Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension

by Andy Clark

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 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.

Genres: Philosophy, Psychology, Science, Nonfiction, Neuroscience, Academic, Linguistics

286 pages, Hardcover

First published October 21, 2008

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.

Reviews

[Blaine Snow · Rating 3 out of 5]

For being one of the more prominent names associated with the embodied mind approach to cognitive science, Clark comes across in this book as a rather reluctant advocate of said approach. His views seem to lie somewhere in the mid-lands between the original dis-embodied, computationalist, representationalist view and the newly emerging embodied-extended view of cognitive science. He is not quite ready to give up on minds as software-programed machines and seems to be including the biological body and environment to the extent that it functions as a larger, extended, mechanistic cognitive processing system. In his conclusion "Mind as Mashup" he writes: ...the proper response is to see mind and intelligence themselves as *mechanistically realized* by complex, shifting mixtures of energetic and dynamic coupling, internal and external forms of representation and computation, epistemically potent forms of bodily action, and the canny exploitation of a variety of extra-bodily props, aids, and scaffolding (219). Mind as mechanistically realized: that about sums up his view, whether extended or not.

In nine chapters Clark does an thorough job presenting a wide array of issues, ideas, and problems that arise out of the confrontation of two paradigms of cognitive science: the “BRAINBOUND” or mind = brain view and, the “EXTENDED” or mind = brain-body-environment view. His primary goal is to get the BRAINBOUND skeptics (aka the traditionalists) to at least consider the evidence for a view of mind and cognition that extends beyond the brain alone. One by one, he references and addresses the many questions and concerns of the traditionalists regarding the extended approach.

Although embodiment (which I take to mean primarily biological bodies) is a central theme of the book, what seems to be missing in Clark’s presentation is a discussion of a critical aspect of embodied mind research which is biological organization and function—how minds relate to the organization of living systems. Although he makes mention of dynamical systems theory, there’s little attempt in this book to include evolution, or the organization of life, or the co-evolution of organism-in-environment and how all this pertains to what naturally constitutes a mind. Questions such as how nature has produced minds or how minds differ between organisms are not considered. Nowhere does he discuss a) the research on the autopoietic organization of living systems (a la Maturana, Varela, Thompson), or b) the research on self-organization and emergence in biological and social systems (Schneider-Sagan, Prigogine). Enactivism, emergence, and dynamical systems theory—ideas that are central to understanding how mind is embodied and situated in biological systems—are merely mentioned by Clark but not discussed. When he does talk about biological organisms, his language tends to be the biomechanical-engineering vocabulary of neural circuitry, feedback loops, information transfers, recording neural activity across multiple cortical ensembles, control architecture, monitoring and recalibration, inputs and outputs, and so on – language that demonstrates his mechanistic conceptions of mind.

Corroborating Clark's mechanistic-computational views, Alva Noe, in his book Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness, accuses Clark of upholding what Noe calls the Foundational Argument, writing "...experience itself - pure consciousness, [as] Clark would have it - depends only on factors inside us", a decidedly Cartesian stance, "the idea that the fact that we dream and that we can produce experiences by direct action on the brain shows that consciousness depends only on what is happening in the brain" (Notes/203).

The following is a short list of books that do talk about many of the things I mention above that Clarke passes over or only briefly mentions. A longer list is my “Embodied Cognition” list here on Goodreads’ Listopia.

1. Bateson, Gregory (1973),Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology
2. Bateson, Gregory (1979), Mind and Nature
3. Thompson, Evan (2007), Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind
4. Varela, Francisco, Evan Thompson, Eleanor Rosch. (1993), The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience 3. Clarke, Bruce; Hansen, Mark B. N., editors (2009), Emergence and Embodiment: New Essays on Second-Order Systems Theory
5. Deacon, Terrence (2011), Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter
6. DiPaolo, Buhrmann, Barandiaran (2017), Sensorimotor Life: An Enactive Proposal
7. Johnson, Neil, (), Simply Complexity: A Clear Guide to Complexity Theory
8. Juarrero, Alicia (1999), Dynamics in Action: Intentional Behavior as a Complex System
9. Maturana, Humberto (1980), Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living
10. Maturana, Humberto, Varela, Francisco (1987), The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding
11. Prigogine, Ilya; Isabel Stengers (1984), Order Out of Chaos: Man's New Dialogue with Nature
12. Prigogine, Ilya (1996), The End of Certainty: Time, Chaos, and the New Laws of Nature
13. Schneider, Eric; Sagan, Dorian, authors (2006), Into the Cool: Energy Flow, Thermodynamics, and Life
14. Stewart, John; Gapenne, Olivier; Di Paolo, Ezequiel A., editors (2010), Enaction: Toward a New Paradigm for Cognitive Science

Edited/Updated: 6-30-25

[Kai Schreiber · Rating 4 out of 5]

The hypothesis of the extended mind has fascinated me for the longest time, without me having any true grip on what it entails or what follows from it.

Briefly, it states that external objects and processes are generally part of cognitive processing, and that the substrate of cognition potentially extends to anything the cognitive agent interacts with. The famous example is Otto, who relies on his trusty notebook to such a degree and with such faith, that it effectively becomes one more cerebral organ for him, albeit made of paper instead of neural goo.

The general thrust of this idea, which is closely aligned with ideas of embodied cognition. Embodied cognition supposes that mind is not incidentally produced by the brain from bodily sensory input, but that lots of mental states in a fuzzy and hard to define way are actually identical to states of the body.

The extended mind takes that idea to extremes by including potentially any object. Again, its a fascinating hypothesis, but I have been bugged for the longest time by one towering question that very roughly asks: so what?

I fail to see any practical (or, for that matter, theoretical) consequences of this. And the oft used imagery of mental substance spread out, reaching soft tendrils into the world to use it for thinking is misguided. Where there is no mental substance, it can not be spread (kind of like Nutella when you don't have any).

And actually, this inverse reading might be what I take away from this. If analysis reveals that the assumption that your hippocampus is a substrate of mind produces the conclusion that your notebook and your pocket calculator may be, too, then something might be wrong with the original idea: that it is useful to talk about something called the mind, and that this something has a substrate.

For illustration: is it useful to think of the road as part of the substrate of driving? And how is this different from saying that driving is something the car does, but it needs a certain environment (roads) to do it. Likewise, mind is something the brain does in concert with the environment, not some object that stretches like a rubber blanket.

But those are my two cents. Read yourself.

[Mira Guetzow · Rating 4 out of 5]

Clark does a great job of dispelling pretheoretical conceptions about the boundaries of cognition, and his vision of a study of mind in which cognitive systems are more holistically investigated and evaluated is promising. If extended cognitive systems can be considered proper objects of study without undermining adjacent treatment of cognition at the levels of body, brain, and cell, what threat is there to cognitive science? Situated in certain amended forms of functionalism and computationalism, Clark doesn't present himself as an extremist in the landscape of cognitive science and philosophy of mind. By the conclusion of the book, what initially appeared to me to be a major deviation from standard views turned out to be a rather modest adjustment to them.

Still, some issues:
- Given the frequent positioning of computationalism and dynamical systems as rival approaches, and given the fact the division tends to correspond to non-embodied versus embodied approaches, Clark's acceptance of both needed a stronger defense.
- The Adder/Ada/Odder example veers too close to psychofunctionalism and away from the characterization of his own view as commonsense functionalism.
- The discussion of consciousness is pretty flimsy. He does attempt to address it using dual-stream models of perceptual experience, but it reads more as a deflection than a resolution.

[Krishna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Are cognitive processes confined to occur within the limits of the biological brain, or can resources recruited from the body or even from the extended environment be combined with neural capabilities to create an extended mind? This is the challenging question that psychologist / neuroscientist / metaphysician Andy Clark asks in this book. The answer brings up futurist scenarios in which implantable chips or distributed computing resources can be recruited as aids to memory or cognitive processing. But fascinatingly, Clark also shows how the embedded mind is not just a futurist potential, but is also exemplified by current, everyday practices.

The main takeaway from the book is a challenge to the notion that non-neural resources should not be considered part of cognition, just because they are external to the brain. Instead, Clark puts forward the "parity principle": if part of the world functions as a process which, if it took place in the mind, we will not hesitate to accept as a cognitive process, then that part of the world, for the time that it functions in that manner, is part of cognition. The example Clark uses is from the game of Tetris, where physically rotating an object on screen is a substitute for rotating it within the mind, and therefore the physical movements of fingers in rotation should be considered a cognitive process. Here, Clark is challenging the air-tight boundary between epistemic and pragmatic actions; epistemic actions are those intended to uncover information in the environment, while physical actions bring an agent closer to a goal. Clark points to physical actions that make computation easier, or aid internal memory to break down this barrier. He introduces the hypothesis of cognitive impartiality, the idea that brains are indifferent between internal and external resources, and choose the most effective and efficient combination of mental, bodily and environmental resources to achieve specific cognitive tasks. Even within the brain, says Clark, there are many semi-autonomous resources that perform different functions (pattern recognition, memory, spatial), which are recruited in transient coalitions to accomplish different tasks. These might be combined with external resources in opportunistic and efficient ways. "(I)nteracting parts of a distributed, semi-anarchic cognitive engine, participating in cognitively potent, self-stimulating loops whose activity is as much an aspect of our thinking as its result" (p. 133).

But is there a still more fundamental level where there is a coherent agent (a "CEO" of the brain) who recruits these coalitions of external and internal resources, as and when required? Clark denies this. There is no central executive, there is instead a fragmented and distributed flow of information over and between temporarily assembled structures of neural, bodily and world elements. Mind is an "emergent property."

There is a lot more covered in this book, which is really an extended engagement with an entire emergent literature on embodied cognition. It introduces and summarizes several concepts and theoretical propositions in the field. To name only a few: the principle of ecological balance, which says agents use the potential of their body's physical capabilities enhanced by just-in-time sensory-motor-neural adjustments, to achieve efficient locomotion (e.g.. passive-dynamic automata). The principle of ecological assembly: agents do not create/preserve full models of their environment, but use efficient combinations of sensory+motor+neural capabilities to retrieve information just when needed (e.g. saccades of eye movements to compare elements of a scene, such as in the children's puzzle, "find 10 differences"). Multimodal sensory stimulation: agents with multiple senses create parallel time-coded streams of sensory information, that allow learning of the outcomes of each action. Perceptual-sensorimotor dependency: Agents correlate the input from movements and sensory perception to make sense of the world (e.g., tilting the head to obtain a better sense of the shape of objects).

Ultimately, Clark's vision of the mind is a challenge to the duality of mind and matter. Can a mind exist without a physical apparatus, or can a mind that only exists as neural circuitry realize its full potential. Clark argues that our identity as embodied minds is simultaneously an extension and a restriction. If the mind is expanded to include the body and in a sense the environment, it is also a limitation of the mind to a specific physical configuration. Embodiment vastly restricts the space of "minds like ours, tying human thought and reason inextricably and non-trivially to the details of the human bodily form" (p. 204). But Clark also argues that, even if the body limits the mind, it does not imply that only one configuration of body can lead to a "mind like ours" -- downstream processing can create same perceptions as ours. Configurations may differ, but a "mind like ours" can function only if it is embodied.

A final quote -- a metaphysical one. "We are thinking beings, whose nature qua thinking beings is not accidentally but profoundly and continuously informed by our existence as physically embodied, and as socially and technologically embedded organisms" (p. 217).

[Seymour Millen · Rating 3 out of 5]

I recall reading this book when it was new, in 2011, as part of an early foray into alternative approaches to cognitive science. Then, it sent me in a whole other direction, spurred by the tantalising answers to old problems. Re-reading it more completely today I have to note how hesitant Clark is in his own thesis, clearly excited by the possibilites but unwilling to part with his historical cognitivism.

Early on Clark represents his own views on cognition as "liberal", meaning roughly without preference for either information-processing or embodied cognition. But in my reading, Clark is liberal in another sense: not only without prejudice but seeking to avoid conflict between diametrically opposed theories. One Clark thinks embodiment is a chance to "sack the inner executive, [and] embrace the motley crew of cognitive processes": to consider all behaviour sufficiently similar to internal cognition (like consulting a notebook to remember directions) as cognition itself. The other Clark wants to keep the brain on its pedestal, however, offloading operations onto external resources when it's beneficial, but otherwise retaining its centrality.

As Clark is an enthusiastic and informal guide to new avenues of thought, I could easily reccomend it to curious but committed cognivists- for more open minds, I think Louise Barrett's Beyond the Brain: How Body and Environment Shape Animal and Human Minds provides a more serious theoretical exploration of the same area.

[Bryan Kibbe · Rating 5 out of 5]

Increasingly I find myself a defender of some version of the extended mind thesis (generally put, our minds are not brainbound, or even bodybound, but arise from the dynamic, soft-assemblies of brain, body and world). Much of my thinking on the topic has been shaped by Andy Clark, who stands out as one of the leading thinkers and defenders of this kind of approach to the philosophy of mind. His most recent book, Supersizing the Mind, continues to deepen my convictions. While this book recapitulates many of the themes found throughout Clark's body of work, it also introduces important engagements with various critics, and represents a careful effort to draw work on embodied cognition and the use of external cognitive props into the mainstream of the philosophy of mind. Aside from a rich tour of references to recent work in the cognitive sciences, Clark simply but profoundly argues for the questioning of the traditional boundaries of the mind. Irrespective of whether the extended mind thesis is ultimately proven true, Clark's lasting contribution, which is a central task of this book, is to at least make the very question of mind extension legitimate. Such an effort should be commended. For those with some background in the philosophy of mind and/or cognitive sciences this is a book worth attending to and considering. Clark is a remarkable scholar of diverse fields, and an expert of synthesis and subtle distinctions. That said, his vocabulary is highly technical in various parts, which will prove difficult to the uninitiated. For a more accessible engagement with Clark, I might recommend his equally interesting, though less technical, book, Natural Born Cyborgs.

[Gandalf · Rating 4 out of 5]

As difficult as this book was to read (for a non-scholar, such as myself), it presents extremely potent models that are rarely expounded elsewhere! I reference this text frequently in my job as a technology designer.

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

Clark builds on the (1998) extended mind thesis, incorporating additional evidence of the role of the body and external environment in cognitive processing. Clark stresses that this view doesn't discount traditional representation-based, internalist views of cognition, only widens the net to include the brain working in "soft assembled" partnership with the external world.

I struggled a bit with the later chapters which focus on addressing criticism of the extended mind approach and at times felt that there was some ?unproductive hair-splitting and language games going on, though by and large Clark is certainly systematic and seems to be very careful with his own choice of words.

The overall approach is that Clark is seeking a synthesis between "brainbound" views and radical embodied cognition, and I think he largely succeeds in finding the sweet spot.

[Harry · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book presents a well researched argument for a unique way of looking at consciousness. It has a lot of good information but seems aimed more at the academic community than the lay reader. There is a lot of overlap in arguments and seeming repetition and few examples to give a concrete understanding to the phenomena. It is tempting to give the book a lower rating for readability but the information is important. The author/editor could be helped by emulating Daniel Dennett who is quoted several times in the book. If you're willing to wade through, reread, and look up the details there is a lot of value in this writing.

[Eliade Weismann · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's incredible read Andy Clark. He is one of the foremost philosophers in phenomenology, and it shows. Most readers will find interest in only the first two sections, after which begins a serious, but somewhat pedantic debate for those who are more invested in the current state of the literature. To read Andy Clark is to experience the near impossible odds that this set of obscure, esoteric experiments all came together in someone's life, and that that someone was brilliant enough to bring them together.

[Nikki Olson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting but ultimately faulty epistemology.

[Edgar Alvarez · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best explanation of the Extended Cognition Theory.

[Diana H. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Clark is wrong !! I stand by this. Wrote my essay on this, pretty boring

[Josh Mastan]

I really enjoyed this book. It takes a more applied account of biomechanics (at least in part) and integrates it with theoretical cognitive science. I do think, though, that it could have done a better job of providing a more coherent conclusion; it felt at times that everything Clark lays out is more so a polished summary of all of the topics he's covered in his papers (which have been significant contributions to embodied cognition, taking nothing away from the quality of the topics apart from their final integration). Of course, I'm just being picky--Supersizing the Mind is nevertheless a necessary introduction to the extended mind hypothesis. I say "necessary" because most other works have been formulated off of the ideas mentioned in Clark's books, affording some scope to a sub-topic under the philosophy of cognitive science that, given its (famously) interdisciplinary content, already takes some time to establish the parameters of its internal logic. If you're interest in philosophical anthropology, philosophy of mind, psychology, philosophy of cognitive science, or phenomenology, then this book should be on your shelf; and if not this book on your shelf, then Clark's papers in a folder on your desktop.

P.S. I was looking forward to some more discussion on Dynamical Systems Theory (DST), a theoretical framework he made famous within the realm of philosophy of cognitive science back in the late '90's. He mentions it somewhere in the first few chapters, but there's little focus on it. So, yeah.

[Brian Tracz · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was both a good summary of Clark's views and an enlightening read. In sum, Clark argues that our "Brainbound" view of cognition -- the idea that the cognition and computation are realised by the brain alone -- should be supplanted by the "Extended" view -- the idea that memory, language, and thinking are, in an important sense, not confined to brain states.

The obvious companion to this book, and one that one should read beforehand, is Alva Noë's "Action in Perception" (2004), which presents a more radical view that our perceptual states simply *are* various sensory motor dependencies. "Perception is something we do", he says. Clark criticises the particulars of this view, while agreeing with its overall (anti-qualia) spirit. I found this to be a particularly interesting part of the book.

In general, the book does not present anything wildly new from Clark's stated views, so some of the book might be a bit slow for a specialist. However, the ideas presented are both subtle and deep, so this is a great entryway into the enactive externalism literature.

[Robin · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a challenging read. I find myself wanting to accept Clark's proposition far too readily, exposing my bias for the appeal of cognitive extension. He is much more loyal to science than I. His approach to the debate on embodiment is structured, informing and responsible. For those who are in the predicament of explaining 'our way in the world', this may offer you some interesting insights.

[Stephen Baker · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting material about the mind, and how it works within the body and even extends outside it. This book is useful for a number of projects I'm working on, but the writing style is highly academic, and he spends quite a few pages battling naysayers in his niche. I could have done without that. But if you're interested in brain-machine interface, it's certainly worth a look

[Nathanael · Rating 2 out of 5]

A fascinating read about how human cognition relates to our external environment, though some parts were a little too academic for my personal taste.

[Carolyn · Rating 1 out of 5]

Too... too... Too too... So... so... Can't take it anymore.

[Alexi Parizeau · Rating 4 out of 5]

The first few chapters were quite interesting, but I was bored during the rest of the book because so much technical effort goes into saying so little.

[Miray]

an up-to-date overview of work on the "extended mind"; the way mind extends into environment and body, rather that just residing in brain

more about it: https://philpapers.org/s/extended%20k...