The Extended Mind

Where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin?

The mind appears to be adapted for reaching out from our heads and making the world, including our machines, an extension of itself.

This concept of the extended mind was first raised in 1998, right around the time Google was born, by two philosophers, Andy Clark, now at the University of Edinburgh, and David Chalmers, now at the Australian National University. In the journal Analysis, they published a short essay called “The Extended Mind” in which they asked a simple question: “Where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin?”

Most people might answer, “At the skull.”

But Clark and Chalmers set out to convince their readers that the mind is not simply the product of the neurons in our brains, locked away behind a wall of bone. Rather, they argued that the mind is something more: a system made up of the brain plus parts of its environment.

Clark and Chalmers asked their readers to imagine a woman named Inga. Inga hears from a friend that there’s an exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art. She decides to go see it. She thinks for a moment, recalls that the museum is on 53rd Street, and starts walking that way. She accesses her belief that MOMA is on 53rd Street from its storage place in her brain’s memory network.

Now imagine a man named Otto, who has Alzheimer’s. His memory is faulty, and so he keeps with him a notebook in which he writes down important details. Like Inga, Otto hears about the museum exhibit. Since he can’t access the address in his brain, he looks it up in his notebook and then heads off in the same direction as Inga.

In the view of Clark and Chalmers, Inga’s brain-based memory and Otto’s notebook are fundamentally the same. Inga’s mind just happens to access information stored away in her brain, while Otto’s mind draws on information stored in his notebook.

The notebook, in other words, is part of his extended mind. It doesn’t make any difference that Otto keeps his notebook tucked away much of the time. After all, Inga tucks the memory of MOMA’s address out of her conscious awareness most of the time too.

Clark and Chalmers concluded that real people are actually more like Otto than like Inga: We all have minds that extend out into our environments.

Accepting Wall-less Minds as Natural

Eleven years later, this argument continues to trigger fierce debate among philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists. There is no doubt that the extended mind is a weird concept.

One reason it seems so strange is that our minds feel as if they are really totally self-contained. We innately believe, for example, that as we walk down a street, we are continuously filming a detailed movie of our surroundings and using that mental movie to decide what to do next. But like many beliefs we have about ourselves, this movie is an illusion. Our awareness is, in fact, remarkably narrow.

One of the most spectacular demonstrations of how oblivious we can be was carried out by psychologists Daniel Simons of the University of Illinois and Christopher Chabris at Harvard University.

They asked people to watch a video of students weaving around each other and passing a basketball. Half the students wore white shirts, the other half black. The subjects had to keep track of how many times the ball was passed by members of one of the teams. In the middle of the game, a gorilla (rather, a student in a gorilla costume) sauntered through the scene.

Many subjects later reported that they never saw the gorilla; their brains discarded it as extraneous.

Inside our heads, instead of making a perfect replica of the world, we focus our attention on tiny snippets, darting our eyes from point to point. We extract only the information we need for whatever task is at hand, whether we’re sorting the laundry or climbing a mountain.

What’s even more remarkable about our brains is that they actually search for new things to make part of this feedback system.

Imagine you are poking a stick into an animal’s burrow. As you poke away, you are aware of what the far end of the stick is touching, not the end you’re holding in your hand. This kind of extended sensation appears to be the result of a reorganization of the brain.

Scientists have found that when test monkeys spent five minutes learning how to use a rake, some of the neurons in their hands began behaving in a new way. They began to fire in response to stimuli at the end of the rake, not on the monkey’s hand. Other neurons, in the brain, respond to things that appear to lie within arm’s reach. Training the monkeys to use the rakes caused these neurons to change—reacting to objects lying within rake’s reach rather than arm’s reach.

Natural-Born Cyborgs


The eagerness with which the brain merges with tools has made it possible to create some stunning mind-machine interfaces.

For instance, Miguel Nicolelis of Duke University and his colleagues put electrodes in the brains of monkeys to link them to a robot arm. The monkeys quickly learned how to move the arm around with pure thought; their neurons reorganized, establishing a new feedback loop between brain and robot arm.

Humans are proving just as good at this merger of mind and machine.

The U.S. Navy has developed a flight suit for helicopter pilots that delivers little puffs of air on the side of the pilot’s body as his helicopter tilts in that direction. The pilot responds to the puffs by tilting away from them, and the suit passes those signals on to the helicopter’s steering controls. Pilots who train with this system can learn to fly blindfolded or to carry out complex maneuvers, such as holding the helicopter in a stationary hover.

The helicopter becomes, in effect, part of the pilot’s body, linked back to his or her mind.

Results like these, reveal a mind that is constantly seeking to extend itself, to grab on to new tools it has never experienced before and merge with them.

Some people may be horrified by how passionately people are taking to their laptops and GPS trackers. But if you think about it, it would be surprising if we didn’t.

We are “natural-born cyborgs.”

Conclusions

The extended mind theory doesn’t just change the way we think about the mind. It also changes how we judge what’s good and bad about today’s mind-altering technologies.

There’s nothing unnatural about relying on the Internet—Google and all—for information. After all, we are constantly consulting the world around us like a kind of visual Wikipedia. Nor is there anything bad about our brains’ being altered by these new technologies, any more than there is something bad about a monkey’s brain changing as it learns how to play with a rake.

Neuroscientists will soon be able to offer fresh ways to enhance our brains, whether with drugs or with implants. To say that these are immoral because they defile our true selves—our isolated, distinct minds—is to ignore biology.

Our minds already extend out into the environment, and the changes we make to the environment already alter our minds.

Source: I edited How Google is Making us Smarter
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Questions left to Answer

As a result of advanced machine-brain connecting technologies, will more people embrace minds as completely unbounded entities encouraging the Hyper-Evolution of Self-Evolution?

When the mind and the internet fully unite as THE Extended Mind, do we become Ubermenschen?

Is the mind really only what the brain does, and in context of this article, employs? Or is it more?

Music as Morphine?

Recent research suggests there is some evidence that playing music for patients who've undergone painful medical procedures may help mitigate their sensation of pain.

The problem in the research comes in identifying the kind of music to play. Some researchers have focused on finding the ideal type of music for all patients -- "anxiolytic" music that is supposed to reduce anxiety and relax patients.

But different people have different music preferences. Music that Jim finds relaxing seems obnoxious and grating to me. Music that I find relaxing seems obnoxious and grating to Greta.

People nowadays are used to creating their own personal audio environment on their iPods. Wouldn't it make sense to let them choose their own music as a way of distracting them from medical pain?

A team led by Laura Mitchell recruited 80 people to bring their favorite song to the laboratory, where they would be paid to dip their hands in frigid water for as long as they could tolerate it. The musical selections they chose ranged from works by Johnny Cash, to The Verve, to Rancid.

The volunteers first dipped their hand in warm water to bring it to a consistent 32°C. Then they held it in a circulating cold water bath at 5°C -- close to freezing! This was repeated three times -- once while listing to their favorite song, once while staring at a blank wall, and once while looking at a work of art they selected from 15 chosen by the experimenters.

They were told to hold their hand in the water as long as they could stand it, or five minutes, whichever came first. Did listening to the music affect their ability to tolerate pain?

Here are the results:

As you can see, people held their hands in the water significantly longer while listening to the music and they also perceived significantly less pain. Viewing the artwork had no effect on these results -- the difference between pain ratings for art-viewing and no-distraction conditions was not significant.

But the artwork did have one interesting effect. The participants were also asked to rate how well they were able to distract themselves from the pain. Now the effect of viewing art was significant:

While listening to music was best, participants who viewed the artwork rated their ability to distract themselves from the pain as significantly higher compared to when there was no distraction (again, on a scale of 0-100).

The researchers also point out that there are some limitations to their study. If you undergo a surgery procedure or are experiencing chronic pain, there's no way to escape it. If you're a real patient, you can never just remove your hand from the frigid water to remove the pain, and in these circumstances music may have a different effect.

But in any case, it seems clear that allowing patients to choose their own music while experiencing pain does indeed go a long way toward mitigating that pain. For it certainly makes intuitive sense that putting patients in a pleasant environment where they have some degree of control would be a good start to helping reduce their experience of pain.

Source: Music, Art & the Perception of Pain

Classic Donovan & Bob Dylan

God is a Verb

Here is God's purpose-
for God, to me, it seems,
is a verb
not a noun,
proper or improper;
is the articulation
not the art, objective or subjective;
is loving,
not the abstraction "love" commanded or entreated;
is knowledge dynamic,
not legislative code,
not proclamation law.
not academic dogma, not ecclesiastic canon.
Yes, God is a verb,
the most active,
connoting the vast harmonic
reordering of the universe
from unleashed chaos of energy.
And there is born unheralded
a great natural peace,
not out of exclusive
pseudo-static security
but out of including, refining, dynamic balancing.
Naught is lost.
Only the false and nonexistent are dispelled.

-Buckminster Fuller-

The Auto Engine of the Future?

Why not make it a condition for the Big Three to have to invest a certain percentage of their income to ideas such as these which show real promise and are already set for testing?
--
Brickley Engine, The

By CLIVE THOMPSON

The auto industry worldwide is scrambling for ways to make cars consume less gas, but mostly it pursues the same few concepts — like making cars lighter and smaller, using alternative fuels or creating hybrid designs that use electricity. Mike Brickley has another idea: why not rethink the internal-combustion engine itself?

Five years ago, Brickley, a self-taught “engine inventor” in Austin, Tex., decided to give it a try. He realized that one of the biggest drags on engine efficiency is friction: whenever two parts interact with each other, they generate heat and drain energy out of the system. So he began designing a new type of engine that reduced friction by doing away with several traditional parts. In the Brickley Engine — as he calls it — there are no piston skirts and several fewer crankshaft and crankpin bearings.

Thomas Porostocky

What’s more, the cylinders are connected through a pinned joint that rotates a comparatively small amount. The resulting device has a curious, flattened appearance: two sets of pistons face away from each other and punch in opposite directions, joining in the center to drive the engine’s shaft.

This configuration produces 35 percent less friction than a regular engine. Brickley projects that this would give the engine up to 20 percent better mileage than a regular car.

If you were to burn diesel fuel in the Brickley Engine, it would use almost 50 percent less fuel than a normal gas-powered engine, with greatly reduced emissions. “It’ll work in anything that burns fuel — trains, tractors, automobiles, you name it,” he says.

A nation of Brickley-equipped vehicles could satisfy the Kyoto Protocol’s demands for greenhouse-gas reduction several years in advance.

Brickley received a patent for the engine last year and this year began working on a prototype to place in a compact car — to prove that his design performs as well as his calculations predict

But one big question remains: Can Detroit really embrace such a weird new engine — especially when the Big Three are collapsing? “It’s not great timing,” Brickley admits. In the quest for fuel efficiency, the real engineering challenges may not be physics but politics.

Source: Year in Ideas 2008

A Bright Future? What to Expect from the Next 40 Years on Earth

A brief summary of ideas laid out in a new futurist book, Technology’s Promise: Expert Knowledge on the Transformation of Business and Society, by William E. Halal:

2010: The World Online. The decade should continue to focus on intelligent advances in information systems and e-commerce. The world in 2010 is almost certain to be smarter, faster, and fully wired, setting the stage for the breakthroughs to come.

2020: High-Tech Arrives. This decisive period should see major breakthroughs in high tech. Green business, alternative energy, and other practices are likely to ensure ecological sustainability. AI should permeate life, and the next generation of quantum/optical computing will permit huge advances in telemedicine, virtual education, and e-government. Biotech should mature, providing personalized medicine, genetic therapy, cancer cures, and other advanced health care.

2030: Crisis of Maturity. Industrialization will reach most developing nations at this point, with as many as 5 billion people living at modern levels of consumption. Although technological powers will be vast, intercultural conflict, weapons of mass destruction, and threats of environmental collapse are likely to grow into such challenges that they force a global shift in consciousness.

2040-2050: Global Order. Civilization has withstood the Fall of Rome, World Wars I and II, and threats of nuclear holocaust, and it will probably survive globalization. The challenges facing civilization are likely to be resolved to form a modernized, fairly harmonious globe, somewhat like a far larger and more diverse version of the United States or European Union. Local wars, ecological disasters, and other mishaps will continue, of course, but limited to the normal dysfunctions of any social system.

Source: Will Technology Create a Wiser World?