The Path into Extended Cognition

University of California, San Diego

Department of Anthropology
Core seminar in Biological Anthropology
Guillermo Saldana-Medina, M.A.
Entropy (Rudolf Clausius 1850)
• The measure of a system’s
thermal energy per unit temperature that
is unavailable for doing useful work.
• Molecular motion: the amount
of entropy is also a measure of the
molecular disorder, or randomness, of a
system.
• Deep insight into the direction of
spontaneous change for many everyday
phenomena.

• (Encyclopaedia Britannica 2017

[https://www.britannica.com/science/ent
ropy-physics])
http://cnx.org/contents/85bb7336-f397-49a9-91ed-5c3d2ba3f190%406/entropy
Fractal (Haussdorf 1918, Mandelbrot 1982)
• From the Latin word fractus (“fragmented,” or
“broken”)
• Any of a class of complex geometric shapes
that commonly have “fractional dimension
• Fractals are distinct from the simple figures of
classical, or Euclidean, geometry—the square,
the circle, the sphere, and so forth.
• They are capable of describing many
irregularly shaped objects or spatially
nonuniform phenomena in nature such as
coastlines and mountain ranges.
• (Encyclopaedia Britannica 2017
[https://www.britannica.com/topic/fractal])

http://formistan.net/konu/fraktal-ve-fraktal-resimleri.474570/
Fractalism and Entropy in Cognition?

http://www.mint-labs.com/mint-labs-won-brain-art-competition-2016/
http://www.photoplaza.nl/lindolfi/photobloghighslide
/photoblogbwgalleryLecture.html
http://alexgrey.com/art/paintings/sacred-mirrors/
http://teenskepchick.org/2013/03/26/a-whole-brain-activity- http://www.cnn.com/2013/04/09/health/belgium-near-death-
map-and-the-obama-administration/ experiences/index.html
What is beyond?

http://johnbleasby.ca/no-one-possiblity-for-categorisation/
 Cognitive consequences for groups: Individual learning

• Possibilities for individual learning depend on the

structure of the ecosystem, both because the local
ecosystem determines the inventory of available
things to be learned, and because family
resemblances among practices reduce the
complexity of learning processes. (Hutchins 2015: 46)
• Learning awakens a variety of internal
developmental processes that are able to operate
only when the child is interacting with people in his
environment and in cooperation with his peers.
(Vigostky 1978: 40)

http://abclearningcenterfl.com/what-do-kids-
learn-in-preschool/
Cognitive Consecuences for Groups: Communication
• Interpersonal coordination of practices,
including communicative practices, is
facilitated by the fact that families of
practices exist.
• The distribution of cognitive skills in a
community will be determined by the
distribution of practices engaged in by http://abclearningcenterfl.com/what-do-kids-learn-in-preschool/
the members of the community.
(Hutchins 2015: 47)
Conjectures Concerning Cognitive Systems in General: Information

• Connectivity within cognitive systems has a fractal structure.

Intelligent systems at all scales have nodes of dense interconnectivity
separated by sparser connections. I do not expect intelligent behavior
to arise from networks having uniform connectivity.
• Some formal principles will be found to operate at multiple scales in
cognitive systems. Perhaps information-theoretic measures will be
useful in discovering and expressing these principles.
• Cultural practices reduce entropy at multiple scales of a cognitive
ecosystem. (Hutchins 2014: 45)
The Cultural-Cognitive Ecosystem
• Like any ecosystem, the cultural-cognitive ecosystem can be seen as a
constraint satisfaction system that settles into a subset of possible
configurations of elements.
• It is a dynamical system in which certain configurations of elements (what
we know as stable practices) emerge (self-assemble) preferentially.
• In this perspective, constraints exist in many places and interact with one
another through a variety of mechanisms of constraint satisfaction. Some
of these are neural mechanisms; others are implemented in material
tools; and still others are emergent in social processes of collective
intelligence, the development of conventions, for example. (Hutchins 2015:
45-46)
http://www.businessinsider.com/the-internet-is-
getting-too-big-and-its-becoming-a-problem-for-
some-service-providers-2014-8
http://globaia.org/portfolio/cartography-of-the-anthropocene/
http://globaia.org/portfolio/cartography-of-the-anthropocene/
How did we get here?
Information
• Centers and boundaries are features that are determined by the
relative density of information flow across a system.
• Some systems have a clear center while other systems have multiple
centers or no center at all.
• Cognitive functions are distributed across areas of the brain and
organs of the body.
• Given the preferred unit of analysis for extended mind, an organism’s
brain may rightfully be considered the center of that cognitive system
and the nature of the transformations that occur at the skin of the
organism make the skin a consequential boundary. (Hutchins 2015:
37)
From the beginning…
Dunbar: The Social Brain Hypothesis
• Constraints on group size arise from the information-processing
capacity of the primate brain: The neocortex plays a major role in this.
• The constraint on group size could be a result of the ability to
recognize and interpret visual signals for identifying either individuals
or their behavior; limitations on memory for faces; the ability to
remember who has a relationship with whom (e.g., all dyadic
relationships within the group as a whole). The ability to manipulate
information about a set of relationships; and the capacity to process
emotional information.  SOCIAL HABILITIES (Dunbar 1998: 184)
Richerson & Boyd: Populational Thinking
• By information we mean any kind of mental state, conscious or not,
that is acquired or modified by social learning and affect behavior.
• Idea, knowledge, belief, value, skill, and attitude (…) describe this
information.
• Most cultural variation is caused by information stored in human
brains – information that got into those brains by learning from
others. (Richerson & Boyd 2008: 5)
Henrich: Cumulative Culture
The key to understanding how humans evolved and why we are so
different from other animals is to recognize that we are cultural
species.
Over a million years ago, members of our evolutionary lineage began
learning from each other in such a way that culture became
cumulative.
Cultural Practices: Hunting practices, tool-making skills, tracking know-
how, and edible-plant knowledge began to improve and aggregate – by
learning from others. One generation could build on and hone the
skills and know-how gleaned from the previous generation. (Henrich
2015: 3)
Skoyles: Chimerization
• Neural plasticity is the capacity of brain that made possible the
development of symbolic language throughout an evolutive process.
• It tool enlarged brains with prolonged development, in bodies able to
easily communicate with others, before brains could exploit it to
chimerize with symbols.
• Chimerization: Refers to the blending of symbols with the human
brain’s neural apparatus. (Skoyles 2011: 234).
The Extended Mind
The Mriganka Sur Experiment
• Mriganka Sur (Noë 2009 53-54).
• Tissues of the visual apparatus of ferrets were re-wired
to the brain area considered as assigned for hearing.
• The cells in the eye which would connect into the visual
areas of the brain, (visual thalamus and the visual cortex)
were able to grow normally into the areas usually
dedicated to hearing. https://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/ferre
t.html

• Implications of this experiment: how external factors

contribute to the neurophysiology of cognition and that
is not possible to consider a univocal determination
from the behavior of cells to experience itself, As Noë
points out:
• What determines and controls the character of http://www.marshallferrets.com/just4fun/fe
conscious experience is not the associated neural rret-fun-facts

activity. (Noë 2009: 53-54)

Extended Mind Models
• Vigotsky (1978): The Developmental Mind
• Bateson (1979): Ecology of Mind
• Clark & Chalmers (1998): The Extended Mind
• Noë (2009): Consciousness in Environmental Context
• Damasio (2003): Extended Consciousness as an Homeostatic Corrective
• Bartra (2015): The Exo-cerebrum Theory
Extended Mind VS Distributive Cognition
• The extended mind framework is a way to approach distributed
cognitive systems in a specific range of spatial and temporal scales.
• Unlike extended mind, however, distributed cognition does not
assume a center for any cognitive system. (Hutchins 2014: 38)
• Shift the focus from ecological assemblies surrounding an individual
person to cultural ecosystems operating at larger spatial and
temporal scales. (p. 35)
Conclusion
• Increase in the entropy of information requires regulator mechanism
for gaining an homeostatic equilibrium: Cultural Practices
• We must consider that Hutchins approach of ‘Distributive cognition’
and ‘Cognitive Ecosytem’ is even more revolutionary than the model
of Extended Mind.
• Whether our brain is the more complex of mammal species it is
owed to the whole complex set of conditions around it: an evolutive
background and environment: clusters of information who have
determined the development of culture and the specific human
consciousness.
Bartra, Roger (2014) Anthropology of the Brain: Consciousness, Culture, and
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Dunbar, Robin I.M. (1998) “The Social Brain Hypothesis”. Evolutionary
Anthropology. 178-190.
Henrich, Joseph (2015) The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving
Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter.
Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Hutchins, Edwin (2014) The cultural ecosystem of human cognition.
Philosophical Psychology, 27:1, 34-49.
Noë, Alva (2009) Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other
Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness. New York: Hill and Wang.
Richerson, Peter J. Boyd, Robert (2008) Not by genes alone: How Culture
Transformed Human Evolution. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Skoyles, John (2011) “Brains and Symbols” in Margulis, Lyn. Asikainen, Celeste
A. Krumbein, Wolfgang E. (2011) Chimeras and Consciousness: Evolution of
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http://alexgrey.com/art/paintings/soul/