Where is My Mind?

For this session, we'll be reading and discussing two papers, The Extended Mind by Clark and Chalmers and Biosemantics by Millikan.

How does the mind connect to the world around us, and where do our thoughts actually happen? These two papers challenge the old idea that the mind is locked away inside the brain. Instead, they show that our thinking relies heavily on a deep, active partnership with our environment.

Millikan looks at this from an evolutionary standpoint. She argues that the true meaning of a thought or signal isn’t decided by whatever triggered it, but by the "consumer"—the biological parts of us designed to read that signal and use it to survive. Clark and Chalmers take this idea a step further into the physical world. They argue that when we rely on external tools in our daily lives—like an Alzheimer's patient using a notebook to keep track of memories—the tool and the brain team up to form a single, working cognitive system. If a tool does the exact same job as a piece of the brain, they argue it counts as part of our mind