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Is external memory memory? Biological memory and extended mind

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New EM paper by Kourken Michaelian published in Consciousness and Cognition.

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Rupert interview on extended mind

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The VERY excellent Rob Rupert on naturalistic theories of mental content and no surprise – extended mind. Also with Jonno Sutton and Richard Menary sandwiched in between Rob. H/T to Ken Aizawa for the alert. Here is a link to my collection of  ”Rupertiana“.

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The Web-extended mind

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A pre-print of Paul Smart’s paper.

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Hegel and the extended mind

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Anthony Crisafi and Shaun Gallagher in AI & Society (Volume 25, Number 1, 123-129):

We examine the theory of the extended mind, and especially the concept of the ‘‘parity principle’’ (Clark and Chalmers in Analysis 58.1:7–19, 1998), in light of Hegel’s notion of objective spirit. This unusual combination of theories raises the question of how far one can extend the notion of extended mind and whether cognitive processing can supervene on the operations of social practices and institutions. We raise some questions about putting this research to critical use.

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Review of Menary’s (ed.) The Extended Mind

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Richard Menary’s long time coming The Extended Mind is reviewed here by  Joseph Ulatowski.

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Extended mind, architecture and design

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Chalmers’ and Clark’s extended mind thesis cited in this article from an architecture and design publication.

Turning to philosophy and robotics gives us a new insight into what might be going on. In 1998, A. Clark and D. Chalmers proposed the “extended mind” concept, where the workings of our mind actually extend beyond the brain and into our surroundings. An interplay takes place between our thoughts and internal memories, and knowledge and information stored outside yet within ready reach. Mobile robots do, in fact, use their environment as their memory — they have no stored internal memory, and thus save enormous computational overhead. Rodney Brooks’ Mars Explorer works in precisely this way. Its ability to navigate its environment comes from an “intelligence” that links internal processors with external information.

This implies that the environment is crucial to the development of our brain: our mind is an integral part of our environment, and if we wish it to engage our intelligence, the environment should embody the same degree of organized complexity as our neurological processes themselves. Two possible connective scenarios are thus strikingly contrasted. 1. In an information-sparse, minimalist environment, our mind stops at the skull’s interior. 2. In a coherently complex environment, our mind can extend into and interact with the visual information stored outside. In the latter case, we are situated in a vastly richer information field that drives our brain’s growth in order to process and interpret this information.

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Rob Rupert Papers

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Check out two forthcoming papers from Rob Rupert, one of the sharpest minds around:

1. Against Group Cognitive States (forthcoming in S. Chant and G. Preyer (eds.), From Individual to Collective Intentionality. No listing on OUP’s website yet).

English users are not fazed by such sentences as “Microsoft intends to develop a new operating system” and “England wants to retain the pound as its unit of currency.” We produce and consume such claims frequently and with ease. One might nevertheless wonder about their literal truth. Does Microsoft — the corporation itself — literally intend to develop a new operating system? Does England — as a single body — genuinely want to retain the pound as its unit of currency. More generally, it is a substantive philosophical and empirical question whether groups of individuals (who themselves instantiate mental states) instantiate mental states properly so called.

2. Keeping HEC in CHEC: On the Priority of Cognitive Systems

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Cognitive Enhancement

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An article from The AtlanticAllen Buchanan interviewed about his recent book.

I think that any appeal to the notion of human nature, on either side of the enhancement debate, is tricky and problematic and has to be handled with care. Yes, in one sense we might say that it’s part of human nature to strive to improve our capacities. Humans have done this in the past by developing literacy and numeracy, and the institutions of science, and more recently we’ve done it with computers and the Internet. So, yes, if an alien were looking at humanity and asking “What is human nature?” one of the ingredients is going to be that these beings seem quite concerned with improving their capacities and they seem to have a knack for doing it.

On the other hand, sometimes people say that we shouldn’t engage with these technologies because we could somehow damage our nature or interfere with our nature, and in doing so they seem to have a kind of rosy pre-Darwinian view about human nature and about nature generally. They tend to think that an individual organism, a human being, is like the work of a master engineer—a delicately balanced, harmonious whole that’s the product of eons of exacting evolution.

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Andy Clark – “Do Thrifty Brains Make Better Minds?”

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I’ve just come across this article by Andy with a follow-up here.

Some recent work in computational and cognitive neuroscience suggests that it is indeed the frugal use of our native neural capacity (the inventive use of restricted “neural bandwidth,” if you will) that explains how brains like ours so elegantly make sense of noisy and ambiguous sensory input.

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Two versions the extended mind thesis

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Here’s a draft of a forthcoming paper I chanced across.

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