Enculturating the Supersized Mind

In the final pages of Supersizing the Mind, Clark describes Dawkins' ''mental flip.'' Dawkins asked biologists to abandon their focus on individual organisms and instead to imagine ''bodies falling transparent so as to reveal the near-seamless play of replicating DNA.'' By taking such a view, one might see that an organism is just a gene's way of replicating itself. Clark goes onto say that a similar mental flip is needed in the sciences of mind ''to cease to unreflectively privilege the inner, the biological, and the neural. '' In this view, ''[t]he human mind emerges as the productive interface of brain, body, and social and material world.'' Clark is to be congratulated for making this case and bolstering it with empirical evidence. From low-level processes of motor control to high-level processes of reasoning Clark shows us how cognitive processes are enacted in systems that transcend the boundaries of the individual organism. Supersizing the Mind delivers us to a point from which yet another ''mental flip'' is both possible and necessary. In this commentary I will try to describe this next flip and some of the things that become apparent when it is made.