Extending Minds, Shifting Boundaries: ambient technological environments as extended allostatic control

Abstract

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 often working passively in the background, learning about the user and operating without an explicit interface or any sensorimotor engagement from the user. We analyse these systems in the context of classical extended mind work, 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 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 passively and 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, provide a markedly new version of the classical thesis of extended mind.