An iPhone Is an Extension of the Mind

McLuhan:<p>&gt; With the telegraph Western man began a process of putting his nerves outside his body. Previous technologies had been extensions of physical organs: the wheel is a putting-outside-ourselves of the feet; the city wall is a collective outering of the skin. But electronic media are, instead, extensions of the central nervous system, an inclusive and simultaneous field. Since the telegraph we have extended the brains and nerves of man around the globe. As a result, the electronic age endures a total uneasiness, as of a man wearing his skull inside and his brain outside. We have become peculiarly vulnerable. The year of the establishment of the commercial telegraph in America, 1844, was also the year Kierkegaard published <i>The Concept of Dread</i>.

&gt;&gt; The FBI isn’t asking to access an uncrackable safe. It wants to compromise the boundaries of the self.<p>No. These are phones, not implants. The FBI wants to crack encryption, not skulls. Anyone who equates access to phones with scifi mind scanning needs perspective. If you find your meat self indistinguishable from your &quot;networked self&quot; then you need to get out of the matrix once and a while. Some of us, I think most of us, still have internal and interpersonal lives that are not shared with our devices.<p>&gt;&gt; There is no reason to allow corporate access to our minds while vigorously denying state access.<p>Yes there is. A corporation doesn&#x27;t have access to weaponized drones (at least not yet;). A corporation doesn&#x27;t want to kill its customers. It wants them happy and spending. On the other hand, governments often want and do kill. A government does not necessarily want its people happy. Therefore, data in the hands of corporations is a very different scenario than data in the hand of government. They should not be equated.

According to the author communication of information to a 3rd party, either another person, or a smartphone, or a pad of paper, is all an &quot;extension of the mind&quot;. This premise equivocates the contents of a device, to the contents of a computer to a persons spoken and written word. To me this all makes sense that a repository of information that was communicated from one&#x27;s mind can be considered an &quot;extension&quot; of it.<p>He then posits the money question &quot;How much of ourselves should we give over to the state?&quot;<p>However, it&#x27;s a huge leap to treat this like a new issue. Humans have been storing mental processes with 3rd parties since the literal beginning of history, and storing them with non-human parties since literally the first written word. This necessarily existed before the &quot;state&quot; in any sense (as a state requires laws, which have to be somehow commuincated.) This means that this debate has been ongoing since literally the beginning of governments.<p>How&#x2F;why&#x2F;when&#x2F;where the state handles spoken conversations vs written records vs computer records are concepts that have been fairly well established in both US and international law. People certainly hold varying viewpoints, but to contextualize that debate as new because of recent technological advances or the latest news seems clickbaity.

I think this is a good philosophical debate that needs to be explored, however I am not sure how I see the safe argument as a poor analog.<p>On one hand the article proposes that writing something down on paper is an extension of the mind, yet does not even mention the obvious situation that must occur on a regular basis of confidential papers in a safe. These are admissible correct?<p>I still am searching for something new about smartphone vs older technology such as safes and paper, which must have hundreds of years of legal precedent to reference. Even the idea that the safe destroys it&#x27;s contents if tampered with is not new (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Cryptex" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Cryptex</a>).

&gt;The FBI isn’t asking to access an uncrackable safe. It wants to compromise the boundaries of the self.<p>This article brings up the concept of cognitive liberty. The more we rely on technology and AI the more this may become a concern.<p>&quot;Cognitive liberty, or the &quot;right to mental self-determination&quot;, is the freedom of an individual to control his or her own mental processes, cognition, and consciousness. It has been argued to be both an extension of, and the principle underlying, the right to freedom of thought. Though a relatively recently defined concept, many theorists see cognitive liberty as being of increasing importance as technological advances in neuroscience allow for an ever-expanding ability to directly influence consciousness.&quot;<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Cognitive_liberty" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Cognitive_liberty</a>

How many old laws do we now lament for their lack of foresight or for having been written in a time well before technology like today&#x27;s could have even been imagined?<p>Here we have the opportunity to do the opposite. It is inevitable, given the trends in technology, that we will someday be able to directly integrate computing devices into our minds in some way. Perhaps we would use them to store memories themselves, or offload the processing of difficult thoughts or problems. It&#x27;s hard to say, but if you can imagine controlling a smartphone or computer with only your mind then it&#x27;s not too hard to imagine all the other potential uses.<p>We have the opportunity to get it right, here and now. Let&#x27;s not waste it.

There we go! I&#x27;ve been waiting about at least 5 years for someone to write this up. It needs to be carried a little further and the current circumstances will determine what the future holds, but I&#x27;m just glad this has been put out.<p>It will become interesting once the &quot;mind reading&quot; technologies become more accurate though. What happens when you can read someone&#x27;s mind in passing to, e.g., call their pin that has been established as protected under the Constitution. Look for wire mesh balaclava fashions in the future.

&gt;If that is the sole, correct framing of the issue, then society faces a simple question of how to interpret existing statutes in light of constitutional constraints.<p>It is not the sole framing, nor is it correct. The order is not to weaken the encryption scheme, but to override the kill switch, on a specific phone, that will disable the device if too many incorrect login attempts are made.

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I find the argument that the phone is an &quot;extension of the mind&quot; to be really interesting. If you think about it, doesn&#x27;t our phone track our behaviors, suggest words when texting, etc.? Our phones are with us almost every single second of the day and we use these phones and store massive amounts of private and personal data and should we be forced to give over that data when forced to? I do not know the answer to this but this opens up the doors for conversations we need to have in such a fast-paced technology world.

A book is also an extension of the mind.

I see these poor young zombies in the street stupefied by their &#x27;smart&#x27; digital pacifiers and thank heavens I quickly weaned myself off and back to using just a plain jane phone.