The Extended Mind

The mind, by definition, is that part of the person that feels, perceives, thinks, wills, and especially reasons. 

While it was typically believed that the mind functions out of the head or rather the brain, we have reason to believe that the Mind is In the Body;  that thinking and feeling happen in every cell....we have evidence that emotions are information molecules that circulate through the body.

And now the question: Where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin?

                  

There's thinking that the mind extends even beyond the body.

The Extended Mind by Andy Clark and David Chalmers is a seminal work in the field of extended cognition. In this paper, Clark and Chalmers present the idea of active externalism in which objects within the environment function as a part of the mind. They argue that it is arbitrary to say that the mind is contained only within the boundaries of the skull. The separation between the mind, the body, and the environment is seen as an unprincipled distinction.

Because external objects play a significant role in aiding cognitive processes, the mind and the environment act as a "coupled system". This coupled system can be seen as a complete cognitive system of its own. In this manner, the mind is extended into the external world.

Dr.David Ludden, a psychologist: What are the boundaries of the mind? Our mind extends to the tools we use and the people we work with. For example, when you drive, your mind extends to the car—you and the vehicle act as a single unit. 

In a television commercial for a Bank, a young lady says of the bank's mobile app, "My phone's a part of my body, so it's like having my bank in my pocket. It's with me everywhere I go." The belief that a mobile phone and the apps it contains is an extension of one's own body has been brought about by new technology.

Not only does mobile technology permit a person to extend one's body beyond the limits of the epidermis but it allows cognitive function to extend beyond the confines of one's own brain as well. Think here of all the contact information and to-do task lists our phone's are able to store, and gps which guides us from beyond. That's so much memory function as also direction, happening externally.

Resources such as pens, paper, and computers are now so deeply integrated into our everyday lives that we couldn’t accomplish many of our cognitive goals and purposes without them.

The extended mind thesis claims that technological resources have become so thoroughly enmeshed with our internal cognitive machinery that they now count as part of the machinery of thought itself.

And I'm wondering, how about consciousness? How different is it from the mind? It's just that much easier now to extend this thinking to consciousness, and see how the individual consciousness enmeshes with the larger consciousness. (Think of it as a field that extends beyond the object, like a magnetic field beyond the magnet)

And this would also explain how the small little things we like to call co-incidences or signs are not really chance, but an occurrence or happening of our own extended consciousness. It no longer seems spiritual or belief based, but something that can be grasped by even the rational thinking mind, the one within?  :)