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Immaterial engagement: human agency and the cognitive ecology of the internet

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Abstract

While 4E cognitive science is fundamentally committed to recognising the importance of the environment in making sense of cognition, its interest in the role of artefacts seems to be one of its least developed dimensions. Yet the role of artefacts in human cognition and agency is central to the sorts of beings we are. Internet technology is influencing and being incorporated into a wide variety of our cognitive processes. Yet the dominant way of viewing these changes sees technology as an outside force “impacting” on our minds. Within this context, Material Engagement Theory (MET) seems well poised to help make sense of our cognitive involvement with the Internet as MET is precisely concerned with grasping the role of material culture in human cognition. This paper explores some of the resources MET provides to think through the effects the internet is having on human agency. This paper uses MET as a starting point for examining the way Internet technology can be involved with human agency, both to the provide a much needed and more adequate theorization of these phenomena, but also to illustrate ways in which the consideration of artefacts can be given a more central and adequate place within the 4E cognitive sciences.

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Notes

  1. With some notable exceptions (Clark 2003; Hutchins 1995; Tribble 2005), even most work on situated cognition the extended mind places very little emphasis on the nature or properties of the real artefacts with which we interact. Most papers get little further than discussing the imaginary notebook of Otto.

  2. One must be careful in how we depict such ‘basic’ or ‘native’ resources (as an anonymous reviewer points out). It is true that one of the central arguments of MET is that many cognitive and agentive capacities that we take to be natural or native might have been interactively developed with material culture. Our advanced mathematical abilities are a good case in point (See Chapter 5 of Malafouris 2013). We must be careful then in any discussion of basic capacities that we do not assume they are natural and have been untouched by prior interaction with one or other regime of material culture.

  3. See also Heersmink (2015) on complementarity and several dimensions by which the integration of artefacts can be analysed.

  4. The JFGI or “Just F&%$ing Google it” principle seems to show that the epistemic background of mind has undergone a radical change which we have as yet only dimly understood theoretically (Michaelian 2014).

  5. It’s important to note that strong agency is not supposed to be equivalent to what Malafouris calls material agency. However, as I will explore in Section 3, they may be strongly connected in human life. Strong agency, I claim, is best understood as a special form of reflexive material agency.

  6. There are reasons to think that web, at least in early forms was not well-poised for cognitive integration in a variety of tasks (Smart 2012) and indeed the interaction mechanism of scrolling through a web-page full of clickable resources may not be the best mechanism of completing certain cognitive tasks.

  7. I have labelled this factor of Cloud-Tech autonomy. Internet technology increasingly implements the fruits of 50 or so years of research in artificial intelligence. Companies such as Google, Microsoft and Amazon increasingly conceive of, design and market their products, as artificially intelligent systems. Insofar as these systems implement intelligent processes that now operate relatively independently of individual human cognitive activities, they can be regarded in this restricted sense, as autonomous.

  8. I have previously attempted to identify some of its novelty and broad, interactive cognitive potential here (Clowes 2015). A more developed account of the cognitive implications of the internet in terms of 4E cognitive science is here (Smart et al. 2017a)

  9. From 2017 onwards, driving a car while navigating with a Satnav has now been incorporated as part of the UK driving examination. Surely official recognition of its skilful – and sometimes perilous - nature.

  10. It is of course possible to argue with the claim that lives are intrinsically meaningful without some sense of the future and our purposes. However a long Lockian tradition sees our long term sense of ourselves as enduring beings with interests and self-disclosable purposes are central to what it means to be a human agent (Parfit 1984).

  11. See discussion in Chapter 6 of Malafouris (2013)

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Shaun Gallagher and Lambros Malafouris who invited me to first present this work at Keble College workshop on Creative Evolution: Mind, biosocial plasticity and material engagement. Thanks again Lambros for his patient and engaged approach to editing. Thanks also to the anonymous reviewers, to Marek McGann and the ENSO seminar series, and the Lisbon Mind and Reasoning Group, where I presented several versions of this paper. This work is supported by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) under grant number SFRH/BPD/70440/2010 on “Virtualism and the Mind: Rethinking Presence, Representation and Self” and by an FCT strategic project grant for IFILNOVA, FCSH/NOVA UID/FIL/00183/2013.

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    Robert W. Clowes

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Clowes, R.W. Immaterial engagement: human agency and the cognitive ecology of the internet. Phenom Cogn Sci 18, 259–279 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-018-9560-4

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