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

IF 1.3 1区 哲学 Q1 HISTORY & PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE
Synthese Pub Date : 2025-01-01 Epub Date: 2025-02-06 DOI:10.1007/s11229-025-04924-9
Ben White, Andy Clark, Avel Guènin-Carlut, Axel Constant, Laura Desirée Di Paolo
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引用次数: 0

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.

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来源期刊
Synthese
Synthese 管理科学-科学史与科学哲学
CiteScore
3.30
自引率
13.30%
发文量
471
审稿时长
1 months
期刊介绍: Synthese is a philosophy journal focusing on contemporary issues in epistemology, philosophy of science, and related fields. More specifically, we divide our areas of interest into four groups: (1) epistemology, methodology, and philosophy of science, all broadly understood. (2) The foundations of logic and mathematics, where ‘logic’, ‘mathematics’, and ‘foundations’ are all broadly understood. (3) Formal methods in philosophy, including methods connecting philosophy to other academic fields. (4) Issues in ethics and the history and sociology of logic, mathematics, and science that contribute to the contemporary studies Synthese focuses on, as described in (1)-(3) above.
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