Shifting boundaries, extended minds: ambient technology and extended allostatic control.

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.

Study at a glance

Abstract

This article applies the thesis of the extended mind to ambient smart environments. These systems are characterised by an environment, such as a home or classroom, infused with multiple, highly networked streams of smart technology working in the background, learning about the user and operating without an explicit interface or any intentional sensorimotor engagement from the user. We analyse these systems in the context of work on the "classical" extended mind, characterised by conditions such as "trust and glue" and phenomenal transparency, and find that these conditions are ill-suited to describing our engagement with ambient smart environments. We then draw from the active inference framework, a theory of brain function which casts cognition as a process of embodied uncertainty minimisation, to develop a version of the extended mind grounded in a process ontology, where the boundaries of mind are understood to be multiple and always shifting. Given this more fluid account of the extended mind, we argue that ambient smart environments should be thought of as extended allostatic control systems, operating more or less invisibly to support an agent's biological capacity for minimising uncertainty over multiple, interlocking timescales. Thus, we account for the functionality of ambient smart environments as extended systems, and in so doing, utilise a markedly different version of the classical thesis of extended mind.