Shifting boundaries, extended minds: ambient technology and extended allostatic control.

This article applies the thesis of the extended mind to ambient smart environments. These systems are characterised by an environment, such as a home or classroom, infused with multiple, highly networked streams of smart technology working in the background, learning about the user and operating wit...

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Publicado en:Synthese Vol. 205; no. 2; pp. 1 - 29
Autores principales: White, Ben, Clark, Andy, Guènin-Carlut, Avel, Constant, Axel, Di Paolo, Laura Desirée
Formato: Artículo
Publicado: Springer Nature Feb2025
Acceso en línea:Ver este registro en EBSCOhost
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        atl: Shifting boundaries, extended minds: ambient technology and extended allostatic control.
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          White, Ben
          Clark, Andy
          Guènin-Carlut, Avel
          Constant, Axel
          Di Paolo, Laura Desirée
        affil:
          https://ror.org/00ayhx656 School of Media, Arts and Humanities, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK
          https://ror.org/00ayhx656 School of Engineering and Informatics, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK
          https://ror.org/00ayhx656 School of Psychology, Children and Technology Lab, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK
      sug:
      keyword:
        Active inference
        Allostasis
        Ambient technology
        Cognitive niche construction
        Extended mind
        Information and Computing Sciences Information Systems
      ab: This article applies the thesis of the extended mind to ambient smart environments. These systems are characterised by an environment, such as a home or classroom, infused with multiple, highly networked streams of smart technology working in the background, learning about the user and operating without an explicit interface or any intentional sensorimotor engagement from the user. We analyse these systems in the context of work on the “classical” extended mind, characterised by conditions such as “trust and glue” and phenomenal transparency, and find that these conditions are ill-suited to describing our engagement with ambient smart environments. We then draw from the active inference framework, a theory of brain function which casts cognition as a process of embodied uncertainty minimisation, to develop a version of the extended mind grounded in a process ontology, where the boundaries of mind are understood to be multiple and always shifting. Given this more fluid account of the extended mind, we argue that ambient smart environments should be thought of as extended allostatic control systems, operating more or less invisibly to support an agent’s biological capacity for minimising uncertainty over multiple, interlocking timescales. Thus, we account for the functionality of ambient smart environments as extended systems, and in so doing, utilise a markedly different version of the classical thesis of extended mind.
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    language: English
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