Models of Minds: Reading the Mind Beyond the Brain

Nick Merrill, John Chuang

Abstract: Drawing on philosophies of embodied, distributed & extend cognition, this paper argues that the mind is readable from sensors worn on the body and embedded in the environment. It contends that past work in HCI has already begun such work, introducing the term models of minds to describe it. To those who wish to develop the capacity to build models of minds, we argue that notions of the mind are entangled with the technologies that seek to sense it. Drawing on the racial and gendered history of surveillance, we advocate for future work on how models of minds may reinforce existing vulnerabilities, and create new ones.