58 CHAPTER TWO
in context, or “a particular aspect of world- making involved in material-
discursive becoming” (Garland- Thomson 2011, 592).
While the special contribution thesis either dismisses the significance of
physical differences between cognizers or implicitly pathologizes such dif-
ferences as do exist, the second type of embodied mind theory Clark iden-
tifies, extended functionalism, allows for wide variation in the makeup of
bodies and minds. Importantly, it does not regard differences as differenti-
ating. In other words, it affirms the principle of multiple realizability, or the
idea that the same process can in principle be achieved by multiple means.
Clark’s model places the human body in a larger system comprising multiple
elements with which a body- subject might cognate. This view stresses cog-
nition’s environmental embedding and appeals “mainly, if not exclusively,
to the computational role played by certain kinds of non- neural events and
processes in online problem- solving” (2008a, 44). Extended, as I discussed
previously, suggests that the network includes not only the brain and the
rest of the body but elements of the outer world, whereas functionalism
suggests “the nature of mental states is given by how they fit in a network
of causes and effects” (Piccinini 2009, 513). Here, the body and environ-
ment are “merely additional elements in a wider computational, dynamical,
representational nexus” (Clark 2008b, 49). A whole variety of configura-
tions or assemblages could in principle achieve similar outcomes; what
matters is the functionality of the overall cognitive economy. This thesis
equalizes cognition across different bodies — including nonhuman ones —
by allowing multiple configurations of brain/body/world to do equivalent
work. It also opens up the body- subject to cyborg ontology, which is Clark’s
interest here.
Extended functionalism does not depend on an ideal body, or any body
in particular; it would not distinguish between cognition achieved through
a normative body with that achieved with a variant one. Neither would
it discriminate prostheses from organic body parts, or differentiate be-
tween those who use prosthetic technologies as “disabled” body- subjects
and those who use them for cognitive or physical enhancement. “What
really matters” for Clark “is the complex reciprocal dance in which the
brain tailors its activity to a technological and sociocultural environ-
ment, which — in concert with other brains — it simultaneously alters and
amends” (2004b, 87). Clark’s view offers a trans- human cyborg that over-