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Annie Murphy Paul

2 Apr, 10 tweets, 2 min read

Andy Clark is one of the world's most interesting thinkers, and I'm always curious to hear what he's thinking about NOW. (With fellow philosopher David Chalmers, Clark proposed the theory of the extended mind, and is the author of "Supersizing the Mind," among other books.)
1/10

Anthony Wing Kosner recently published an article about the extended mind, featuring an interview with Clark. It includes a number of gems—such as Clark's suggestion that the isolation imposed by the pandemic has driven us further into what he calls "brainbound" thinking.
2/10

"Intense digital home-working scenarios could feed a kind of isolationist user-illusion, enhancing our native tendencies to a kind of dualism" between the mind and its environment, Clark told Kosner.
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As Kosner puts it, "Looking at a screen reinforces the very notion of an inner self separate from the world that Clark’s extended mind concept explodes."
4/10

My forthcoming book expands on the original notion of extending the mind with tech to include extending the mind with the body, with physical spaces, and with the minds of other people. So I was pleased to hear something else Clark had to say.
5/10

“An awful lot of my work has actually been rather individualistic," Clark notes. "It’s been very much about someone on their iPhone, as opposed to a larger collective.”
6/10

But, he adds, “There is another kind of extended minds scenario"—one that argues that, because thought processes are transient, on-the-fly assemblages, "you don’t actually own all of it, other people own bits of it, and some of it is owned by no one.”
7/10

To focus only on extending the mind with technology, Clark continues, "trades on our (mistaken) idea that mind somehow starts off as an internal thing that then gets augmented with a bit of tech—"
8/10

"—rather than the even more challenging (but I think correct) idea that brains are—from the get-go—organs for the creation of extended systems that get things done.”
9/10

There's lots more good stuff from Clark in Kosner's article, including this tantalizing tidbit: "Clark’s next big project concerns 'the fundamental principles by which material culture influences the mind.'"

Here's Kosner's article: blog.dropbox.com/topics/work-cu…

10/10

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