Well, this article was inevitable - first mentioned here). Francis Heylighen has been talking about this for a few years now as has myself in discussing Hayek, distributed cognition and co-evolved mind and sociality not to mention my ongoing interest in stigmergy which I argue is a species of EM.
Abstract: This article explores the notion of the Web-extended mind, which is the idea that the technological and informational elements of the Web can sometimes serve as part of the mechanistic substrate that realizes human mental states and processes. It is argued that while current forms of the Web may not be particularly suited to the realization of Web-extended minds, new forms of user interaction technology as well as new approaches to information representation do provide promising new opportunities for Web-based forms of cognitive extension. In addition, it is suggested that extended cognitive systems often rely on the emergence of social practices and conventions that shape how a technology is used. Web-extended minds may thus depend on forms of socio-technical co-evolution in which social forces and factors play just as important a role as do the processes of technology design and development.
Keywords: cognition, cognitive extension, cognitive technology, extended mind, Internet, linked data, Web science, World Wide Web.
July 17, 2012
Short URL Andy Clark, Cognition, Cognitive science, complexity, Extended Mind, Externalism, Francis Heylighen, Friedrich Hayek, Mind, Stigmergy complexity, distributed cognition, distributed knowledge, global brain, network theory, networks, neural networks, social connectionism, social epistemology, sociocognition, spontaneous orders, stigmergic, stigmergic cognition, stigmergy
I see that the publisher now has a fully detailed page up for a volume that I’ve been privileged to be a part of. The Foreword is by a very nice chappie going by the name of V.Smith and includes luminaries such as McCloskey, Boettke, Gintis, Steel and others. My abstract:
Mindscapes and Landscapes: Hayek and Simon on Cognitive Extension
Hayek’s and Simon’s social externalism runs on a shared presupposition: mind is constrained in its computational capacity to detect, harvest, and assimilate “data” generated by the infinitely fine-grained and perpetually dynamic characteristic of experience in complex social environments. For Hayek, mind and sociality are co-evolved spontaneous orders, allowing little or no prospect of comprehensive explanation, trapped in a hermeneutically sealed, i.e. inescapably context bound, eco-system. For Simon, it is the simplicity of mind that is the bottleneck, overwhelmed by the ambient complexity of the environmental. Since on Simon’s account complexity is unidirectional, Simon is far more ebullient about the prospects of explanation. Hayek’s social externalism functions as a kind of distributed “extra-neural” memory store manifest as dynamic spontaneous orders. Simon’s organizational rule-governed externalism negotiates the “inner” world (the mind) with the “outer” world through a homeostatic interface that offloads the cognitive burden into the environment. Their respective externalisms may differ in detail but not in spirit in that it ameliorates their shared presupposition of cognitive constraint. Even though any “optimization talk” for Hayek and Simon is objectionable, knowledge acquisition can be represented by a contextualized stigmergic swarm optimization algorithm that gives due emphasis to both the individual and the environment. The key insight is that “perfect” knowledge is unnecessary, impracticable and indeed irrelevant if one understands the mechanism at work in complex sociality, a stigmergic sociality that in effect augments or scaffolds cognition.
July 11, 2012
Short URL Austrian School, Bounded Rationality, Cognition, Cognitive science, Colin McGinn, complexity, Economics, Extended Mind, Friedrich Hayek, Hayek, Herbert Simon, Philosophy of mind, social epistemology, Social science, Spontaneous order behavioral economics, bounded rationality, cognitive closure, Deirdre McCloskey, extended cognitive systems, extended mind, externalism, hayek, herb gintis, Pete Boettke, self organizing systems, self-referentiality, situated cognition, social cognition, social connectionism, social epistemology, social ontology, social psychology, spontaneous order, spontaneous orders, stigmergic, stigmergic cognition, stigmergy, vernon smith
My chum David Emanuel Andersson has just had this edited collection published. Here is an excerpt from his intro:
In what is perhaps the best-known article in the history of the Austrian school, Friedrich Hayek (1945) asserts that market prices distill and thus reflect the unique local knowledge of a multitude of individuals, each of whom resides and works in a particular place. Because only an autonomously acting individual can take advantage of her unique creativity, skills, and personal connections to others, centralization of economic decisionmaking guarantees that much useful local knowledge is irretrievably lost. It is impossible to communicate the totality of all local entrepreneurial ideas and tacit knowledge to a small group of top-down planners; their cognitive limitations guarantee substandard economic performance (Hayek, 1952). We should therefore not be surprised that it is valuable to possess ‘‘knowledge of people, of local conditions, and special circumstances’’ (Hayek, 1945, p. 522). Given the great number of citations to Hayek (1945) in the general economics literature, it would require no great stretch of the imagination to imagine that Hayek – and by extension the Austrian school – had set in motion a way of theorizing about economic phenomena that later gave rise to theories about knowledge spillovers, urbanization economies, and local social networks. But this was not to be. There are virtually no references to Hayek or any other Austrian economist in the spatial economics literature prior to the year 2000. The lack of interest in Austrian economics among spatial economists was reciprocated by a similar lack of interest in spatial economics among self-professed Austrians. To my knowledge, Pierre Desrochers (1998) wrote the first explicitly Austrian contribution that deals exclusively with spatial economic phenomena. In spite of this historical disconnect, Austrian ideas have entered the spatial economics, economic geography, and urban planning literatures because of the close parallels between the influential ideas of the urbanist Jane Jacobs and Austrian market process theory. While Jacobs (1961) does not refer to Hayek or any other Austrian, her Death and Life of Great American Cities at times reads like an Austrian theory of urban planning: [N]obody, including the planning commission, is capable of comprehending places within the city other than in either generalized or fragmented fashion. They do not even have the means of gathering and comprehending the intimate, many-sided information required, partly because of their own unsuitable structural inadequacies in other departments. Here is an interesting thing about coordination both of information and of action in cities, and it is the crux of the matter: The principal coordination needed comes down to coordination among different services within localized places. This is at once the most difficult kind of coordination, and the most necessary. (Jacobs, 1961, quoted in Ikeda, 2006, p. 22) With her emphases on (implicit) methodological individualism, the importance of local knowledge, and complex evolving orders, Jacobs provides a rich source of insights for those who wish to combine Austrian economic theory with a dynamic approach to agglomeration economies. Such a dynamic approach focuses on entrepreneurial processes rather than on idealized equilibrium states. Unsurprisingly, both Hayek and Jacobs figure prominently in this volume. But they are far from the only influences. This book is a collection of 13 essays that address spatial aspects of the market process from refreshingly diverse approaches. They range from the extension of Austrian theory to spatial phenomena over hybrid combinations of ideas from distinct traditions to state-of-the-art spatial models that integrate Austrian concepts such as ‘‘roundaboutness’’ or entrepreneurial innovation.
June 22, 2012
Short URL Austrian School, Friedrich Hayek, Hayek, Jane Jacobs, Social Sciences complex adaptive systems, complexity, David Emanuel Andersson, distributed cognition, distributed knowledge, individualism, liberalism, philosophy of economics, philosophy of social science, social epistemology, spatial economics, spontaneous orders
The publisher has now put up a webpage for this volume.
June 14, 2012
Short URL Austrian School, Cognition, Deirdre McCloskey, Economics, Epistemology, Friedrich Hayek, Herbert Gintis, Herbert Simon, Peter Boettke behavioral economics, complexity, distributed cognition, distributed knowledge, extended mind, externalism, social epistemology, spontaneous orders, stigmergic, stigmergic cognition, stigmergy
Sandel plugging his latest. The journalist’s quote below has much resonance to me.
Even to a toddler’s mind, the logic of the transaction was evidently clear – if he had to be bribed, then the potty couldn’t be a good idea – and within a week he had grown so suspicious and upset that we had to abandon the whole enterprise.
June 4, 2012
Short URL Free market, Market economy, Michael Sandel, Sandel adam smith, empathy, ethics, freedom, hayek, liberalism, libertarianism, liberty, moral philosophy, moral psychology, philosophy of economics, philosophy of social science, political philosophy, spontaneous orders
This is a highly unusual collection worth checking out, co-edited by the very excellent Dagfinn Føllesdal - for the first time here is a work that seriously brings Adam Smith into the orbit of cogsci:
Contents
Preface
Introduction
Contributors
Can we have objective knowledge of the world? Can we understand what is morally right or wrong? Yes, to some extent. This is the answer given by Adam Smith and Edmund Husserl. Both rejected David Hume’s skeptical account of what we can hope to understand. But they held his empirical method in high regard, inquiring into the way we perceive and emotionally experience the world, into the nature and function of human empathy and sympathy and the role of the imagination in processes of intersubjective understanding. The challenge is to overcome the natural constraints of perceptual and emotional experience and reach an agreement that is informed by the facts in the world and the nature of morality. This collection of philosophical essays addresses an audience of Smith- and Husserl scholars as well as everybody interested in theories of objective knowledge and proper morality which are informed by the way we perceive and think and communicate.
May 26, 2012
Short URL Adam Smith, Austrian School, Cognition, Cognitive neuroscience, Cognitive science, Dagfinn Føllesdal, David Hume, Edmund Husserl, Extended Mind, philosophical psychology, Philosophy of mind, Smith, social epistemology, Social Sciences, Spontaneous order Christel Fricke, cognitive systems, collective intentionality, collective knowledge, Dagfinn Føllesdal, group minds, Intersubjectivity, Objectivity, spontaneous orders
Coming soon the first of three papers I’ve co-authored with Dave Hardwick, this one due in Advances in Austrian Economics, Vol. 17
ABSTRACT
Purpose/problem statement – The two most successful complex adaptive systems are the Market and Science, each with an inherent tendency toward epistemic imperialism. Of late, science, notably medical science, seems to have become functional or subservient to market imperatives. We offer a two-fold Hayekian analysis: a justification of the multiplicity view of spontaneous orders and a critique of the libertarian justification of market prioricity.
Methodology/approach – This paper brings to light Hayekian continuities between diverse literatures – philosophical, epistemological, cognitive and scientific.
Findings – The very precondition of knowledge is the exploitation of the epistemic virtues accorded by society’s manifold of spontaneous forces, a manifold that gives context and definition, to intimate, regulate, and inform action. The free-flow of information is the life-blood of civil (liberal) society. The commoditization of medical knowledge promotes a dysfunctional free-flow of information that compromises notions of expertise and ultimately has implications for the greater good.
Research limitations/implications – While we accept that there are irresolvable tensions between these epistemic magisteria we are troubled by the overt tampering with the spontaneous order mechanism of medical science. The lessons of Hayek are not being assimilated by many who would go by the adjective Hayekian.
Originality/value of paper – On offer is a Hayekian restatement (contra the libertarian view typically attributed to Hayek) cautioning that no one spontaneous order should dominate over another neither should they be made conversable. Indeed, we argue that the healthy functioning of a market presupposes institutions that should not answer to market imperatives.
May 9, 2012
Short URL Austrian School, Economics, Epistemology, Friedrich Hayek, Hayek, Market, social epistemology, Spontaneous order extended cognitive systems, extended mind, liberalism, libertarianism, liberty, philosophy of social science, political philosophy, science, scientific publishing, spontaneous orders
May 8, 2012
Short URL cognition, cognitive closure, cognitive science, constructivism, distributed cognition, distributed knowledge, hayek, liberalism, liberty, philosophical psychology, philosophy of social science, qualia, rationalism, social constructivism, social epistemology, social ontology, socialism, sociocognition, spontaneous orders
Readers with some familiarity with the eclectic content found on this website will be aware that the humble ant features strongly. Here is an article that offers a brief and accessible discussion of an excellent symposium to be found in Behavioral Ecology that features Mark Moffett’s work.
May 4, 2012
Short URL Ant, Ant colony, Behavioral Ecology, Laurent Keller, Mark W. Moffett ants, cognitive science, cognitive systems, complex adaptive systems, complexity, computation, computational intelligence, distributed cognition, distributed knowledge, spontaneous orders, stigmergic cognition, stigmergy
Just under a week until the CI2012 shindig – as it so happens I’m busy co-writing a paper and co-editing a themed issue of Cognitive Systems Research on a species of CI – surprise, surprise “stigmergy.”
April 14, 2012
Short URL Artificial intelligence, Austrian School, Cognition, Collective intelligence, complexity, Extended Mind, Intelligence, Knowledge, Knowledge Management, Philosophy of mind, social epistemology, Social Sciences, Spontaneous order, Stigmergy, Wikipedia collaboration, collective intentionality, collective knowledge, complex adaptive systems, complexity, computational intelligence, computer simulations, distributed cognition, distributed knowledge, Don Lavoie, group agency, group cognition, group justification, group minds, hayek, hypothesis of embedded cognition, self organizing systems, situated cognition, social cognition, social connectionism, social epistemology, social networking, social ontology, sociocognition, sociology of science, spontaneous order, spontaneous orders, stigmergic, stigmergic cognition, stigmergy