emotions and processing experiences that occur during preceding waking hours. As such, when sleep is neurologically or genetically impaired or just too short, the processes that good sleep facilitates–those that usually have a positive effect on our mood and performance–can short circuit, with negative results that occasionally reach tragic proportions. Examining the interactions between conscious and unconscious forms of thinking as they proceed throughout the cycles of sleeping, dreaming, and waking, Cartwright demystifies the inner workings of the human mind that trigger sleep problems, how researchers are working to control them, and how they can apply what they learn to further our understanding of the brain. Along the way, she provides a lively account of the history of sleep research and the birth of sleep medicine that will initiate readers into this fascinating field of inquiry and the far-reaching implications it will have on the future of neuroscience. The Twenty-four Hour Mind offers a unique look at a relatively new area of study that will be of interest to those with and without sleep problems, as well as anyone captivated by the mysteries of the brain–and what sleep continues to teach us about the waking mind.

See also: Author’s website

Here is a list of books on evolutionary psychology published 2008-2010 (had some catching up to do), based on a search of WorldCat.

2010
Adaptive Origins: Evolution and Human Development by Peter LaFreniere (Hove: Psychology Press) forthcoming Aug 2010. (amazon.co.uk – Sept. 2010)

The Evolution of Personality and Individual Differences by David M Buss, Patricia H Hawley (New York: Oxford University Press) forthcoming Nov 2010. (amazon.co.uk – Dec. 2010)

Evolutionary Psychology by Viren Swami (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell) forthcoming July 2010 (amazon.co.uk – June 2010)

Evolutionary Psychology (The International Library of Essays on Evolutionary Thought), ed. by Stefan Paul Linquist; Neil Levy; (Farnham: Ashgate) forthcoming Aug 2010. (amazon.co.uk – July 2010)

Evolutionary Psychology and Information Systems Research: A New Approach to Studying the Effects of Modern Technologies on Human Behavior (Integrated Series in Information Systems) ed. by Ned F Kock (New York; London: Springer) forthcoming July 2010. (amazon.co.uk – Aug 2010)

Getting Darwin Wrong: Why evolutionary psychology won’t work (Societas) by Brendan Wallace (Exeter: Imprint Academic) forthcoming Aug 2010. (amazon.co.uk – Aug 2010)

Human Morality and Sociality: Evolutionary and Comparative Perspectives ed. by Henrik Høgh-Olesen (Basingstoke; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) (amazon.co.uk)

In the Name of God: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Ethics and Violence (Blackwell Public Philosophy Series) by John Teehan (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010). (amazon.co.uk)

Selected: Why Some People Lead, Why Others Follow, and Why It Matters by Anjana Ahuja; Mark Van Vugt (London: Profile, 2010). forthcoming Jan 2011 (amazon.co.uk – Aug 2010)

Social Brain, Distributed Mind (Proceedings of the British Academy) by R I M Dunbar; Clive Gamble; John Gowlett (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). (amazon.co.uk)

The Solitary Self: Darwin and the Selfish Gene (Heretics) by Mary Midgley (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press) forthcoming Sept 2010. (amazon.co.uk – Acumen, Sept 2010)

Supernormal Stimuli: How Primal Urges Overran Their Evolutionary Purpose by Deirdre Barrett (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2010). (amazon.co.uk)

2009
The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution by Denis Dutton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). (amazon.co.uk)

The Biological Evolution of Religious Mind and Behavior (The Frontiers Collection) ed. by Eckart Voland; Wulf Schiefenhövel; (Dordrecht; New York: Springer, 2009). (amazon.co.uk)

Essential Evolutionary Psychology by Simon Hampton (Los Angeles; London: SAGE, 2009, 2010). (amazon.co.uk)

Evolution and Genetics for Psychology by Daniel Nettle (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). (amazon.co.uk)

Evolution, Culture, and the Human Mind ed. by Mark Schaller; et al (Hove: Psychology, 2009). (amazon.co.uk)

The Evolution of Obesity by Michael L Power; Jay Schulkin (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009). (amazon.co.uk)

Evolutionary Neuroscience ed. by Jon H Kaas (Oxford ; San Diego: Academic Press ; Amsterdam; Boston: Elsevier, 2009). (amazon.co.uk)

The Evolutionary Origin Of Human Behavior: How Play And Evolution Carried Us From Our Reptile Predecessors To The Storytellers We Are by Keith C M Glegg (Bloomington, IN: iUniverse, Inc., 2009).

Foundations in Evolutionary Cognitive Neuroscience ed. by Steven M Platek; Todd K Shackelford (Cambridge, UK ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009). (amazon.co.uk)

The Moral Brain: Essays on the Evolutionary and Neuroscientific Aspects of Morality ed. by Jan Verplaetse; et al (Dordrecht; New York: Springer, 2009). (amazon.co.uk)

Philosophy after Darwin: Classic and Contemporary Readings by Michael Ruse (Princeton : Princeton University Press, 2009). (amazon.co.uk)

The Rise of Homo sapiens: The Evolution of Modern Thinking by Frederick L Coolidge; Thomas Grant Wynn (Chichester, U.K. ; Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009). (amazon.co.uk)

The Sapient Mind: Archaeology meets neuroscience ed. by Colin Renfrew; Christopher D Frith; Lambros Malafouris (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). (amazon.co.uk)

2008

Evolution and Human Behavior: Darwinian Perspectives on Human Nature, 2nd Edition (Bradford Books) by John Cartwright (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008). (amazon.co.uk)

Evolutionary Forensic Psychology ed. by Joshua Duntley; Todd K Shackelford (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). (amazon.co.uk)

Evolutionary Psychology: An Introduction, 2nd ed. by Lance Workman; Will Reader (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008). (amazon.co.uk)

An Evolutionary Psychology of Leader-Follower Relations by Patrick McNamara; David Trumbull (New York: Nova Science Pub Inc 2008) (amazon.co.uk)

Foundations of Evolutionary Psychology, 2nd ed., ed. by Charles Crawford; Dennis Krebs (New York: Psychology Press, 2008). (amazon.co.uk)

Healing The Unhappy Caveman: Why The Human Mind Was Not Designed For Happiness And What YOU Can Do About It by Chris Wilson (Atlanta: Libertas Press, 2008).

How Sadness Survived: The Evolutionary Basis of Depression by Paul Keedwell (Oxford; New York: Radcliffe Pub., 2008). (amazon.co.uk)

Inhuman Thoughts: Philosophical Explorations of Posthumanity by Asher Seidel (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008). (amazon.co.uk)

Origins of the Social Mind: Evolutionary and Developmental Views ed. by Shoji Itakura; Kazuo Fujita (Tokyo: Springer, 2008). (amazon.co.uk)

Textbook of Evolutionary Psychiatry: The origins of psychopathology by Martin Brüne (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). (amazon.co.uk)

What is Special About the Human Brain? (Oxford Psychology) by Richard Passingham; (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). (amazon.co.uk)