关键词: 心理生活, 延展心智, 延展认知, 延展情感, 延展意识

Abstract:

Today, society is experiencing an era of rapid development in science and technology. Information technologies, such as the Internet, computers, and smart phones have significantly expanded human cognitive abilities and changed human emotional experiences, making people gradually accept the belief that memory and thinking are not limited to the brain. This has raised concerns about the problem of the so-called ‘extended mind’. The extended mind thesis maintains that mental processes such as memory, thinking, emotions, and affection are not confined to the brain or central nervous system of an organism, nor is the brain the only organ of the mind. On the contrary, under proper conditions, the organism’s non-neural body, the environment outside the body, and objects in the environment all play a constitutive role in mental activities. The early extended mind research focused on cognitive process, and has undergone three waves of development.
In recent years, research has begun to focus on extended emotions. The most basic manifestation of extended emotion is the dependence of emotional experience on the body. It is argued that emotional experience transcends the boundaries of the head and extends to the non-nervous body, known as the hypothesis of bodily extended emotions. In addition, extended emotion holds that the carrier of emotion not only exists in the organism, but also transcends the boundary of skin and contains external resources carrying emotions; this is known as the hypothesis of environmentally extended emotions. Emotions are individual regardless of whether they are physically or environmentally extended. However, in many conditions, emotions are not individual, but achieved through multiple people. In such cases, the emotion is shared by two or more individuals at the same time, the so-called hypothesis of socially extended emotions.
The significance from cognitive to emotional extension is that the entire mental process of human beings, including human conscious experience, can transcend the boundaries of the head and skin and extend to the external resources available in the environment. This is known as the extended consciousness thesis.
From cognitive, to emotional, and to consciousness extension, mental life transcends the Cartesian gap and straddles the mind, the body, and the environment. The mind transcends the boundaries of the skull and skin, that is, the place of the mind is not entirely confined to the brain, and the latter is not the only basis of the former.
Does mental life have no boundary with the objective world? Can mental life spread infinitely into every aspect of the universe? When we say that the subject and the world are a whole and inseparable, it does not mean that there is no difference between them, nor does it mean that there is no boundary in the mental life. However, the boundary of mental life is not ontological, but epistemological, similar to the Markov blanket concept that exists only statistically.
Extended mind thesis shows that cognition, emotion and even consciousness can break the boundaries of the brain and extend into the body and the environment. The cognitive boundaries, like a “Markov blanket”, are epistemologically malleable, depending entirely on how the organism chooses meaningful external resources to establish a coupled cognitive system with. In this sense, the extended mind is bound to be built on the theory of embodied cognition, that is, cognition is a trinity dynamic system in which the brain is embedded in the body and the body is embedded in the environment, and the “body” plays an active role.

Key words: mental life, extended mind, extended cognition, extended emotion, extended consciousness