Trivially Important Semantic Context
The "extended mind thesis" posits, among other things, that our minds are not limited to our brains or even our bodies, but instead extend into the tools we use and even the spaces we occupy.
This isn't the sort of thing you can prove: it's more a framing of how cognition occurs and where we tend to draw the line between "self" and "not-self."
Inclusive in this thesis is the possibility that we can offload information—memories, but also know-how—into external tools and storage.
If I write down my memories in a journal, that journal could, in some framings, serve as sort of an external hard drive for the computer of my mind, holding information about things I’ve experienced and thought about, but also jogging brain-stored memories of the same.
If I use a physical calculator to compute a sum, that calculator could be construed as a component of my extended cognitive capabilities: the same as counting on my fingers, but a little more complex and powerful.
Another concept, "trivially informative semantic context," pours a bit of cold water on some of the more expansive claims made by proponents of the extended mind thesis.
Namely: we seem to be prone to overconfidence in our own capabilities and capacity when exposed to what're sometimes called "fluent experiences."
In this context, a fluent experience might be watching a video on YouTube or reading a passage in a book.
The idea is that being exposed to information of this kind can lead to an internalized sense that we are more capable and knowledgable than we actually are.
There was a study in which folks were exposed to a three-minute video of a pilot landing a plane, and viewing this video increased research subjects' confidence that they, themselves, would be capable of landing a plane in a pinch.
Piloting a plane is an incredibly specialized undertaking, and it's unlikely most of us—lacking training and abundant luck—would be able to take the controls from an incapacitated pilot and successfully land the vehicle without significant outside help.
Nonetheless, research shows that people who have seen pilots land planes on videos, read about the subject, or even just seen similar things happen in films or on television are more likely to believe they would be capable of doing so.
This belief is almost certainly overconfidence, and that overconfidence would seem to the the consequence of our categorizing fluent experiences (like watching a short video about piloting a plane) as actual, practical, personal experience (equivalent to ourselves having piloted a plane and thus knowing how to do so).
This would seem to reinforce the claim that we use tools and knowledge stored in our environment as if they were our own, and it raises concerns about the disparity between what we know versus what we think we know in an age of abundant and persistently accessible fluent experiences of all shapes and sizes.
If you’ve found value in this essay, there are several things you can do to support my work:
You can become a paid subscriber to Brain Lenses
Or you can support all my projects by becoming an Understandary member