The evolutionary implausability of outlandish alien cognition

Contemporary arguments for (and against) the extended mind hypothesis (eg. Sprevak 2009) regularly invoke hypothetical aliens with outlandish forms of internal cognition. Sprevak asks us to imagine an alien that stores memories "as a series of ink-marks" (ibid: 9). This is meant to be functionally equivalent to the case where someone 'stores' their memories in an external diary. The point is that, in order to preserve multiple realisability and the Martian intuition, we are forced to accept that both the alien and the diary-user constitute cognitive systems, with the only difference being that the latter extends beyond the biological brain.

Baby Martian?

In another example, this time intended as a reduction ad absurdum of functionalism and the extended mind, Sprevak proposes an alien with an innate, internal cognitive sub-system that calculates the exact date of the Mayan calendar (ibid: 21). Again, his point is that there seems to be no functional difference between this sub-system and the one that he claims to have installed on his office computer¹. Ergo, his extended mind includes this implicit knowledge of the Mayan calendar.

Ignoring for the moment any questions about the extended mind per se, we should question the plausibility of these kinds of aliens. In each case, but especially the second, it seems that our aliens would possess remarkably over-specialised brains. The ink-jet memory system seems cumbersome, and the Mayan calender calculator is an extremely niche-interest device, one that would probably never see any use. In both cases it is difficult to imagine how or why such a cognitive architecture would have evolved.

This doesn't constitute a counter-argument, as regardless of any evolutionary implausibility Sprevak's aliens serve their rhetorical purpose. However it's interesting to note that much of Clark's own use of the extended mind is intended to highlight the way in which human brains off-load these kinds of specialised skills on to the environment (see his 2003), meaning that we are precisely the kind of generalists that these aliens aren't. Perhaps it's important not to get too caught up with outlandish aliens when we consider the extended mind, and return to the much more homely (and relevant!) examples which it was originally intended for.


1. I have a meeting with him in his office tomorrow, so I'll try and check if is true...

References

• Clark, A. 2003. Natural Born Cyborgs. Oxford: OUP.
• Sprevak, M. 2009. "Extended cognition and functionalism." The Journal of Philosophy 106: 503-527. Available at (and references to) http://dl.dropbox.com/u/578710/homepage/Sprevak---Extended%20Cognition.pdf

Functionalism reconsidered

I've long considered myself to be a functionalist about mental states such as belief and pain. Functionalism is the theory that mental states should be identified not by their physical instantiation but by their functional role, i.e. the role that they play within a given system. The classic example is pain, which is said to be defined by behaviours such as flinch responses, yelling out, and crying (and perhaps a particular kind of first-person experience). One of the main motivations for functionalism is the "Martian intuition" - the intuition that were a silicon-based Martian to exhibit pain-behaviour, we would want to say that it is in pain, despite it lacking a carbon-based nervous system like our own. A less exotic intuition is that an octopus or capuchin monkey can probably feel pain, despite the exact physical instantiation of this pain differing from our own.

Martian octopus, perhaps in pain? 
(with permission from Ninalyn @ http://studiodecoco.tumblr.com/)

However I'm now beginning to suspect that there might be more than a few problems with functionalism. For starters, functional states are often defined as being those that are "relevantly similar" to an imagined paradigm case - thus, a Martian who screamed and recoiled when we punched might be said to be in pain, but one that laughed and clapped its hands (tentacles?) probably wouldn't. This is fine up to a point, especially in seemingly clear-cut cases like the above, but what should we say when we're faced with the inevitable borderline case?

Whether or not fish can feel pain seems to be a case like this. Research into fish pain behaviour is contentious - whilst fish exhibit apparent pain behaviour, they have only recently been shown to exhibit more complex pain avoidance behaviour that might be thought essential to pain. The problem is not just a lack of evidence either, there's a more fundamental lack of clarity about how exactly we should define the functional role of pain, or indeed any other mental state.

Having said that, the problem isn't limited to the functionalist account of mental states. Biological species appear to form vague natural kinds, a problem which has motivated the idea of homeostatic property cluster kinds, categories of kinds that share some, but not all, of their properties. So we maybe we could say that functional kinds, such as pain, are a category of HPC kinds. That still wouldn't necessarily give us a straight answer in genuine border-line cases, but at least we'd have good reason to think functional roles might sometimes pick out genuine kinds (albeit perhaps not natural kinds). 

The problems don't stop there though. By arguing that it entails a radical form of cognitive extension, Mark Sprevak has pushed functionalism to its logical extreme. If he is correct then being a functionalist would commit you to apparently absurd conclusions,¹ such as that the entire contents of the Dictionary of Philosophy sitting on my desk form part of my cognitive system, or that my capacity for mental arithmetic is bounded only by my access to electronic computing power. I think there might be a way for functionalism to avoid the full force of this argument, but it comes with its own problems and costs.

Essentially what the functionalist needs to do is to stop talking about cognition and mental states as though they were one kind of thing. They're not, and rather than lumping memory, personality, beliefs  and so on into one unitary framework, we need to look at giving finer-grained functional descriptions in each case. This might even mean getting rid of some mental states, such as belief, or at least admitting that they're more complex than we first thought. This approach will still entail some degree of cognitive extension, but hopefully in a more subtle and intuitive way. So whilst it might not be true that the contents of the Dictionary are part of my 'cognitive system', they may nonetheless form part of a belief-like system, albeit one that functions differently to my regular belief system. 

Would this still be functionalism? In a sense yes, because it would maintain a degree of multiple realisability, only at a more fine-grained level. So a Martian with a silicon brain might have beliefs, but equally they might have something more akin to the belief-like system that is constituted by me-and-the-Dictionary. The problem with functionalism is that it tends to reify our folk intuitions about mental states, and we need to remember that these might not be entirely accurate. I suppose I'm beginning to lean towards a form of eliminativism, although I still think that there's room for an instrumentalist account of functional roles. 


1. I say "apparently" because I'm not entirely convinced that one shouldn't just bite the bullet and accept these conclusions. That's probably a post for another day though.