2023-08-24 22:10:53
by MAURIZIO FERRARIS
The theses of the new essay by cognitive scientist Andy Clark: we shape the world according to our expectations, the real experience is the one that surprises
There are philosophers who have represented the mind as a virgin table, a blank page on which impressions are written: above all, the example of John Locke. There are other philosophers who instead believe that our experience has already taken place in another life, through the vision of ideas prior to incarnation, and that the current experience is not a more or less faithful memory of the first one. out-of-body experience: the case of Plato. Halfway there are all the others. Those who admit that all knowledge begins, as regards time, with experience, which however is not deposited on a blank sheet, but on pre-existing structures, conforming to the organization of reason (as in Kant) or resulting from a process evolutionary (like most of those who have dealt with this topic since Darwin).
Andy Clark, in The Experience Machine (Pantheon Books) belongs to this group, that is, he embraces a widely shared vision, even if he is keen to present his own version as heterodox. In this he manifests a tendency to overestimate the innovative potential of his ideas which has brought him much luck, ever since, in the 1990s, he elaborated, together with the Australian philosopher David Chalmers, the controversial theory of the extended mind, according to which the mind does not identifies with the brain or with the body, but with the entire context in which it is found, including the technical apparatuses it uses. Again, although, as I said, the doctrine produced heated discussions that propelled Clark and Chalmers into the philosophical firmament, it was the amplification of common sense considerations.
It surprises no one that certain calculations, which are difficult to do in the mind, are easily resolved through the use of an external support, be it pen and paper, or an abacus, or the calculator on our mobile phone. Likewise, the consideration by which education and society determine our way of thinking does not exactly seem a great novelty: and if we wish to baptize theory of the extended mind the action of the outside on what is (rather problematically, since it is not we’re talking about a homunculus barricaded in the center of the brain and defended by the braincase) let’s call it internal, well, no one can forbid it. It being understood that there is no reason to define extended, to the point of including the tools it uses, a mind that is, rather, incorporated, in the sense that our thoughts are what they are above all because they take place in a body endowed with certain characteristics, and equipped, that is, it has the propensity, exclusive of the human animal, to enhance its performance, both manual and intellectual, through the use of technical prostheses of various kinds.
Therefore, nothing new under the sun, but certainly many things, old and new, which are worth reflecting on in order to understand how our experience of the world takes place. As I said, Clark’s fundamental thesis is that the mind does not constitute the passive receptor of external experiences, but rather a predictive apparatus that formulates hypotheses about experience and seeks its confirmation. By doing so, a structure that has been determined by a very long evolutionary history projects anticipations on the world, and starts a process of confirmations and denials that strengthen or weaken the systems of anticipation. Thus, in this process, the mind is not passive, but active and, above all, does not exercise an exclusively cognitive function, but manifests itself through action, which (according to an intuition ascribed to William James) is above all a sort of bet in which an act is prefigured through the imagination which will then actually be performed. Also in this case, the success of the action acts as a confirmation, and the failure as a denial, with a process that will condition future actions.
James, together with Helmholtz and Lotze, constitutes one of the few recognized ancestors of a theory which, however, as we have seen, has a long philosophical past. Suffice it to say that the cover of the book, which appears as a surface with folds onto which the title is projected, is an involuntary representation of the mixture of innatism and empiricism that Leibniz contrasts with Locke in New essays on the human intellect: it is true that experiences are from the outside, but these are not projected onto a neutral and flat surface, but rather onto a pleated support, like light on a theater backdrop, receiving their specific shape precisely from the folds of the backdrop that welcomes them.
And as for the predictive nature of the mind, certainly pedant, but not illegitimate, to remember that Kant had described a system of first principles of experience that precede and determine it, precisely carrying out that predictive action that Clark claims as one of the great conquests of contemporary neuroscience. Essentially, Kant had argued that before any experience, our sensitivity is equipped with two pure forms, space and time, which do not derive from experience but make it possible. He had also said that our intellect is endowed with a certain number of first principles which, again, precede experience with a constructive and projective function, so to speak, and he referred in particular to substance as the permanence of something in time and to causality as a succession of events. In doing so, he challenged many philosophers who had preceded him and exposed himself to the criticisms of as many philosophers who came after him. It remains that Kantian ideas such as the fact that before any experience we can anticipate that it will be intense, weak or null, i.e. it will have a certain degree, not only appear difficult to contest, but are perfectly in line, although they were published in 1781, with what Clark in 2023 presents us as an inventum magnum.
Therefore, if Clark’s book is appreciated not so much for its theoretical framework, which is not at all as original as its author claims, nor (and it would be absurd to expect it from a cognitive scientist) for the awareness of the historical background of the doctrine, but rather for the large amount of experimental examples adduced as proof of the theory of the anticipatory and active mind. Students who listen to a series of disturbed sound signals and are invited to say if they recognize a piece of music that has been indicated to them as the text hidden in this white noise (and many recognize it, precisely because there are expectations that ask to be satisfied). Professors (Clark himself, in this case) who hear the chirping of their partner’s alarm clock even if the room is completely silent only because they are used to that morning sound, and expect it (the famous e xpectatio casuum similium, waiting for cases similar, which was already contemplated by the psychology of Scholasticism). Or that they feel their mobile phone vibrate before a conference simply because the accumulated adrenaline generates a phantom perception. Workers who, after having fallen from a height onto a taut steel wire which has cut the sole of their left boot, suffer the pains of hell which are not sedated even by the most powerful analgesics as if they had actually injured their foot, even if the doctors notice that the limb is uninjured and only the sole is cut (unfortunately Clark does not tell us if the finding that the foot was uninjured made the pain stop in the presumed injured person).
All of this shows that, in Clark’s words, the world as we see and feel it is shaped, in part, by our expectations (conscious or unconscious). Which, again, is a thesis that no one would feel like contesting, and which would only become interesting if it were to clarify to what extent the innate prevails and where, on the other hand, experience prevails. However, with respect to the classic theories of experience as a mixture of expectation and states of fact, Clark adds an element of non-negligible importance, namely that experience is relevant precisely in cases where it falsifies our expectations instead of confirming them. Which allows Clark to outline a highly economic doctrine of psychic functioning, whereby, given a framework of constants, partly innate and partly acquired, the actual experience, the one that changes, the one that surprises, coming to modify the framework pre-existing even for a minimum detail.
How all this relates to the theory of the extended mind is not evident (in the sense that the thesis holds both in the hypothesis of a mind identified with the brain, and in that of a mind expanded to include parts of an environment), and from this point of view it is not clear to me why, in the second part of his book, Clark returns to the theory that made him famous. And in general one gets the impression that this non-succinct book could have been much shorter without losing anything that makes it worth reading, namely the abundance of examples and the formulation of the thesis of an experience that is truly such. when it denies rather than confirms our alternatives.
It is a transposition within the field of the theory of experience of the falsificationism that Karl Popper had made famous in the field of the theory of science, arguing that a thesis is actually scientific only if there is the possibility that experience refutes it: that is to say (potentially) scientific to discuss the alcohol content of wines, but not the sex of angels. But even here, if we want to be picky, we must not forget that Popper was trained in the same Viennese philosophical world in which Gestalt psychology arose. And what does this psychology teach us? Again, Clark’s inventum magnum, i.e. the fact that experience is not a disorderly flow of sensations, but obeys its own well-founded and robust laws, to the point of being able to resist our expectations, a circumstance which vice versa, in the case of a swirling and dusty experience like the one described by empiricism from Bacon onwards, would not be able to explain.
In conclusion, it may also be true that there are more things between earth and sky than in all our philosophies, but it is equally true that, usually, there are more things in all our philosophies than single philosophers, in love with their own inventions real or presumed, are not willing to admit. Once this circumstance is recognized, Clark’s book loses much of its originality, but it still deserves to be read, no longer as a denial, but as a confirmation, of many intuitions of philosophy and common sense regarding the nature of experience.
August 24, 2023 (change August 24, 2023 | 22:09)
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