Extended mind: constitution or integration?

There are two broad ways of thinking about what it would mean for the mind to be extended.Footnote ² One can hold one or the other or both while remaining in the extended mind camp. The first way holds that thinking and other mental activities can include the operations of artefacts as functional parts of one's own thinking. On this way of thinking about things, associated with ‘the first wave’ of extended mind,Footnote ³ the extended mind thesis is a thesis about the constitution of mental processes. In contemporary philosophy of mind, the mental is often thought of in functional terms. Many of the technological devices that we depend on serve functions that, at some level of description, are the same as or are continuous with functions that our brain states appear to fill. What happens when we put these two facts together? One might well think that the implication is that the mental processes of one's brain/body can be extended outside the body.Footnote ⁴ What one antecedently thought was a boundary on the mind, the body–world interface, is actually porous, and mental function can be imposed on things outside the body.

Andy Clark and David Chalmers (Reference Clark and Chalmers1998) introduced the idea of the extended mind in a co-written paper. Since then Clark has been the standard bearer in chief for the constitution gloss on the extended mind, and, indeed, when people speak of proponents of the extended mind as a unitary camp, it is usually Clark's view they take as normative (specifically Clark (Reference Clark2008) ).

Clark and Chalmer's original argument rested heavily on the parity principle which is as follows:

It is not an accident that the parity principle involves a heavy use of ‘part’ talk. The original emphasis of Clark's position is on the functional equivalence of some artefacts and parts of one's brain or, better, the functional equivalence of processes hosted by each. This is not to say that any old notion of parthood can be applied, but Clark seems committed to the claim that sub-processes occurring outside the head (and body) can qualify as cognitive in virtue of being parts of a whole which is a cognitive process. Clark and Chalmer's most famous example from their paper was that of Otto, a man with Alzheimer's who uses a notebook as an aid to his faulty memory.

Here's a summary of the case from Clark (Reference Clark2008).

For Clark and Chalmers, Otto's notebook just is a part of Otto's memory and thus, a part of Otto's mind. This isn't mere metaphor. The constitution gloss on the extended mind is an adventuresome metaphysical thesis, one that conflicts with deeply held folk beliefs about the boundedness of minds.

The second way of thinking about the extended mind claims something that at least prima facie seems much more modest. It claims that one's internal thought processes can be functionally integrated with the operations of external artefacts, other persons, or other aspects of one's environment so as to compose a dynamic system. This integration changes what the mind can do but not necessarily by allowing the mind to bleed over into the external world. The dynamic system of which one's body is one node can function so as to co-produce an external artefact, but perhaps more commonly, the dynamic system will co-produce an internal state in the agent. Whereas the first wave is associated with impressing a function on an external artefact allowing one's agency to spread out into the world, the second wave is associated with the world getting in, with it playing an intimate role in the doing of agency. One's mental operations are open to influence and engage in a continuous give and take with the outside world. The mind is again porous, but the import of that porousness is reversed. The world can get in not only so as to provide raw material to think about but to participate in the doing of one's thinking. The result may be akin to the creation of a network of linked systems or to the downloading of software, but in either case, the precondition is an openness to influence from without.

Persons like Richard Menary who are drawn to an integrationist gloss on the extended mind typically don't put much weight on the idea that things outside the body can be ‘parts’ of the mind or that the relationship between a mind and the relevant external resources is one of constitution (cf. Menary (Reference Menary2007) ). On a Clark-style extension of the mind, you have a hard core of agency centred in the embodied agent and then one builds outwards from there with the equivalent of cognitive prostheses. Clark's emphasis is on the way the agent can organize the world around her in a way that imposes functions on the environment. The integrationist approach is more inherently egalitarian in flavour. The emphasis here is that dynamic systems can exist in which one's mind is one node amongst others and in which a web of interactions produces cognitive results that seem to emerge from the interactivity of the members. Certainly, one has desires and intentions that influence how one interacts with other nodes but so too might other nodes in the network, if those other nodes are agents.Footnote ⁵

A nice example of what the integrationist has in mind comes from John Sutton, who shows how couples do a better, more accurate job of remembering their common stories when doing so together (Sutton et al. (Reference Sutton, Harris, Keil and Barnier2010) ). It isn't simply that one gets a story from a couple together that is equivalent to the synthesis of the stories they would tell apart from one another. Rather, the pattern of interaction a couple has developed over the course of a life together allows the two to cue, filter, or otherwise empower each other to tell their stories in ways they couldn't by themselves. In this kind of case, it isn't that one member of the couple is extending her memorial system so as to use the other as a part or even that both are doing that to each other. The action needn't be centred on either in the same way that Otto's using his notebook is centred in his personal agency. Rather, it is in the interaction itself that the couple's story is made possible.

The strength and weakness of the integrationist gloss on the extended mind is that it is not staking much of a claim as to how one parses the world metaphysically. One might think that the relationships between environments, artefacts, and bodies-brains that the integrationist posits are interesting but that we don't have to revise our metaphysics of what these interesting relationships hold between. In fact, some of the self-described critics of extended mind, taking aim at the better-publicized constitution model of extended mind, have forwarded alternative models that might well qualify as integrationist models (cf. Sterelny (Reference Sterelny2010) ). As interesting as Sutton's example of transactional memory is, one might, for instance, be forgiven for thinking that the critics of extended mind might be perfectly happy to admit that such interpersonal dependencies hold.

One way to see the import of the integrationist position, though, is to locate a worry that is more naturally associated with an integrationist perspective than with either a bounded mind or one that is extended in the constitution sense. A mind that is extended via constitution gains power over her environment that an unextended mind would not have. In contrast, one might think that a mind extended in an integrationist sense may be vulnerable in ways that an un-extended mind would not be. Being dependent on dynamic coupling with other persons or tools for the operation of one's agency renders one vulnerable in a way that Clark-style extension might not. When a telescope breaks, one can use one's eyes. If a rhinoceros has something happen to its oxpecker bird, it does not get to settle for normal functioning over enhanced functioning. It needs the bird for normal functioning. Moreover, the integrationist model makes one vulnerable to influence from the outside. Rather than one's mind and agency getting out into the world, the integrationist model is more a model of how the mind might be porous in the other direction, allowing external influences to shape what goes on inside oneself.Footnote ⁶ While it may seem obvious how a mind that controls additional resources outside the body and puts them to work on its mental projects extends the agency of a subject, there is a defeasible but real worry that dependence on one's environment in the integrationist's sense could diminish agency.Footnote ⁷

The two different glosses on the extension of mind are compatible with each other, but they need not be combined or equally emphasized. One can endorse the idea that we extend minds via integration without endorsing the idea that what we integrate with becomes part of the mind, and one can endorse the idea that we can extend the mind via constitution while claiming that the adding of a part does not have a symmetrical effect upon what that part is added to.

Having laid out these two glosses on extended mind, we now turn to how we can use this distinction to capture a dynamic tension in how ‘the folk’ think about power's relationship to religion.

Extended religion: power and the porous self

The extended mind has been used on a few occasions as a resource within philosophical theology (cf., in a Christian vein, Cross (Reference Cross, Marmodoro and Hill2011), Marmodoro (Reference Marmodoro, Marmodoro and Hill2011), Arcadi (Reference Arcadi2015); for a Buddhist example, cf. Rockwell (Reference Rockwell2009) ). As a resource for explaining folk religion, the primary precursor to this article is a pair of 2004 articles by Matthew Day. In those articles, Day claims that the external trappings of religion allow individuals to offload cognitive work so that the average person in a religion does not have to reason about invisible agents or counterfactual scenarios. The emphasis of the present piece is different. I contend that the folk across different religions do think about invisible agents and counterfactual scenarios even if they don't typically take up abstract theological topics. The dynamic interplay highlighted by the two different ways of approaching extended mind helps bring into focus how and why the folk do think about these things.Footnote ⁸

It might initially strike one as odd to apply the concept of the extended mind to religion. Extended mind is associated with advances in technology that religion predates and with developments in the philosophy of mind that sit most comfortably with a naturalism about persons. I will claim, however, that the extended mind thesis and in particular the divide between a constitution and integration gloss on that thesis provide a useful frame for capturing a number of neglected dimensions of religion. To see how the distinction within extended mind can be mapped onto religious phenomena, it is useful to consider what makes the extra-natural pragmatically important from a cognitive science of religion perspective.

One of the prominent theories in the cognitive science of religion is that we have an adaptive interest in being sensitive to the possible presence of agents (cf. Guthrie (Reference Guthrie1993), Barrett (Reference Barrett2000), Boyer (Reference Boyer2001) ). From an evolutionary perspective, a sensitivity to hidden agents can help us find a lunch or keep us from becoming lunch. Even aside from one's reaction to immediate stimuli, it would make sense for us to develop a predator–prey schema quite early on whose original function was to help us recognize hidden natural agents relevant to our natural survival but which could be redeployed to think about extra-natural agents (cf. Atran (Reference Atran2002), 51–79). Moreover, again from a cognitive science of religion perspective, it would make sense that early applications of this schema would depict extra-natural agents as being psychologically salient in virtue of their potential influence on survival. They have the power to kill, protect, or provide (Boyer (Reference Boyer2001), 169ff).

One can expect interfacing with the extra-natural to be fraught with vagueness over boundaries that do not normally apply in the natural order. The extra-natural may manifest itself visibly, but cross-culturally, it is a realm whose actors and forces are supposed to be, if not always invisible, at least often hard to detect. Pascal Boyer, for example, memorably opens his book Religion Explained with example after example of religious actions concerned with agents and powers we do not see – hypothetical witches with invisible darts, visible statues that can receive an offering from a shaman that will set someone's mind free of invisible spirits, members of a Polynesian cargo cult wasting their material possessions because of their confidence in the return of the currently unseen ancestors, and, of course, Christians, Jews, and Muslims praying to a God they cannot see (ibid., 1).

Ordinary boundaries do not necessarily apply to the extra-natural, and it may not always be clear how normal ways of using or protecting oneself from one's environment would apply to it. This vagueness, when it is resolved, need not always be resolved in just one way, and, due to the imperfect accessibility of this invisible realm, one can never be absolutely certain that there are not more ways to relate to the extra-natural dimension of human existence than those one is personally familiar with. This opens up the possibility that either model of extended mind could be the proper analogue of how one can or should relate to the extra-natural. It could be that one can extend one's agency through the extra-natural, and it could be that one's agency would be shaped or even nullified by exterior forces were one's life to intersect the extra-natural.

Imagine a continuum that corresponds to the locus of functional primacy in an instance of extended agency, which includes but is not limited to the extension of mind.Footnote ⁹ Let S stand for the subject and E for the external agents, artefacts, or general environmental features that one is either influencing or being influenced by.

In the middle of this continuum are cases in which the external elements with which an agent is coupled have just as much of an influence on oneself as one has on them. In this context, one's agency and the extra-natural would jointly produce outcomes that reflected the participation of both. This middle ground is consistent with an integrationist position on extended mind like Menary's. On the left side of the continuum are cases where the agent is more affected than the affecter. One does not dominate the extra-natural as a tool but is oneself the affected or even the tool in extreme cases. The right side of the continuum corresponds to Clark-style extension in which one has extended one's agency by using the extra-natural as a tool, wielding it as an extension of one's agency. In contrast to the left side of the continuum where the direction of influence is asymmetrical because the agent is more affected than affecting, on the right side one has acquired an extra-natural prosthetic through which one can affect the world.

We are now ready to put the conceptual apparatus we've developed so far to work on some cross-culturally reoccurring aspects of religion that analytic philosophy of religion normally doesn't have much to say about but which the cognitive science of religion is much more aware of.

Magic

Anthropologists and cognitive scientists of religion who study magic sometimes have a hard time making sense of the dramatic difference that's supposed to exist between magic and true religion. It's something of a proverb in the field that, ‘One man's magic is another man's religion’ (Haluszka (Reference Haluszka2010), 17). At the very least, ‘[i]n polemical writing, your magic is my miracle, and vice versa’ (Grant (Reference Grant1966), 93).Footnote ¹⁰ Though actual practitioners of a religion may see a great difference between magic and true religion, one that often carries great normative import, anthropologists often see them as being of a piece.

Jesper Sorensen's cognitive theory of magic defines magic as the use of special actions to change the state of a person or thing through opaque causal mediation (Sorensen (Reference Sorensen2007), 32), a definition which he realizes captures both a variety of endorsed practices of religious communities as well as prohibited ones. Nonetheless, in his review of traditional approaches to magic, he acknowledges that these theories emphasize the way ‘magic’ helps draw a line between permissible actions that are consistent with the common good and actions that are outside the bounds, and he acknowledges that these theories track a real difference in how the folk think about the different practices.

Again, Sorensen's perspective on this approach is instructive. He acknowledges that it's tempting to think of magic merely as a category of disapprobation, but he himself is reticent to do so because he doesn't see a deep difference between the way people think of extra-natural causation in orthodox and heterodox contexts.

Sorensen is not alone in his assessment that what religious people mark as being outside the bounds, as ‘magic’ (or black magic) is sometimes hard to differentiate from beliefs and practices that are considered to be within bounds. For example, Lindeman and Svedholm (Reference Lindeman and Svedholm2012) make the case that there is no difference relevant to study in cognitive psychology between the concepts of the ‘paranormal, magical, religious, and superstitious’. The fact that these categories are functionally equivalent from the perspective of a certain kind of psychological investigation does not, of course, mean that these concepts are used in an equivalent way by religious practitioners.

As Ann Taves puts it, building in part on Lindeman and Svedholm's meta-analysis,

D. S. Farrer finds this folk understanding of the difference between magic and religion to be enshrined in descriptive anthropology.

This very quotation, however, comes from the introduction of a volume on ‘war magic’. Practices of inflicting and warding off harm that cross the boundary between the intra- and extra-religious are covered from around the world – self-mutilating exorcists in Singapore, the use of spirit siblings to protect and harm in Java, the reputation of highland persons for dark magic in the Jambi highlands of Sumatra, etc. The clearest example for our purposes, though, of the way in which the magic–religion boundary can be perspectival comes from an article in that volume by Zeljko Jokic concerning Yanomami shamans in Venezuela (Jokic (Reference Jokic2014) ). Shamans in this context are tasked with using and fending off cannibalistic spirits called hekura. The hekura demand human flesh, and inflicting them on other tribes is a means of protecting one's own. A hekura is going to get its pound of flesh after all. Nonetheless, suffering a death as a consequence of the ritual actions of someone else's shaman is thought of as an evil that must be avenged.Footnote ¹¹

The Yanomami case illustrates how the line between magic and religious ritual can be blurred to the point that moral opprobrium directed at practitioners of magic seems a bit hypocritical. The case is an extreme one, but it helps to underline why anthropologists and cognitive scientists of religion puzzle over the way in which magic, witchcraft, and the like are used as negative categories to define the religious community when the outsider doesn't always see a big difference between what lies on either side of the line.

How might our reflections about extended mind help us think about the cross-cultural relationship between religion and magic? All religion involves navigating the interface between one's natural life and the extra-natural so as to promote one's interests. The motive for engaging with religion in the first place has to be that one thinks it has or might have power to make one's life better. A religion may shape what one's interests are, of course, a consideration that we will return to later in the article, but a religion that is not experienced as providing benefits that make sense of its costs will wilt. Although any given individual may participate in religion out of cultural allegiance or social pressure, in the absence of a widespread belief that religion provides benefits in excess of its costs that social pressure would abate and cultural allegiance would find another way to be expressed.Footnote ¹² Magic, of course, holds out the promise of providing extra-natural benefit but in a different way.

Magic, I propose, is a category that tends to be introduced into religious discourse to reflect the felt threat of people moving too far to the right on the continuum of extended agency. The more someone relates to the extra-natural in the constitution way, by appending it to an otherwise unaffected core, the greater the threat that he or she will do so at the expense of other people. The threat of magic stems from the very reason people typically involve themselves in religion in the first place, namely, they think it can be used to improve one's life. The pragmatic element in religion is what introduces the conceptual possibility of someone finding a way to achieve his or her pragmatic ends without also prioritizing the common good.Footnote ¹³ One can always posit that special powers exist that are only used by necromancers or witchdoctors or heathens or what have you, but because sanctioned powers can, in principle, be used to cross a line into unsanctioned territory, there is always the potential for contested cases, for disagreement on how the motivated behaviour of the individual does or does not respect the common good.

For example, in Charles Taylor's Secular Age, colourful folk practices in the Christian Middle Ages that are woven into the text vary considerably in their apparent connection to the common good. On the one hand, one has ‘beating the bounds’ in which the host and relics would be carried around the perimeter of a village to ward off evil (Taylor (Reference Taylor2007), 42). On the other hand, a mass for the dead could be done for a living person in order to harm them (ibid., 72). Between these, persons might try to take the host with them for private ends (e.g. to use it as a love charm or instrument of healing (ibid., 72, 91) ). Alternatively, recall our prior example of the Yanomami shamans. The power to direct a hekura spirit to kill someone can be directed by a concern for the common good, as when a shaman claims to have re-directed such a spirit away from one's people to another tribe, but such a power isn't like the power to heal. It doesn't sit unambiguously on the side of the common good, especially if one takes oneself to have been victimized by some other tribe's shaman.

The desire to invoke the extra-natural for pragmatic ends will exert a consistent pull towards the right-side of our continuum, a desire to control and appropriate this power. The right-side of the continuum, one will recall, is the side parallel to a Clark-style extension of the mind in which one's agency imposes a function on tools outside the body-bound agent. The prohibition on magical action acts as a counterweight against this attraction rightward.

The prohibition on moving too far rightward on the continuum raises a quandary, however. Given people's desire for effective interactions with the extra-natural, interactions that promote people's interests, how do we promote such interactions or convince people that religion does promote their interests while protecting society from the dangerous pull rightward? The answer that many religions seem to have landed on has to do with the vetting of a special class of human agent who can be trusted to mediate this relationship. This brings us to the second dimension of religion to which we will apply our conceptual frame.

Special agents

A recurring feature in religion is that of some kind of class system.Footnote ¹⁴ There are ordinary people, the laity, on the one hand and then there are priests, shamans, monks, elders, etc. on the other side. The resources we have borrowed from the extended mind help us to understand the ubiquity of such special human agents. Members of these higher classes are supposed to have a better connection with the extra-natural than normal human beings and to be more able to bring the benefits of the extra-natural to normal people, thus lessening the temptation of rogue individuals to try to move right on the continuum by themselves. They are better able to extend their agency than the average person, and thus are better positioned to bring the benefit of the extra-natural to the folk. In some cases, the human intermediary may be located in the sphere of the extra-natural, such as in the case of ancestors in ancestor worship. Even in that case, the intermediary is tied to this world through kin membership and their formerly natural, human way of being.

Robert McCauley and Thomas Lawson's well-regarded theory of religious cognition within the cognitive science of religion is based on analysing action schemata (e.g. agent + instrument + patient = action) in order to model how religious people think about their rituals (McCauley & Lawson (Reference McCauley and Lawson2002) ). A ‘special agent ritual’ is one in which the extra-natural element brings about an effect rather than receiving something from the devotee, that is, the extra-natural occupies the agent slot in the schema (cf. ibid., 155–171). Interestingly, it's hard to account for many of the religious rituals that are supposed to qualify as special agent rituals without interposing a special human agent into the schema. For example, in an exorcism the schema should look something like this ‘God → exorcist → holy water/prayer/etc. → possessed person’. One can't really remove the exorcist from this schema and have the same ritual. Special agent rituals, then, quite often involve the interposition of a special human agent as a second agent in the schema or, in some cases, an extra instrument.Footnote ¹⁵

The member of the special class is supposed to be vetted, but the means of vetting can be various including some combination of hereditary authority, special training, special knowledge, initiation rituals with a transformative function, or, as in the case of the ancestor, a special state of being. The members of the special class are also supposed to be ‘safe’ in some way that assuages the worry that they will abuse their special connection with the extra-natural to exploit others instead of helping them. Think of the vows of the Catholic monk to celibacy, poverty, and obedience. These vows are supposed to communicate that the monk is safe. He is not someone who is going to compete with the layman for worldly goodies or worse extort such goods in exchange for protection.Footnote ¹⁶

Perhaps, as in the case of séance, the special human agent has special abilities to act as a portal to the extra-natural but does not necessarily have any special abilities to dominate the extra-natural and bend it to his or her will. Having special powers that do not include the ability to direct those powers towards a particular end would potentially make the special human agent safe. Thus, the medium presents an interesting case. On the one hand, the medium has a greater ability to connect with the extra-natural, suggesting she should be to the right of the average person on the continuum. Yet, the nature of the medium's power is more passive than in other cases of special human agent, which suggests more of a leftward placement. This ambiguity helps to explain why in contexts like the Afro-Brazilian cults that Emma Cohen (Reference Cohen2007) studies, people flock to mediums on the one hand, instead of just trying to connect with the dead themselves, and yet new mediums pop up all the time as well, suggesting that this more passive way of exercising extra-natural power is seen as more inherently bridgeable than other forms of special human mediation one finds in religion.

In general, then, the special agent is supposed to hover somewhere in the middle of the continuum of extended agency even if they must be to the right of the folk. To the extent that the special agent veers too far to the right on the continuum, the laity will start fearing that he or she isn't safe, and thus a veer rightward will have to be paired with more extreme demonstrations of safety.Footnote ¹⁷ To the extent that the special agent is too far to the left, however, the folk may start to feel the special agent is unnecessary.

Though they have to negotiate a balance between these two pitfalls, between safety and unique potency, special human agents play an important role. The special connection that these agents are supposed to have with the extra-natural removes the need of moving rightward oneself and undercuts the idea that an average person would be successful in doing so insofar as one would have to transcend the powers of a revered figure like a shaman, elder, or monk. Deferring to a special human agent when it comes to the Clark-style extension of power does not, however, imply that the folk will undertake Menary-style integration vis-à-vis the extra-natural.

Other-worldliness and internalization

The continuum of extended religious agency is not one that anyone has to be on. One can opt out by being opposed to religion, of course, but one can also simply be indifferent to the beliefs, practices, or material support of religion. A religion is a complex of behaviours, beliefs, and affective dispositions, and it can only survive if it is being internalized in a potent enough manner to propagate itself. Rogue uses of the extra-natural, then, are not the only threat to its existence and stability. Indifference and under-participation are an equally important threat even from within a religious perspective. It is often the responsibility of the special human agents from the last section, not only to disincentivize moving rightward on the continuum but to facilitate the internalization of religion.

The laity, then, is expected to occupy a position more on the left-side of the continuum relative to the special agent not only because they are not supposed to move to the right-side of the continuum but also because religious authorities need to have a formative effect on what the laity think and desire. A religion might be able to survive if a special human agent cannot actually exert any power over the extra-natural (trivially so if naturalism is true), but it will not survive if the laity opt out of participation in and propagation of the religion.

Anthropologist Harvey Whitehouse (Reference Whitehouse2004) identifies what he calls the doctrinal and the imagistic modes of religion. The doctrinal mode relies more on the repetition and drilling of propositional material. Repeated hearing, speaking, or reading of the propositions definitive of a religion is supposed to infiltrate and structure the religious mind via semantic memory. The problem that Whitehouse identifies for this mode of religion is attrition through boredom. In the doctrinal mode, a kind of unity is promoted at the level of explicit semantic encoding, but at the risk of an under-motivated laity. The risk here is that a unified religion at the intellectual level will undercut itself with poor internalization at the conative and behavioural levels.Footnote ¹⁸

The imagistic mode is much more given to sensory pageantry and the promotion of the ecstatic experience.Footnote ¹⁹ Whereas the doctrinal mode promotes internalization of religion through the semantic memory, the imagistic mode operates at the level of the concrete, sensory, and episodic. The problem that Whitehouse notes for the imagistic mode is that ecstatic experience has to be ratcheted up like a drug if it is to continue to have the same motivating effect. It is also hard to regulate how individuals will encode their experiences in this mode and what implications they may derive from them. Whereas the more sentential, discursive style of the doctrinal mode allows for a great deal of top-down regulation, the imagistic mode is more inherently unstable. One might say that the imagistic mode has more success at internalizing religion at the conative and behavioural level, at least in the short term, but has little scope for promoting internalization at the intellectual level.

A problem that one can anticipate from our discussion of magic and religious hierarchies is that, just as the doctrinal mode will tend towards a poorly motivated and incorporated laity, so the empowerment of and poor regulation of the laity in the imagistic mode will threaten the stability of the laity–special agent structure. An increased ability to motivate the laity comes with the danger that they will see the laity–special agent gap as bridgeable. After all, the imagistic mode promotes a feeling of direct contact with the extra-natural. A leader can always reinforce this gap by showing that he or she can deliver a more powerful experience to the laity, but this, again, risks a cycle of escalation that is hard to maintain. Either the special agent will seem too far to the left to command religious authority, or the special agent will appear dangerously far to the right.

Given the problematic features inherent to both the doctrinal and imagistic modes, one is left wondering whether there is a way of giving the laity a motivation to stay without reintroducing the problematic dynamics related to inappropriate pursuits of power. I think there is. At one time, it was common to lump some of the world's largest organized religions together under the label of ‘Axial’ or ‘post-Axial’ religions. John Hick famously hypothesized that the other-worldly concern of at least Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism with some form of salvation was reflective of some common insight between them.Footnote ²⁰ The viability of a pre-/post-Axial taxonomy of religion apart, there is no denying that a cross-cultural similarity of some religions, including broad swathes of many of the major world religions, is a de-emphasis of this world's goods in favour of either goods reserved for a future time at some distance from the present or else some internal, spiritual good.

The emphasis of the cognitive science of religion on considerations amenable to evolutionary analysis makes the prevalence of other-worldliness a bit of a puzzle. As referenced previously, cognitive science explanations of religion typically start from how adaptive faculties and behaviours can be co-opted to provide the foundation of religion. For example, perhaps a sensitivity to hidden predators, prey, or rivals could lead to the hypothesizing of gods (cf. Guthrie (Reference Guthrie1993) ). Likewise, seeing the world as designed might help one think of adaptive uses for potential tools. Thinking of invisible agents as morally interested might help stabilize more complicated social groups to prevent free-riding. Religious behaviours might get used as costly signalling devices to weed out free-riders more directly (cf. Bulbulia Reference Bulbulia2008), and so on.

Given the this-worldly orientation of explanation in the cognitive science of religion, explaining other-worldliness is a bit awkward, and it doesn't tend to come up explicitly in the cognitive science of religion. An instructive exception, however, is in a discussion of magic by Ilkka Pyysiäinen.

He says,

Pyysiäinen's comments about religion better describe a subset of religion than the entire class, which Pyysiäinen himself would readily acknowledge since he thinks that what we commonly call religions are actually complexes made up of magical and ‘religious’ thinking and practice (ibid., 105–110). In effect, what he is noticing is that magic always has a this-worldly orientation whereas religion sometimes does not. The appeal of this-worldly goods needs no explanation, but what does he say for the other-worldly?

Pyysiäinen cites two advantages that ‘religion’ has over magic. The first is that, unlike magic, ‘Religious representations are complex, involve counterintuitiveness, and produce gaps in reasoning; all of this contributes to their reinterpretability, making them practically unfalsifiable’ (ibid., 98). The second reason is that theological elites need some way of ensuring their control over their religion (ibid., 100).

Interestingly, Pyysiäinen's second reason underlines the power dynamics I have described in this article and says that non-magical religious elements are needed to keep the laity from moving too far rightward on our continuum. He doesn't specify why these elements would be attractive or effective, however. Likewise, his first reason in terms of unfalsifiability doesn't really connect with human motivation. A doctor or a lawyer can shroud her language in technical vocabulary that sidelines the non-specialist, but opaque discourse doesn't motivate. It doesn't engage desire. Other-worldliness in religion, however, is primarily an affective orientation, a demoting of this-worldly goods in favour of something else.

My suggestion is that, whatever else is true, other-worldliness in religion is an affective, conative solution to a problem endemic to the power dynamics of religion. The availability of extra-natural power that can transgress normal boundaries is intrinsically motivating but also makes for intrinsically unstable social arrangements. A more stable solution is to find a way to switch from viewing Clark-style extension as the positive way of relating to the extra-natural to something closer to Menary's integrationist model of extended mind.

In particular, I want to highlight what we might call ‘left-side other-worldliness’. When one thinks of being ‘other-worldly’, there are two ways to proceed. One can either transform the left side of the continuum into an attractive position to occupy or, alternatively, can try to quell the attractiveness of the right side of the continuum by sanctioning a move rightward on the continuum for some future state. Let us call these approaches left side and right side other-worldliness for ease of reference.

The more crude approach, arguably, is right-side other-worldliness. On this strategy, the arrival of whatever natural goods might tempt one to move rightward on the extended continuum on one's own is deferred. Perhaps it is deferred along with the promise that greater natural goods will be in supply at that time. The prospect of exchanging obedience and the like for a pay-out that is both sanctioned and greater than what would be available in the here and now helps restrict the danger of unsanctioned movements to the right side of the continuum in this life. Whether it's forty virgins, a feast that never ends, or conquest and rule, one is asked to restrain those impulses that might disrupt life here until one can give those same impulses freer rein in the hereafter. The drawback of this strategy is that it relies on people's ability to act in the interests of delayed gratification when the delay may be very long, often one's whole life.

Occupying the left side of the extended continuum may be seen as unattractive because it is unclear how religious participation is helping one to pursue one's private interests. Instead, one is asked to cooperate with the imposition of a structure on one's own internal states and behaviour, perhaps for ends that don't have anything to do with one's antecedent, this-worldly interests. The innovation for left-side other-worldliness is to identify in some way or another the benefit that the extra-natural brings with what one is supposed to internalize. If the price one is asked to pay is intrinsically connected to the good on offer, perhaps one will be more willing to pay it. So, one can make the left side of our continuum stable by identifying it with the human good itself. This move tends to track the distinction between the so-called pre- and post-Axial religions as the religions marked out as Axial or post-Axial typically stress something like salvation or enlightenment alongside whatever natural goods people pursue, even if how this religious telos is conceived varies widely across the different religions. There is some good of personal transformation that floats free from sex, wealth, health, and social dominance that is put at the fore in these religions or those parts of them associated with other-worldliness.

The difficulty with the strategy, of course, is to convince people to elevate the internalization of religion in this manner. This is especially crucial in those cases in which the pursuit of natural goods may conflict with the religiously prescribed method of integrating with the extra-natural, such as in the case of persecution and martyrdom or, indeed, in the case of foregoing magic. Although left-side other-worldliness holds a lot of potential for genuinely diffusing the power dynamics we've been exploring, getting it off the ground requires an education of the palate that would need rather substantive cultural support.

Thus, it should come as no surprise that we find our best examples of left-side other-worldliness in the major world religions. On the one hand, being a major world religion makes it more likely that it will be able to provide the cultural infrastructure necessary to educate the palate of the faithful for other-worldly goods. On the other hand, to the extent that one is able to accomplish this re-education, one thereby solves a problem inherent to the power dynamics of religion, which in turn would give one's religion an advantage over others still suffering the inherent combustibility of a this-worldly orientation.

In conclusion, in this article I have used the extended mind literature to develop a conceptual frame with which to elucidate cross-cultural religious patterns which are both interconnected and largely neglected by analytic philosophy of religion. In particular, I have highlighted two alternative glosses on the extended mind that one finds in the literature, one that involves projecting a functional economy onto the outside world and another which involves occupying a node in a larger dynamic system.

When applied to religion, these two paradigms for the extended mind in turn give us two different possibilities for how the extra-natural might violate normal boundaries. One might be able to extend one's agency beyond one's own natural boundaries, or one might have one's own boundaries crossed from without. I then applied this apparatus to help make intelligible the relationship between ‘true religion’ and magic, the rise of spiritual hierarchies in religion, and the attractiveness of other-worldliness as a means of stabilizing the power dynamics in a religion.

In the New Testament Gospel of John, Jesus famously tells Pilate that, ‘My kingdom is not of this world’. Perhaps Jesus gave Pilate a reason for thinking it would do quite well down here anyway.Footnote ²¹