The sciences of cognition have tended to examine a disembodied intelligence, a pure intelligence isolated from the world. It is time to question this approach, to provide a critique of pure reason, if you will. Humans operate within the physical world. We use the physical world and one another as sources of information, as reminders, and in general as extensions of our own knowledge and reasoning systems. People operate as a type of distributed intelligence, where much of our intelligent behavior results from the interaction of mental processes with the objects and constraints of the world and where much behavior takes place through a cooperative process with others (Norman, 1993, p. 146).
Consider one of the problems posed by researchers in artificial intelligence: to build a computer that emulates the mind. Often, mind is identified with brain; however, if one takes a distributed view, cognition includes objects like computers that contain important memories, embodies problem-solving strategies and facilitates interactions among individuals who are part of a problem-solving network. Therefore, the computational tools being used to model the mind themselves conduct activities usually referred to as mental. Instead of conducting 'disembodied discovery', computers form part of a network that distributes cognitive tasks and shares functions.
Take Searle's classic 'Chinese room' problem, in which a person plays the role of a 'disembodied' program like BACON. Chinese characters are slipped into the room: the person inside consults a rule book that tells her what characters to select in response, and she puts them out without understanding them. Searle intended this analogy to illustrate that "thinking is more than just a matter of manipulating meaningless symbols; it involves meaningful semantic contents" (Searle, 1984, p. 36). Digital computers are like the Chinese room: they use syntactic rules to manipulate symbols without understanding what they mean. BACON, KEKADA and the other simulations discussed in this book literally did not know what they were doing. According to Searle, 'brains cause minds.' Cognition is not disembodied.
In contrast, Edwin Hutchins argues that the Chinese room is a 'sociocultural cognitive system' (Hutchins, 1995a). By this he meant that the whole system translated Chinese--not just the person in the room. He could have similarly argued that BACON was part of a cognitive system that re-discovered laws; other elements of the system included the programmers, who realized what the program's accomplishments meant, and publicized them. Hutchins sociocultural comment does not undermine Searle's critique of programs like BACON, but it does pose problems for the idea that minds cause brains. For Hutchins, cognition is distributed as well as embodied.
Hutchins' conducted a detailed study of navigation on an amphibious helicopter transport and found that the navigation task is distributed across a sociocultural cognitive system that included a Navigator, an Assistant to the Navigator, a Navigation Plotter, a Recorder and two Pelorus Operators who took sightings of landmarks. This team also relied heavily on advanced technologies like an adilade for visual sightings, a gyrocompass, various chronometers, the fathometer, which measures the depth of water under the ship, radar and satellite navigation. The duties and coordination of this team were spelled-out in manuals. In practice, however, these duties were often negotiated. For example, the Plotter often had to leave his station to instruct the more junior Pelorus Operators how to obtain familiar fixes as the ship came into port. In one particularly dramatic case, the ship lost power, including the gyrocompass, and the navigation team had to re-negotiate its roles in order to do the additional computations that would have been done by the gyrocompass.
Hutchins has recently extended this sort of analysis to how speeds are remembered in the cockpit of a commercial airliner. He focused especially on how indicators called 'speed bugs' functioned as mechanical representations. These speed bugs indicated the minimum maneuvering speed of the aircraft at several different configurations of wing flaps; the configuration of the speed bugs on the airspeed indicator dial is determined by the weight of the plane. "Setting the speed bugs is a matter of producing a representation in the cockpit environment that will serve as a resource that organizes performances that are to come later." (Hutchins, 1995b, p. 279)
Hutchins' example suggests that many of the functions normally associated with mind are distributed outside the brain. "Memory is normally thought of as a psychological function internal to the individual. However, memory tasks in the cockpit may be accomplished by functional systems which transcend the boundaries of the individual actor. Memory processes may be distributed among human agents, or between human agents and external representational devices" (Hutchins, 1995b, p. 284).
It would be interesting to look at how the speed bug was invented, to see if a mechanical representation that forms part of a sociocultural cognitive system was designed by such a system. In this chapter, we have considered inventions done by individuals or two-person teams. In the next chapter, when we consider ethical issues in discovery and invention, we will also provide examples of how new technologies emerge from complex sociocultural cognitive systems.
I have a backpack I refer to as my 'brain'. I try to keep it with me wherever I go since it contains my schedule, to-do lists, important files, disks and other materials that I might need at a moment's notice. I also ask others to remember things for me. For example, if a student needs a letter of recommendation, I ask her or him to send me an e-mail as the time gets closer, then I print the message and put it in my 'brain'. I have seen other people develop much more organized systems of this sort, in briefcases with flaps and folders and compartments that can be labeled.
Cognition clearly is both embodied in brain, hands and eyes, and also distributed among various technologies and shared across groups. Mind is more than brain.
This page was last edited: Wednesday, July 14, 1999