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For some, it was shocking when Hilary Putnam coined his catchphrase, “meaning just ain’t in the head.” For a few others, it was so obvious a conclusion that the flare-up of discussion warranted a theory that expressed the actual extent to which our minds do reach beyond our heads. Andy Clark and David Chalmers took a leap in 1998 when they published The Extended Mind, professing a theory that took Putnam’s concept to its absolute extreme: not only is meaning outside our heads, but cognition is, too.

Given how radical this theory is, we need to look at the framework first in order to give the necessary solid foundation for it. The primary mover here was Hilary Putnam, who was a proponent of ‘multiple realizability’ as it took the forefront of discussion in philosophy of mind. Multiple realizability is basically the idea that mental states such as being in pain are so up for debate and difficult to attribute to any one physical state that the only way to talk about them in any concrete sense is by referring to what they do instead of what they might be. If we accept this premise, it would imply that mental states can be incredibly different between things while still referring to the same functional role being played. If a tree felt pain (which is absolutely possible under this theory), we wouldn’t be able to tell just by looking at its brain, because trees don’t have brains. Its pain would be so materially different that no current framework would be able to find where or how the pain happens. Importantly, multiple realizability also implies that mental states may be completely separate from the brain as long as the other thing is still fulfilling the functional role that defines the mental state in question.

Putnam extends this idea further through his theory of meaning. On Earth, we have water and we call it H₂O because that’s how our scientists have denoted its most basic structure. In practice, the acronym itself describes almost very material quality of water given the proper chemical understanding of compounds. But on Twin Earth, our mirror image in another dimension where everything is precisely the same, there’s one discrepancy: they have water, but it’s X_yZ instead of H₂O. To your twin self who lives on twin earth, water is wholly described by X_yZ because their scientists have established the semantics necessary for all of its chemical properties to be contained within the one acronym’s letters. But that’s really the only difference. You are both talking about the same water at the same time and there’s no material difference between the two besides semantic meaning established by the trusted smart people. Notice, however, that despite referring to exactly the same thing, the meaning is different between you and twin you. We’re not just talking about the official definition, we’re talking about what it immaterially invokes in your mind when you think ‘water’; that web of connections of experience that make up your whole concept of water is only different by this one discrepancy. Meaning, something of our mind, “just ain’t in the head”.

It doesn’t seem like much, but that small experiment was a practical example of multiple realizability and allowed people to begin questioning just how much our mind might bleed into the world that surrounds us. Of course, meaning is not a particularly strong thing to hinge off of, though. It’s totally possible for us to say, “okay, meaning ain’t in the head, but that’s it.” One could accept Putnam’s whole theory and still not give it much credit as anything really important.  The needle began moving on people attempting to establish other mental states as external, but following Putnam’s approach is a grueling and boring one. If each new addition to the external mind adds to the others in a slow knock-on of mental states being externalized, why don’t we just skip to the conclusion? Let’s just establish that cognition itself is external, and then every subsystem is automatically grandfathered in!

Consider the following: There is a woman named Inga who is just like you or I, a busy and productive person who has a soft spot for good art. She hears of an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art and decides to go. She consults her memory and recalls that MoMA is on 53rd Street. Now consider a different case: There is a man named Otto who also loves good art, but he has an advanced form of Alzheimer’s that has eliminated his long-term memory completely. To mitigate this problem and remain functional, he carries a little notebook with him everywhere he goes and he writes things to remember in it. He hears of this art exhibit and also wants to go, so he checks his notebook and “remembers” that MoMA is on 53rd. Now pray tell, what is the functional difference between the role of Otto’s notebook and the role of Inga’s memory?

This is the famous thought experiment put forth by Andy Clark and David Chalmers in their 1998 paper, The Extended Mind. The main idea of the paper and its experiment is to establish that many of the functional roles usually attributed to our minds can be externalized into other things in the outside world. For Otto, his memory has been replaced by a physical notebook and pen, and the more we consider his case, the more we realize just how similar it is to Inga in terms of the functional role being served. Of course, the conclusion has been strongly disputed by many on good grounds, so we should lay out some guidelines for what must be true if we hope to replace some faculties of the mind. 

For one, we need to have reliable and consistent access to the device that’s inhabiting a functional role. Otto can’t bring his notebook into the shower, and Inga can’t remember very well when she’s blackout drunk, but they still both have consistent and reliable access to their memory when they need it. We also need to have enough trust in the device that we can immediately rely on and endorse its output, considering how Otto’s memory is only good enough if he trusts what he reads as much as Inga trusts what she recalls; perhaps this also requires some past endorsement, too, especially if we are to say that Otto’s beliefs are also stored in the notebook, which would be reliant on his memories. The last criteria and probably the weakest to defend is that the information has to be immediately available. The particular edge that Inga has over Otto is that her memory indexing is almost instantaneous, as evidenced by the phenomena of experiencing something that involuntarily invokes a memory, like the smell of home. Otto has to somehow be able to access particular memories quickly enough to properly fill the functional role of his missing memory.

More generally, the extended mind device has to completely fulfill the functional role of the mental process as a replacement, and the device has to be active in affecting behavior. If we recall Putnam’s external meaning, the difference between X_yZ and H₂O doesn’t change the agent’s behavior, it just changes truth values and unconscious mental associations. For this sort of radical externalism, our devices have to fulfill the entire role of the replaced process, meaning it also changes and controls our behavior. That’s important. From here, Clark and Chalmers begin to postulate about what else might count as extended minds. Calculators, agendas, and diagrams might count depending on their use, but we can even stretch this theory all the way to things like language, culture, and other people. 

If you’re reading closely, you probably have plenty of refutations and questions for this theory of extended mind. It’s radical and violates our intuitive sense of reality, yet their paper is only thirteen pages long, so much is left on the table. Some simpler refutations make their way into the paper, like the problem of just how easily Otto’s mind can be taken away from him or lost, and this extends into pretty much every device. The simple problem with that refutation is that people who haven’t externalized that part of their mind, like Inga, can still have it taken from them with a well-placed needle or a bad fall. More concretely, this decoupling issue can be solved by the consideration of the use of our bodies as extended mind: things like counting on your fingers, tapping your foot, or breath techniques are extended cognitive processes that we have access to as often as we have access to our minds. Otto losing his notebook is much like if you removed or disconnected a part of his brain.

One of the most annoying problems with the paper is when a righteous refutation like whether Otto directly believes what the notebook tells him, or if he just believes that the notebook contains the information and chooses to trust its advice; or in the example of physically moving Scrabble letter tiles to try and find a word, whether it’s not just a long string of inputs and outputs still in the mind, they respond by saying it’s too complicated of an explanation, it’s “one step too many,” and thus shouldn’t even be considered. Other issues are more subtle, like their first thought experiment which I omitted: in a game of Tetris, the player will choose to rotate their block with the buttons to figure out where it fits instead of just using their mind, because rotating the block physically is faster than doing so mentally. The example struck me as dead on arrival, because it doesn’t take long for players to gather the intelligence needed to predict what pieces they need and in what orientation before they even appear. It’s true that new players would most likely go through the process of deciding through trial and error with this extended cognition, but as soon as they start going for a high score, they will return to the mental process because it’s more efficient given their intelligence by experience.

There are so many oversights and willful avoidances of criticism that I think their examples and everything they try to build on their theory is likely to work out as invalid. The Tetris example was simple to outright deny because of my prior knowledge on the facts of the matter, and there are some refutations of Otto’s state of affairs that have yet to be answered satisfactorily. Despite this, I do still believe that there is some basic truth to the theory of extended mind put forth by Clark and Chalmers. There simply are processes that we consider mental that we have replaced with external devices. Whether or not this fact should be considered as proof of our minds actually being somewhat outside our heads seems besides the point, it’s not wrong in any factual sense to say that this cognitive externalization is extending the mind beyond our heads, it’s just down to whether we consider the mind to be some thing that we can confine to begin with. For now, the mind is a designation of certain processes that Clark and Chalmers are comfortable attributing to our brain but are not mechanically explained, like emotions, memory, beliefs, and desires.

A connection that I have avoided making, and which might be outstandingly obvious, is the role that smartphones might play in extending our minds. Clark and Chalmers in 1998 provide examples of extended mind like pocket calculators, Filofaxes, and notebooks, all of which we have replaced with one device. This one pocket computer can serve as replacement for a majority of our extended mind devices with greater efficiency than analog alternatives. If Otto’s notebook were on his Samsung, he would be able to contain infinite notes that are immediately indexable by search. It’s possible that this device would be even more efficient than Inga’s memory in some cases, like when she’s trying to remember where MoMA is, but misremembers or struggles to recall whether it was 53rd or 52nd. His notebook can now be kept with him at all times, including in the shower. He can now unlock visual memory through photographs. He can now know how to get to 53rd without remembering where he is in relation to MoMA by using a map application. He can now contextualize his conversations through text message history. The reminders that he wouldn’t be able to know he needed with an analog notebook can now be pushed to him in an unavoidable way. Even if his smartphone is stolen, he can acquire a new one and automatically have his data restored from the cloud. In short, every major shortcoming of Otto’s memory notebook has suddenly been overcome by the smartphone. Even Inga will use her own notebook to remember some things now.

It was dubious whether Otto’s notebook could really replace the functional role of memory, but it now seems easier to defend than refute the smartphone’s total replacement of that mental process. The requirement of reliable, consistent, and immediate access is satisfied completely, as now it’s expected that all people have smartphones on them at all times. Every math teacher’s nightmare has come true: everyone always has a graphing calculator on their person. 

It’s a marvel how this total consolidation of mental processes has occurred in such a way that exceeds every requirement of an extended mind, and it’s not even really an option anymore. A system of social enforcement has arisen where our phone numbers and social handles have become our unique identifiers, and any particularly successful social interaction in the real world is concluded by a swapping of these identifiers to signify the beginning of a friendship. Social value in a worryingly capitalist sense is moving towards a numeric value attached to those handles: how many friends, followers, or subscribers one has is seen as an indication of importance and scarcity. In every way except governmental law, smartphones are a requirement.

This is partly because of the mass offloading of mental processes onto our phones’ apps. Maintaining a friendship has drastically shifted from real-world meetings to digital communication and comments under social media posts; for many, a friendship can’t take place without at least a phone number. Professionals (and generally busy people) commonly rely exclusively on digital calendars, reminders, and alarms to organize their entire temporal sense of a connected reality, not just for work but also for family and friends, generating a shocking and unexpected systematization of life that grows more and more alienating as the calendars fill and stress mounts. These kinds of extended mind have become so ubiquitous and necessary so quickly that people have begun to feel excessively detached from reality as many of the things they used to connect with emotionally through their minds have now become a layer removed, extended to the outside world where that sense of connection is lost and everything becomes precisely what it is and nothing more.

I think the most guilty party in this discoloration of phenomenal reality is social media. The advent of digital calendars, text messaging, and email proved to be more useful than our inbuilt mental capacities, but the adoption was moderated by their function. Digital calendars are functionally the same as real calendars, just now with notifications and shareability added on top. Phone calls and text messages are now more reliably and immediately accessible, but they can’t functionally replace the role of in-person interaction in most cases. Social media, however, is just adequate enough to give the semblance of social interaction and interpersonal connection that it has begun to replace that mental faculty of connection with others. It’s not unusual these days (at least, among the younger generations) to have a romantic partner or a meaningful friend who you only interact with online. Some of the more superficial friendships are served only by occasional messaging and interaction with posts on social media. 

There has been growing concern about a ‘loneliness epidemic’ among teens and young adults, and I think this is an adequate possible explanation. The progeneration and development of close emotional bonds has been stifled by the functional adequacy of social media. Most friendships begin as something very casual and unimportant, and those kinds of emotional bonds are are served well by social media, where they go to die. I can imagine that social media does really fulfill the functional role of those burgeoning friendships, but as soon as requirements grow to spend more quality time bonding emotionally, heart to heart, it can no longer fulfill this role of growing responsibility and thus installs a ceiling to every friendship’s development. This still permits a greater consideration and connection with people in real life, which will hopefully remain inevitable, but for those kids who grow up using the internet, who might be socially ostracized for some physical difference or eccentric behavior, they may find that their internet friends are better than any real life people, leading to such a strong extended mind that to exorcise it from them would mean the abandonment of a large portion of their Self.

In the 2010s, people had to be reminded that Twitter wasn’t real life. It was and is a cesspit of the most extreme possible conversations, especially since Twitter’s acquisition by Elon Musk, who began a revenue-sharing membership that paid users for views, replies, and reposts, incentivizing people to do whatever it takes to incite as much engagement as possible. Strangely, we now face an issue where Twitter increasingly is real life. It has gained so much leverage on its users that the mental effects become manifest in reality. Twitter was known primarily as a place populated by ‘social justice warriors’ for a long time, meaning it was heavily skewed left and disproportionately represented ‘“Woke”’ ideology (ideas like social equity and anti-racism), until Elon Musk was forced to buy it by legal pressure in 2022. What followed was an unbanning of many controversial figures and a total allowance of what might otherwise be considered hate speech or incitement of violence. Despite vigorously maintaining that it was now a bastion of free speech, it was injected with an algorithm that was subtly weighted toward Musk’s right-leaning ideology, which can be easily demonstrated by creating a new account on Twitter and scrolling through the Home feed without any prior indications of preference. Invariably, it will be populated by right-leaning MAGA figures.

This change was insidious and the perfect example of our extended minds acting to not only our own detriment, but to the detriment of others. The people who use Twitter as their primary place for social interaction and self-expression, the place that would otherwise be an in-person public forum like at a university or town hall with other real people, were now being constantly suggested to believe one ideology instead of the other. Left-leaning people and their posts are suppressed and right-leaning posts are promoted, leading to an artificial sense of scarcity. The portion of their minds offloaded onto the social aspect of Twitter, which was done out of convenience and a desire to lessen their overall needs, is now being manipulated. For the unlucky few who invest some Selfhood into Twitter, allowing trusted people to guide their beliefs and desires, especially about something as complicated and nebulous as politics, that immediate trust necessary to an external mind becomes extremely poisonous. 

The shocking rise in far-right populism across the entire world can find an explanation partly in this fact. The externalization of our minds into social media has made us so reliant and so immediately trusting that the majority of people who don’t pay attention to politics get swept up in a deliberately controlled public forum whose very design is to inspire an urgent sense of danger about anything pressing: Haitians eating cats and dogs, men beating up women in sports, a massive nationwide campaign to turn your kids gay, they are all terrifying and so pressing that even granting a small percentage of the story to be true is unknowingly extreme. 

This problem is true of every social media. The algorithmic tailoring of your feed to show you what you want to see with advertisements in between is necessarily manipulative and controlling to whatever amount of your mind is offloaded onto social media. Twitter is a particularly good example because it shows not only a slow and implicit shift of your feed by disinterested machine learning, but instead a deliberate and extreme contortion of the truth whose purpose is to change what you believe, what you desire, and ultimately who you are.

It’s lucky, then, that this is a problem with solutions. Societal awareness has grown about these issues, especially among younger generations, who have begun quitting social media and even smartphones altogether. Social media ‘detoxes’ have gained popularity, even aesthetically, as the emotional effects of social media have become so strong that they are overwhelming. We’ve witnessed the emergence of a whole new market of ‘dumbphones’, whose whole purpose is to remove vectors of control and reliance to promote a return to our analog extended minds. Truthfully, I believe simply understanding our state of affairs is enough for principled people to see it in their own lives and feel the disgust at the unending mental control we grant our phones. 

Others prefer to be controlled, because the dependence on these extended minds is far too much to give up. Like Otto losing his notebook, losing our phones or even just their apps is literally sacrificing a part of our minds, and for some, that cost is too high. It’s really our decision to make individually, but a cultural shift away from social media and over-reliance on apps in general is something that only requires a large minority of people, which appears more than possible to me.