The Dynamically Extended Mind -- A Minimal Modeling Case Study

TL;DR

This paper uses a minimal evolutionary robotics model to demonstrate how coupled agents exhibit properties that cannot be reduced to individual components, supporting the extended mind hypothesis against the coupling-constitution fallacy.

Contribution

It provides a minimal dynamical systems model showing that interaction processes can be constitutive of cognition, addressing a key critique of the extended mind hypothesis.

Findings

Coupled agents exhibit emergent properties not present in isolated agents.

Neural dynamics of coupled agents have formal properties impossible in isolation.

The coupling-constitution fallacy is based on misunderstanding nonlinear interactions.

Abstract

The extended mind hypothesis has stimulated much interest in cognitive science. However, its core claim, i.e. that the process of cognition can extend beyond the brain via the body and into the environment, has been heavily criticized. A prominent critique of this claim holds that when some part of the world is coupled to a cognitive system this does not necessarily entail that the part is also constitutive of that cognitive system. This critique is known as the "coupling-constitution fallacy". In this paper we respond to this reductionist challenge by using an evolutionary robotics approach to create a minimal model of two acoustically coupled agents. We demonstrate how the interaction process as a whole has properties that cannot be reduced to the contributions of the isolated agents. We also show that the neural dynamics of the coupled agents has formal properties that are inherently impossible for those neural networks in isolation. By keeping the complexity of the model to an absolute minimum, we are able to illustrate how the coupling-constitution fallacy is in fact based on an inadequate understanding of the constitutive role of nonlinear interactions in dynamical systems theory.