Sometimes we can get to the same place taking opposite paths.

One path is the Buddhist belief that “self” is a delusion.

The objects with which people identify themselves—fortune, social position, family, body, and even mind—are not their true selves. There is nothing permanent, and, if only the permanent deserved to be called the self, or atman, then nothing is self. 

Buddhists set forth the theory of the five aggregates or constituents (khandhas) of human existence: (1) corporeality or physical forms (rupa), (2) feelings or sensations (vedana), (3) ideations (sañña), (4) mental formations or dispositions (sankhara), and (5) consciousness (viññana). Human existence is only a composite of the five aggregates, none of which is the self or soul. A person is in a process of continuous change, with no fixed underlying entity.

Compare this central tenet of Buddhism with a broader definition of “mind.”  In a book called Being There:  Putting Brain, Body and World Together Again (1997), philosopher Andy Clark makes the case that there is no basis for conceiving of the mind as bounded by skin and skull.  Clark cites Maurice Merleau-Ponty:

Our own body is in the world as the heart is in the organism . . . it forms with it a system.

Admittedly, we do many of our basic activities—e.g., walking, reaching and looking—as individuals.   But what about activities involving advanced cognition, such as “voting, consumer choice, planning a vacation or running a country? 

To accomplish these higher order activities, we

create and maintain a variety of special external structures (symbolic and social-institutional).  These external structures function so as to complement our individual cognitive profiles and to diffuse human reason across wider and wider social and physical networks whose collective computations exhibit their own special dynamics and properties.

Clark suggests that we “offload” cognition onto the environment for three reasons:  1. To harness our fast, pattern-completing style of computation (we are “good at Frisbee, bad at logic”); 2. To take advantage of numerous external processes and structures, including those that are social and institutional; and 3. To take advantage of public language to coordinate and collaborate socially (admittedly, we also use language to think as individuals).

We use our intelligence to structure our environment so that we can succeed with less intelligence.  Our brains make the world smart so that we can be dumb in peace . . . It is the human brain plus these chunks of external scaffolding that finally constitutes the smart, rational inference engine we call mind.  Looked at that way, we are smart after all—but our boundaries extend further out into the world than we might have initially supposed. 

[Being There, p. 180]

Here are some of the ways we make the world smart so that we don’t have to be smart.  Most of us don’t do complicated math in our heads; we use a calculator (an external device).  Even when we scratch out the solutions to complicated math with pen and paper, we still use algorithms that we learned in school.  Most of us don’t know why such pen and paper routines work—the smartness of the solution lies in the pattern, though, not in the person half-heartedly filling in the numbers.  

We diagram and outline problems on paper and computer programs to be able to “see” solutions.  We reduce office work by using external organization devices such as in-boxes, files, checklists and by stacking papers in specialized piles on our desks.  These external control structures allow documents to be “available for future manipulations.”   Each of these strategies reduce “the amount of daily on-line deliberation” in which we engage.  When we want to remember to take something to work the next morning, we put it right in front of the door.

In and out of the office we use labels, bells, and blinking lights to negotiate our complex environments.  These devices and reminders allow “a little learning to a very long way, helping others to find their targets in new locales . . .  [and allowing us to] shrink enormous search spaces to manageable size.”

We offload cognition onto other people too.  We look to others to determine what is safe to eat, say or drive.  This is not mere imitation.  It is offloading cognition.   We use brand names as tokens for quality when we shop—we thereby offload what would have been a personal investigation into areas in which we often lack expertise.

Our friends and acquaintances are also part of our external resources—we consult and interact with them to solve the constant stream of social and technological problems we face.  Who hasn’t felt the loss of self when a close friend dies?  Sometimes we have the opportunity to collaborate closely with other people.  When such a person dies, though, we end up going to our own funeral.

Our acquaintances don’t merely provide information to us; they are much more than storage devices.  We all tend to associate ourselves with people of various talents in that they offer us strategies for collaborating, thereby limiting search spaces.  Many times, these people associate with us under the auspices of institutions.

Perhaps there are some people who think that they are self-sufficient. They claim that they think things out in their own heads and thus they don’t rely on externalized cognition to get through their day. A good mind-experiment would be to strand any such person on a deserted island for a month, then give him or her an exit interview: When you were on that island, didn’t you feel the suffocating lack of external resources whenever you tried to think something through?

These numerous external structures we utilize are ubiquitous.  We offload our thought processes in numerous ways.  Through these techniques, our cognition is smeared out into the world.  The project of studying the externalization of our thought process is therefore an enormous undertaking:

Understanding the way our brains both structure and inhabit the world populated by cultures, countries, languages, organizations, institutions, political parties, e-mail networks, and all the vast paraphernalia of external structures and scaffolding which guide and inform our daily actions.

[Being There, p 191].

For many people, the Buddhist belief in no self leads to a powerful realization that we are a very small part of a large ever-changing whole.  Belief in extended cognition can bring a similar outlook. Andy Clark’s enormous expansion of the “self” intrigues me, then.  It makes me think that “opposites” can be the same.  It makes me think that belief in the lack of self is functionally similar to a belief in a self that blends way out into the world.

The mistake of putting one’s “self” on a pedestal inflames one’s desires to focus on satisfying the immediate cravings of one’s own body.  Perhaps there are two ways around this trap, then.  The Buddhist approach is to downplay the concept of self.  One version of cognitive science offers another alternative:  expand the notion of self to include all of the people, places and spaces out there, each of those aspects of the outer world that, to some extent, constitute us.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 7th, 2006 at 4:47 pm and is filed under Culture, Psychology Cognition. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.