Group items tagged

The crux of Carpenter’s insight, I think, is that he isn’t just interested in a privileging of sight over other senses, but a particular way of thinking of sight as touch, of imagining that the things we see are real. On a certain level, of course, we do know that if we look at a row of trees, the “trees” are real while the “row” is imaginary, but — at the same time — Carpenter is not wrong to note that we do tend to act as if these mental bridges are real. Jonathan Edwards’ notion that what God “sees” produces reality gets secularized into practices we do without thinking about it: seeing is believing, we say, and despite all the evidence that seeing a thing is practically synonymous with seeing it wrong, we can still use phrases like “photographic evidence” as if it’s not an oxymoron.

The pen and paper of Feynman's thought are just such feedback loops, physical machinery that shape the flow of thought and enlarge the boundaries of mind. Drawing upon recent work in psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, robotics, human-computer systems, and beyond, Supersizing the Mind offers both a tour of the emerging cognitive landscape and a sustained argument in favor of a conception of mind that is extended rather than "brain-bound." The importance of this new perspective is profound. If our minds themselves can include aspects of our social and physical environments, then the kinds of social and physical environments we create can reconfigure our minds and our capacity for thought and reason.