Andy Clark & Extended Mind

Some of his points:

As our use of technology increases, we are hard put to say the world stops there and the person begins here.

We are prejudiced as we think what matters most is what goes on inside the head.

Most of the ideas were never ours but evolutionary biology conspires to make us think so.

As technology increases, human brains must dance in greater intricacies between symbols, media, formalisms, texts, speech, instruments, and culture. (The mind dances in extension with the world.)

For these and other reasons, to assume a biologically fixed "human nature" may be a mistake. Our nature is shaped to varying degrees by the brain's cognitive activities with something as simple as the words or numbers we jot on a sheet of paper. The words, the numbers, the paper are themselves technological instruments. They exemplify mind extended into the world.

"My body is an electronic virgin. I incorporate no silicon chips, no retinal or cochlear implants, no pacemaker. I don't even wear glasses (though I do wear clothes). But I am slowly becoming more and more a Cyborg. So are you. Pretty soon, and still without the need for wires, surgery or bodily alterations, we shall be kin to the Terminator, to Eve 8, to Cable...just fill in your favorite fictional Cyborg. Perhaps we already are. For we shall be Cyborgs not in the merely superficial sense of combining flesh and wires, but in the more profound sense of being human-technology symbionts: thinking and reasoning systems whose minds and selves are spread across biological brain and non-biological circuitry.

This may sound like futuristic mumbo-jumbo, and I happily confess that I wrote the preceding paragraph with an eye to catching your attention, even if only by the somewhat dangerous route of courting your immediate disapproval! But I do believe that it is the plain and literal truth. I believe, to be clear, that it is above all a scientific truth, a reflection of some deep and important facts about (a whiff of paradox here?) our special, and distinctively human nature. And certainly, I don't think this tendency towards cognitive hybridization is a modern development. Rather, it is an aspect of our humanity which is as basic and ancient as the use of speech, and which has been extending its territory ever since. More

Chaos Theory and Avalanches: Your Brain Is Like A Pile of Sand

So you think your thoughts, you say? Well, if you do, what will you think thirty seconds from now? One minute from now? One hour? Where is this thinker you claim yourself to be?

What about space? You know what that is, right? Show me space. You are wrong if you say it is that which is occupied by the chair, the wall, and your computer monitor. They occur in relationships and are put in something termed space to explain the relationships. In fact, pure space is an illusion. What you call space is instead a sense impression used to filter the relationship of objects.*

When you think about it, you realize that many of our intuitions about the world are only a way for us to make sense out of it so we can get along within it. Making sense out of it is not the same as the way things are within it.

So when I say that the brain--your thoughts, your reason--works in a kind of chaos, don't dismiss the idea out of hand.

Formulated by Edward Lorenz in his study of weather patterns, then applied to population growth by Robert May, and later developed into the fractal geometry of nature by Benoit Mandelbrot, Chaos Theory now has entered the field of neuroscience.

According to those who apply the theory to consciousness, your brain operates on the edge of chaos. Moreover, disorder is essential to the brain's ability to transmit information and solve problems.

"In technical terms, systems on the edge of chaos are said to be in a state of "self-organised criticality". These systems are right on the boundary between stable, orderly behaviour - such as a swinging pendulum - and the unpredictable world of chaos, as exemplified by turbulence."

When sand piles reach a certain height and mass, they unpredictably begin to avalanche. "The brain has much in common with them. Networks of brain cells alternate between periods of calm and periods of instability - "avalanches" of electrical activity that cascade through the neurons. Like real avalanches, exactly how these cascades occur and the resulting state of the brain are unpredictable." More

*Einstein folded Newton's classical space and time into curved spacetime.