Extended Cognition

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.

New D7000



Not Yet Crossing the Line, originally uploaded by jjvornov.

This is my first processed image with the D7000. Its a popular camera for good reason.

I was surprised when Baltimore’s local pro photo dealer, Service Photo, told me that they had a D7000 body in stock. The camera sounded like it was perfect for me. I liked the D80 size and weight, but its exposure system just didn’t work for me. It tended to over-expose and heavily weighted the focus area in choosing exposure. Sure I could shoot manually, use centerweighted or spot metering, and adjust exposure but I was fighting the camera. I was much happier when I moved up to the D300, but its a big, heavy camera- the biggest I’ve ever owned.

The D7000 is an advanced camera that is compact and light. With a prime on it, its actually not that much bigger than the Sigma DP1 which has been my travel camera. The DP1 as we know produces beautiful images but is slow in operation.

The challenge for me is to follow through with my intention to make the D7000 a real carry everywhere camera and increase my skill at image capture.

Day 1.

Vintage Digital

I brought out the Nikon D80 this afternoon. Vintage 2006. It had the old Nikkor 24mm f/2.8 on it, which is at least 15 years old.



Frog Bell Press, originally uploaded by jjvornov.

I brought out the Nikon D80 this afternoon. Vintage 2006. It had the old Nikkor 24mm f/2.8 on it, which is at least 15 years old.

Exposure on the D80 is as incosistant as I remember it, but quality is just fine and a light DSLR with a prime is a pleasure to shoot.

Andy Clark: Supersizing the Mind

Thinking about where the feeling of consciousness really resides

I’ve arrived at a new destination while reading Andy Clark’s book on extended cognition. My ideas about the real nature of the abstract world now make more sense in a neurobiological sense. The mid is more than embodied in the brain, it is embedded in it’s physical and abstract context.

Value or Goals?

It’s a basic tenet of decision theory that one cannot make a decision unless one clarifies what are desirable outcomes. After all, if you don’t know what you want, then all choices are equal and there is no way to decide. Actually there’s no reason to decide and one should just go with the flow.

But I often confuse myself by mixing up values and goals. Values are broad an directional feelings about what’s important. And since some values are more important than others they are quantitative and scalable. Goals on the other hand are specific desired outcomes generally bound in time.

Goals are frequently artificial and often lead to bad decisions. For example, if my goal is to be on time to pick my son up at school, then I’ll chose to drive more aggressively. I can’t see which of my values supports that goal and the means to achieving it.

Failure

Glen Alleman at Herding Cats has it right:

Doing stupid things on purpose is not the same is a highly unlikely event occurring – a long tailed distribution. The effect on the economy may be the same, but had the modelers at the rating agencies simply included the possibility of a negative direction for the price of homes they would have seen this coming.

I started On Deciding . . . Better in late 2009 to discuss the philosophy and techniques of decision making. I had been introduced to the techniques of Decision Theory through my work in drug development. In the end, mastering the techniques took me in a different direction, understanding the nature of uncertainty itself.

Over the last decade, I’ve had little opportunity to directly apply the analytic tools, but instead have read more widely in neuroscience and linguistics.

The tools of decision theory are a set of models that are useful in making uncertainty more explicit. I remain convinced that our mental models are the primary drivers of perception and a basic neurological mechanism behind our conscious experience.

It makes sense that the accuracy of our mental models is the most important determinant of success. Not our planning or the quality of our data, but how well the consequences of current choices.

Remember to Capture Too Many Images

Painter’s Pots, originally uploaded by jjvornov.

I’m finally getting around to processing and posting the images from the family vacation out west.

I remember thinking when I captured this image that I could create hundreds of abstracts at Yellowstone’s hot springs. But the truth is I didn’t. In fact i’ll end up with only two or three posted images. There was the family and my personal experience of place competing for focus. But I really thought I had shot more images.

It’s been rare that I ever load images into Aperture and think i’ve overdone it. Almost always there’s regret that I didn’t find 30 minutes or an hour to focus on image capture.

Kertesz and Cropping

I was lucky to have a free afternoon in Paris to catch the first full Kertesz retrospective in Europe. Early on, Kertesz made contact prints mostly, but later on reworked some of the negatives using an enlarger. It reminded me of my early days using film when I’d load paper in the easel and move the paper and enlarger until I had improved the composition.

At some point in my digital work, I really stopped cropping as a discipline to compose in camera. Seeing what Kertesz did has inspired me to start cropping images again. I’ve chosen the 8.5×11 format to maximize print area just as I used to crop to 8×10 or 11 x 14 photographic paper.

A crop of a city tableau:

The Sky