Thinking Differently about Thinking: The Mind-Expanding Ideas of Andy Clark

No mention of Wittgenstein, and the argument for the impossibility of a private language. All that material in Philosophical Investigations on how natural language is game like, and an essentially social practice, is highly relevant.

This article reminds me of a sci-fi series I read a million years ago, The Golden Queen by Dave Wolverton. In the series, some characters had a &quot;mantle,&quot; an external mind worn on the head that could either passively impart knowledge to the wearer or actively help them develop a skill.<p>After I read the series I started thinking about notes and books and references as being a sort of external brain that I shouldn&#x27;t be ashamed of utilizing if I needed to. Or maybe more like the secondary storage to my brain&#x27;s RAM (long-term memory) and CPU cache (short-term memory.)<p>That isn&#x27;t to say that I would actually recommend reading the Golden Queen. It was cheesy and campy, but it had a couple of neat ideas and a talking bear.

The important distinction drawn is between the brain, a physical organ that exists within each human, to the mind, which is at this point an interdisciplinary concept which is defined and explored by psychologists, neuroscientists, and philosophers alike.<p>In general, I find the intermixing of science and philosophy an increasingly common situation for those interested in &quot;the mind.&quot; For me, it is hard to reconcile the falsifiable and evidence-based nature of science with the inherently linguistic nature of philosophy. Philosophers have come to this question not due to their knowledge of neurology or psychology, but rather to heap on more theory to the word &quot;mind&quot; itself.<p>My question is: What is the practical use of this theory of mind? How does it &quot;expand&quot; my mind to be reminded that I use tools and props? Since it is clearly not news that all of us use tools and props, is the author&#x27;s primary insight to claim that these are part of the mind? How does that claim aid society?

If the mind extends beyond our heads and into the devices we carry around and therefore into the cloud what about privacy?<p>It seems the distinction still remains between Inga and Otto in other words between the mind in our heads and the mind in our devices because for what’s in our heads we can always choose whether we want to tell others or not but for our devices even if we set our privacy settings we lose control of choice over who to share that information with as soon as we tell the cloud about it

This is a good article for educating people that we need machines and implants to be complete beings. Classic illuminati thinking that people will most likely embrace once cute implants are available in white, rounded plastic with names such as memory pod :)

The &quot;extended mind&quot; seems to me to be an extension of Richard Dawkins&#x27; idea of the &quot;extended phenotype&quot;.

Does Andy Clark&#x27;s hypothesis assert that self driving cars&#x27; neural networks must necessarily contain the minds of pedestrians ?

I learnt that modal adverts are terrible. Thanks.

Mind = software.<p>Pen &amp; Pencil are just environment variables.