AUTHOR=Kirchhoff Michael D. , Kiverstein Julian 

TITLE=Attuning to the World: The Diachronic Constitution of the Extended Conscious Mind

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Psychology

VOLUME=Volume 11 - 2020

YEAR=2020

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01966

DOI=10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01966

ISSN=1664-1078

ABSTRACT=It is a near consensus among materialist philosophers of mind that consciousness must somehow be
constituted by internal neural processes, even if we remain unsure quite how this works in the brain.
Even friends of the extended mind theory have argued that when it comes to the material realisers
of conscious experience, the boundary of skin and skull will prove to be somehow privileged. They
have argued that only processes taking place within the skin and skull boundary can serve as the
material substrate of conscious experience. Such arguments have however typically conceived of the
constitution of consciousness in synchronic terms, making a firm separation between proximate
mechanisms, and their ultimate causes. We argue that to properly explain the processes involved in
the constitution of some experiences ultimate causes need to be embedded within proximate
explanation. We focus on the case of what we call phenomenal attunement in this paper. The
phenomenon we have in mind is most evident in cases in which it is missing such as when one
travels to a foreign land for the first time. The feeling of being at home in the world is a ubiquitous
and taken for granted structure of our conscious experience of the world. It is this structure of
experience we will name phenomenal attunement. We use the notion of diachronic constitution to
argue that phenomenal attunement is extended. Phenomenal attunement we will argue is
constituted by cycles of embodied and world-involving engagement whose dynamics are constrained
by cultural practices. Thus it follows that an essential structure of the conscious mind, the absence of
which profoundly transforms conscious experience, is extended.