The Extended Mind

There was a time where I felt stranded and the future seemed only a vague idea. I had come back home after a year abroad and was considering going to yet another country to pursue a bachelor of engineering. In great doubt over what to expect and thus what choice to make, I felt hopelessly wired. We lived then in the south countryside of France, nature was abundant and the weather was, for lack of a better word, indulgent.

Somehow I started to run and exert myself as my body demanded. There was always a way to be in nature or to be in silence (often both). To this day, I have only felt in short bouts this perfect mixture of calm, inspiration and creativity I experienced then.

Ideas came pouring in, fully formed, thoughts seemed to take this fractal nature, deepening themselves over the course of my stay. I could focus for longer periods of time, it felt in a way as if I was constantly in a flow state. But please, understand I am nostalgic of this time, and so I tend to idealize it. As worried as I was at first, it was in retrospect, one of the most peaceful moments of my life.

This is part of why I am seeking to understand what made this period so great, to access those "deeper wells" of inspiration and energy.

Andy Clark and David Chalmers proposed the thesis of the extended mind (1998), which can be encapsulated in its single introductory question, "Where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin?" In the eponymous book of Anne Murphy Paul, she draws a map of this extended cognitive landscape and the diverse forms our thinking, and doing, takes across our bodies (embodied cognition), our spaces (situated cognition) and our social bonds (distributed cognition).

Movement improves our thinking and each type of movement creates a specific effect on our cognition. In a sense thoughts are shaped by the motions of our bodies. Our memory too, it is much easier to remember physical movements than text for example. Using physical movements to "embody" an abstract concept allows us to understand and integrate it better.

The spaces in which we move have similar effects on our thoughts. Patients in hospitals whose rooms' windows give on trees or nature feel less pain and recover more quickly. Simply being in nature is deeply healing to our capacity to focus, perform and remember, to the point that a twenty minute nature walk is nearly as effective as the drug Ritalin in treating ADHD. Even being in a room with a high or low ceiling impacts the ability to come up with creative solutions, or not.

As influential if not more, is the thinking we offload onto others. Called "transactive memory," it is to know and use the abilities of others when needed. It is a spontaneous happening but it must be intentionally cultivated to continue to benefit the group. Groups in which members have known roles and are aware of the expertise of others perform better than groups without clear, or maintained, transactive memory.

It is not often that we pay attention to this. Just as we most often wonder what we are thinking rather than how we are thinking about it.

If there ever was a time when this is needed, it is today. Change is the eternal constant, yet the changes we are experiencing, and will experience, are profoundly transformative.

And if you are reading this, you are most probably part of the near five billion using the internet.

There is no debate that our technological extensions are totally integrated into our way of thinking and living. I am not here to start a new movement of tech bashing luddites, however, I recognize that we are biological first, electronically extended second. On the other hand, programs, robots and AIs are born and raised in this new land, only then do they communicate with us through our still limited windows into their world.

This gap is not resorbing, it is expanding exponentially. As more processes become interlinked and produce new elements, the rhythms of this parallel spacetime get tighter and more complex. I would say they are impossible for anyone to understand in a felt sense any longer, but if you can, I absolutely need to talk to you.

Even if we all could, what good would it do, to compete with the natives of this world? When by combining our forces and providing our exclusive strengths, transactive memory, there is much more to gain. Unfortunately, we seem to attempt to become more like machines and in the process, we forget how to use our innate knowledge.

We are by nature biologically attuned to the language of the physical world. We have evolved through this dialogue between the micro and macro biology through and from our felt world. This earth however has experienced profound transformations, and yet our organism has not been modified in any significant way. What conclusions should we draw from this? That is a subject for another day.

In relation to AI in particular, this is the missing part of the conversation. The origins of the causal chains that reverberate across the web are only deduced from the data by our models, not experientially known. I hope that you see now, this fact might have been deemed insignificant before, yet it is crucial that its implication be pondered so that the construction of rich data (multisensorial, e.g. sensor fusion applications) brings about AIs capable of vast and multifaceted "perceptions," for lack of a better word.

If we may know a powerful way of challenging our assumptions, of adopting new perspectives and formulating creative solutions to the wicked problems the "real" world presents, it is through this conscious awareness and adaptation of our modes of thinking.

So here is what I hope you keep with you: the genuine curiosity for what is beyond the horizon, the willingness to experience without yet understanding and, to understand what has yet to be experienced.