Attuning to the World: The Diachronic Constitution of the Extended Conscious Mind.

A familiar, culturally constructed environment can feel like home, while culture shock makes that feeling vanish. This paper argues that such 'phenomenal attunement'—a taken-for-granted structure of conscious experience—is not produced by internal neural processes alone in a single moment. Instead, it is constituted over time through repeated cycles of embodied engagement with the world, guided by cultural practices. Because these cycles involve the environment and culture, not just the brain, an essential part of conscious experience is extended beyond skin and skull. The argument challenges the near-consensus that consciousness must be internally constituted, even among proponents of the extended mind theory.

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Abstract

It is a near consensus among materialist philosophers of mind that consciousness must somehow be constituted by internal neural processes, even if we remain unsure quite how this works. Even friends of the extended mind theory have argued that when it comes to the material substrate of conscious experience, the boundary of skin and skull is likely to prove somehow to be privileged. Such arguments have, however, typically conceived of the constitution of consciousness in synchronic terms, making a firm separation between proximate mechanisms and their ultimate causes. We argue that the processes involved in the constitution of some conscious experiences are diachronic, not synchronic. We focus on what we call phenomenal attunement in this paper-the feeling of being at home in a familiar, culturally constructed environment. Such a feeling is missing in cases of culture shock. Phenomenal attunement is a structure of our conscious experience of the world that is ubiquitous and taken for granted. We will argue that it is constituted by cycles of embodied and world-involving engagement whose dynamics are constrained by cultural practices. Thus, it follows that an essential structure of the conscious mind, the absence of which profoundly transforms conscious experience, is extended.