Thing is, you don't just use tools and props. From the perspective of your mind, they become a part of you, of your concept of self, even if only temporarily.

And the tools don't just exist without, your mind is built from tools within as well. There is a part of your mind that rationalizes things, for instance. Rationalization is a tool that other parts of your mind can draw on. I think this is quite clear if you've spent a good amount of time having to argue with your own thoughts, maybe that isn't a very common experience though.

Similarly there's a part of your mind that simulates experiences. It can be used by the part of your mind that makes predictions, and it can be used by the part of your mind that recollects.

Some people's minds use visual or auditory processing components to aid in arithmetic. It's sort of the human equivalent of doing computation on the GPU.

The biggest myth we tell ourselves, on which so much flawed philosophy is based in my opinion, is that we're a single thing. We like to think that what we are is something that is a whole unto itself, that can be isolated, and not, like everything else in the universe, a collection of interactions viewed from a particular perspective.

Indeed. As Clark always points out, the brain is three pounds of meat trapped in a black box made out of bone, given a few wires to the outside. A logically necessary part of its job is figuring out how to extend its reach outside the skull and entangle itself usefully with the inward-facing and outward-facing faculties of the body, and thence, via those outward-facing faculties (ie: motor systems in your arms or whatnot), with other stuff in the external world (not so different, since it's all outside the black box of bone, is it?) that can be organismically valuable, like a bicycle.

I notice that when I hit a bump on my bicycle I don't feel a force in my hands and conciously deduce that this must have been caused by the bicycle's tire hitting something. It seems more like I just feel it in my wheel.

I go "ouch" when my wife runs over a pothole while driving. It's a very neat trick, even after I've read things like Surfing Uncertainty and have an idea how it's done.

I think it's a good perspective if you're trying to build minds (ie, do AI research). There are lots of things that existing tools can do as well or better than biological minds, so there's no need to build these into the AI proper.

It's an obvious idea in robotics ("The world is its own model" as Dreyfus put it) but may be less obvious in general reinforcement learning research.

In practice, the question is what sort of lens cognitive scientists and neuroscientists use for studies. When conducting a scientific experiment, you have to make some assumptions about what system you're studying, how you're modeling it, and how you're connecting model to hypothesis to evidence via experimental design.

My favorite argument by Andy Clark specifically is his take on the Outfielder Problem: if you study the brain with a "disembodied", action-free theoretical lens, you have a really hard time parsimoniously explaining how an outfielder runs to catch a fly-ball. If you take the "embodied", "action-oriented" view, you see that solving cognitive problems using bodily and environmental resources via continually-updated motor planning is not only the theoretically elegant solution (the one that makes most precise use of the available sensory data, has the fewest parameters, is cheapest to compute), but simply resembles what we observe people actually doing (linear optical acceleration cancellation).

It's an abstraction. The question is: Is it a useful abstraction?

Clearly, we're all just made of atoms. But it's helpful to think about those atoms in an organized way.

It reminds me of the classic chain of abstractions in the sciences. One version:

  * Philosophy --> Math
  * Math --> Physics
  * Physics --> Chemistry
  * Chemistry --> Biology
  * Biology --> Psychology
  * Psychology --> Sociology

Where does this one fall? Maybe

  * Neurology --> Cogsci

Maybe a specific aspect of psychology or cognitive science. For example, the questions

  * "What is the role of environment in identity and coping?" 
  * "What would an artificial mind look like?"
  * "How do minds shape their environment?"

To my mind (pardon the pun) what he's doing ultimately boils down to the study of personal identity.

What does it mean to 'me'? What does it mean to be 'you'? What are those differences really? What makes the 'me' of 10 years ago the same or different from the 'me' of this morning? And of the 'me' 20 years from now?

That, to me, is the really interesting question. And Derek Parfit basically answered it.

The way I see it is that my identity is a set of fallible memories which are stored in my brain. If I write some of those memories down in a notebook, journal or diary, have I extended my mind?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't see how. If I write about the first house I grew up in, and then forget all about it, can that old notebook recognise the extant building? If I hold the closed notebook in my hand, waft it around a bit, will we recognise the house? For recognition to happen there has to be some matching or prediction of sensory data by memory data. All of which takes place in a fairly small volume and time window, within the brain. Extended body, yes. Extended memory, yes. 'Extended mind', not so much. Not yet.

If I disconnect and remove the part of my brain that holds my memory of my house, and walk in front of my house while holding that part of my brain in my hand as lumpy inert matter that's not understood/wired to the rest of me, we won't recognize the house either.

A notebook is swap space that has to be causally linked to you somehow (through your eyes, etc) to be useful just like a part of your brain has to be linked to you (generally through direct wiring).

On a macro scale, those kinds of questions have given rise to a lot of the social progress we've experienced in the last century.

In the future, you'd expect a mature theory of mind to give direction to psychologists or neuroscientists. A rough analogy would be the way theoretical physicists interact with experimental physicists and chemists. It's difficult to create the experiment or speculate about a reaction without a point to jump from. In the same way, a psychologist looks to philosophy to ask "what are the most important questions to people, and how might that reflect in how they behave?"

> Philosophers have come to this question... > My question is: What is the practical use of this theory of mind?

The practical use is elevation of the professional status of Andy Clark, and ultimately to sell articles, books, and public appearances.

Can it be anything else in this world? It is far too nebulous to nail down in any concrete manner, so it's practical application is a money grab, and little more. I bet Andy knows this too, but a philosopher's got to eat, has to promote themselves professionally, and owns an ego too. Why not?