The dynamically extended mind
IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation May 8, 2013 Tom Froese, C. Gershenson, D. Rosenblueth
The extended mind hypothesis claims that cognitive processes can extend beyond the brain into the body and environment, but critics argue that coupling to external elements does not make them part of the cognitive system—a charge called the coupling-constitution fallacy. This paper uses an evolutionary robotics approach with a minimal model of two acoustically coupled agents to respond. The interaction as a whole has properties irreducible to the isolated agents, and the coupled agents' neural dynamics exhibit formal properties impossible in isolation. The work shows that the fallacy rests on a misunderstanding of how nonlinear interactions can be constitutive in dynamical systems.