Enactivism and the locus of consciousness Against the extended consciousness

In this paper, I examine the thesis I call the extended consciousness, according to which (at least some of) conscious experiences are constituted by environmental events. Traditionally, internalistic (sometimes called Cartesian) picture which regards the brain as the sole physical basis of mind is widely accepted. Recently, some theorists deny this and claim that mind is sometimes extended beyond skin and skull into the environment. However, the majority of them (represented by Andy Clark) concede that only non-conscious mental states and processes are extended. In contrast, 'enactivists' (such as Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, Susan Hurley, and Alva Noë) , who stresses the close connection between perception and action, propose that consciousness is extended, too. By this, they try to remove the mystery of mind which threatens Cartesianism. The purpose of this paper is to show that the extended consciousness is groundless and unmotivated. I examine and refute two arguments offered by enactivists for the extended consciousness: Noë's argument based on 'change blindness' and 'the sense of perceptual presence', and Thompson, Varela, and Hurley's argument based on the fact of 'dynamical entanglement' of neural, bodily, and environmental processes. Then I discuss Hurley and Noë's attempt to bridge 'the explanatory gap' between the physical and the phenomenal by taking the extended view on consciousness, and show that the extended view is neither necessary nor sufficient for explaining the phenomenal consciousness. In my view, the extended consciousness does not contribute to the purpose of demystifying mind. In the end of this paper, I sketch an alternative anti-Cartesian picture of mind by comparing enactivists' and Dewey's conceptions on experience. Dewey's conception is said to be a candidate picture which may overcome the Cartesianism in a way different from enactivism or the extended consciousness