Andy Clark on the Web and the Extended Mind
9th November 2010
Via Howard Rheingold:
“In contrast to contemporary arguments that using the web is making people and culture dumber and shallower, Andy Clark advocates the idea that knowledgeable use of digital media might, as Doug Engelbart put it, raise the collective IQ of cultures and extend the minds of individuals.”
Video via ://www.blip.tv/file/433876
(embedded version may not show)
December 19th, 2010 at 5:04 pm
Not a mere Interactionism between Mind and World – Clark’s claim is stronger – mind is constituted by these external artifacts (such as I-phone’s, the Internet, etc.) – But this is nothing new – Externalist Mental Scaffolding, Niche Constructions, Socially-Distributed Cognition, etc. have been around for as long as people have thought; however, our awareness of our role in this “over-mind” has only recently been understood as constitutive – remember, Clark is a functionalist, so he has no biological bias toward the “skin-bag”. Functional organization can be instantiated on any number of physical bases (substrata), the difference here is that this functional organization is expanded to include what we traditionally view as “world” as part of its constitution, which implies that “I” am more than a biological entity – of course, the problem is that we have difficulties expressing this idea in subject-verb language. Consider complex multiplication problems done by 2 or 3 people, in which the work is distributed between these 3 people – the author of the answer provided by the group is not merely the collection of entities, but is a single cognitive being. Yet, how is one to explain that idea in a language that demands a subject doing an activity, this is an activity which creates a subject, but is also created by subjects.