Descartes Extended Mind Analysis

Descartes conceive of minds as essentially immaterial, non-extended substances entirely distinct from the body. The powerful hold of Descartes’ dualistic thesis can still be felt in many corners of our intellectual framework. It seems natural to conceive of mental states and activities as purely ‘inner’ phenomena that are intimately tied to what’s going on inside the head, but only contingently related to our bodies, other people, and the world around us. In recent philosophical literature, there is a development of certain theoretical frameworks which aim to repudiate the Cartesian legacy, insofar as they advocate that we study human agency, mind, and cognition as embodied, embedded, extended, and enacted phenomena. These theories in line with cognitive sciences suggest that mind is not bound by skin and bones. …show more content…
Broadly speaking this thesis asserts that our minds are ‘hybrid’ entities dynamically assembled from continuous and dense interactions between brains, bodies, and environmental structures such as symbols, tools, artifacts, cultural practices, norms, group structures, or social institutions. In a way a breaks the hegemony of skin and the skull and sees human as the creatures ‘of the world’. In the present section, I shall first attempt to analyse the extended mind thesis. How it has been understood and interpreted by analytics? In the later course of the discussion I shall also look into the implications of extended mind theory for the idea of group mind. If mind is not in the head, can it be said to remove one of the major hurdles in accepting the idea of group