Wouldn’t be nice to extend your brain with technology? Improved memory,?More acute vision? The ability to see distant places without moving?
But don’t we actually do these things every day with our available technology?
The Path From Apple’s Newton to Evernote
The basic idea was really simple. We figured that no one is really fully satisfied with our normal brains, with our normal memory. Everyone wants a better brain. And a few years ago, it looked like technology was finally at a point where it would be viable to try to build a service to be your secondary brain – your external brain.
This in some sense what Andy Clark means by Extended Cognition.
We view ourselves as a mind limited within a body. Subjectively, we generally feel like we’re located behind our eyes, between our ears. This is the self perceives with the senses and controls the motor apparatus.
There are several hard questions about this sense of consciousness. What exactly is it? Where is it located? Does it really exist in a physical sense or is it just an illusion, a byproduct of a complex functioning brain? Is it unique to brains or could a computer possess it? Animals? Is it dependent on language?
In 1998, Andy Clark and David Chalmers proposed what I think turns out to be a new and useful perspective. Instead of the disembodied mind of Descarte’s dualism or the embodied mind of Lakoff’s neurobiological conception, they place the mind across both the brain and its extended environment. It had seemed to me over the last few years that there had to be some reality to the conceptual world. I think this was Plato’s intuition as well, but he didn’t have a good metaphor for understanding why, for example, mathematics is real. The embodied mind exists in a world where math works, so the metaphor of math is a useful mental model in the brain. But on reflection, it seems that these metaphors have a fuzzy boundary and aren’t purely interior. When I read and become absorbed in the text or listen to music and see the patterns of sound, I lose my sense of being located in my head. Flow, according to Csikszentmihalyi is that sense of immersion when the boundary of self dissolves.
Extending the location of consciousness, the mind, to include objects outside of the borders of the body leads to some interesting ways to look at clarifying values and making decisions. In essence, once the borders of in here and out there are made less absolute, then it becomes easier to understand how abstractions and concepts can be influential in the real world.
And it blurs the line between self and object- whether computer or notebook. Self and other people and organizations. A broader sense of identity.
