Shifting boundaries, extended minds: ambient technology and extended allostatic control.
Synthese January 1, 2025 Ben White, Andy Clark, Avel Guènin-Carlut et al.
The classical extended mind thesis, with its conditions of trust and glue and phenomenal transparency, poorly describes how people engage with ambient smart environments—spaces infused with background smart technology that operates without explicit user interaction. Drawing on active inference, a theory that frames cognition as embodied uncertainty minimization, the authors develop a process-based version of the extended mind in which mental boundaries are multiple and shifting. They argue that ambient smart environments function as extended allostatic control systems, invisibly supporting an agent's biological capacity to minimize uncertainty across interlocking timescales. This account reframes the classical extended mind thesis to better capture the fluid, background operation of such environments.