The Extended Mind Analysis

Where is your mind? Where does it begin and where does it end? Does it stop at the skin and skull or, does it extend beyond our body? It is normal to think that the mind including our thoughts, beliefs, memories, experiences, and so on is internal to our bodies as most of us tend to identify the mind with the brain. However, if we try to imagine the possibilities of the extended mind, what ideas could potentially come up may be telekinesis, mind control, or telepathy. If asked whether the ability to move things with your mind equals your mind extending beyond and out into the world, majority of us would agree, that if we had the ability to control things then our mind really does extend beyond our body.

Clark and Chalmers through their essay “The Extended Mind” argues that the mind is
extended, that it does not only lie internally but the boundary of the mind goes beyond the skin and skull.
They provide two arguments, the first being that the separation between the mind, the body, and the environment is seen as an unprincipled distinction, since external objects can play a significant role in aiding cognitive processes. Their example of this is through the game Tetris, using a computer that allows you to rotate shapes when playing the game to present 3 cases. The 3 cases are quite similar in which they have a person sitting in front of a computer that displays various of two dimensional geometric shapes except:
(1) The person mentally rotates the shapes to align the shapes with sockets.
(2) The person can physically rotate the image on the screen, by pressing a rotate button, or mentally rotate the image as case (1).
(3) The person has the benefit of a neural implant that allows them to mentally rotate the image as fast as the computer in case (2) or choose to mentally rotate the image without the implants as case (1). Each resource makes different demands on attention and other concurrent brain activity.

Since mentally rotating the shapes in case (1) is undoubtedly cognitive, the mental rotation in case (3) should also be cognitive, as there is no reason for why the neural implant should return the process non-cognitive.
Case (2) is also cognitive, even though it is a physical rotation and not mental rotation like case (1) and (3) it is not fundamentally different. Since with the rotation button, case (2) displays the same sort of computational structure as case (3). The difference between case (2) and (3) is that the computational structure is spread across the person and the computer, case (2) being external while case (3) is internalised within the person. If case (3) is similar to case (1) and the rotating of the shapes is through the neural implant still counts as a cognitive process, then there is no reason of denying that the rotating method in case (2) would also count as a cognitive process, or as part of a cognitive process. As previously stated, the computational structure in case (2) is the same as case (3) and although in case (3) the computational structure is internalised within the person, nothing else of significance seems different according to Clark and
Chalmers.