I generally end up using Twitter to yell at strangers about world events neither of us can really do anything about, but occasionally I get into weird discussions about philosophy with people who know about way more stuff than I do. This is when Twitter is at its best for me, when it intersects all of my personal interests and gives me a temporary outlet to just think about stuff for a while outside of my own head. Having an external proof of an idea gives it weight, since energy tends to do that when you square it.
Which brings me to the topic of my latest round of “cool shower thoughts”: the Extended Mind Theory. The person who actually brought up the theory was Eric Kaplan, who has a PhD in philosophy from Stanford. Dr. Kaplan also has written for many television shows, which makes him the perfect subject to test the very theory of mind he questions here.
I do not have any formal education in philosophy. I used to do a lot of shrooms with my roommate who dropped out of the philosophy program at Rollins College, but I don’t feel that really translates into professional credentials. What I do have is the ability to read extremely fast; which can make it seem like I know a lot of stuff when the reality is that I will forget 85% of things the moment I stop thinking about it.
The Extended Mind is a paper written in 1998 by Andy Clark and David Chalmers where they come up with this thing called “active externalism;” the idea that objects in the environment can become part of our cognitive functions. In it, they write a little drama about a dude named Otto who has Alzheimer’s and his neurotypical “friend” Inga who hang out at a museum. Otto can’t remember things very well, so he writes down the directions to get to the museum. Inga has a normally functioning memory, so she just…remembers them somehow. Maybe she’s been there before, who knows.
So the argument these guys make is that because Otto has accepted his notebook as an extension of his own memory, it becomes a part of him in the same way as his hand or foot would be. Thus, both people are able to arrive at the museum even though the means by which they direct themselves is different.
This is a simplistic version of what I’m sure is a more complex theory of mind; but for me it is more of a complementary explanation for brain functions being augmented through the use of tools rather than an explanation for how thought processes are directed. There. Sorted.
Now we can get into the interesting part. We can see how personal notes and other coping skills can help people out with memory issues, but let’s say you find a note you didn’t write. What effect does that have on your own cognitive processes? Obviously this would depend on the nature of the message. A simple shopping list probably would have little to no effect on your life, but some sort of haunting goodbye or spicy breakup letter might elevate this event that happened to someone else to a place of importance in your own life.
This is where Dr. Kaplan comes in. To test this theory, we would need something well-known yet emotionally impactful enough to have become a working memory. We would also need the creator of that thing, because only they would have the original ideas that led to its creation. This gives us both halves of the flow of energy: The initial creation; and the many shards of perception that it was interpreted into.
So I want you all to look at this dog, and tell me how it makes you feel:
Now I have no idea what the creative process was for writing this episode, nor do I know anything about the lives of anyone who worked on Futurama. All I know is that it was fucking sad. Even though this dog never actually existed, I am still kinda sad about this fictional dog who sat in front of a pizza place until the dark side of forever. I have been sad about this dog since the episode first aired in 2002, which was nearly 20 years ago. That’s a long time to be sad about a cartoon dog. But it worked! After all, I wouldn’t have been sad about a lot of other cartoon dogs. Goofy could die and I wouldn’t give a shit. You could put the entire cast of Paw Patrol in the closing scene of Jurassic Bark and it would mostly just be funny.
This episode is famous for being extremely depressing. In the 21st century pictographic language of memes, it has become its own separate message that can be invoked with a simple animated .gif:
Basically, everyone who has seen this episode has their own internalization of it. So now I can finally shut up and pose my philosophical question:
If objects in the environment can become part of your cognitive processes, how much does it matter who put them there? I suppose we would have to first define what a “mental process” is so the book nerds don’t try to run me off the highway again. Fortunately, someone else has already done the work.
A guy named Mark Rowlands came up with a little thing he likes to call the “4E’s of Cognition,” based around the central claim that “cognition does not occur exclusively inside the head, but is variously embodied, embedded, enacted, or extended by way of extra-cranial processes and structures.” In short, our cognitive processes are not completely internal. Since we rely on the ability to adapt to our environment to solve complex problems, it only makes sense that our brains would have to integrate the environment in some way. We also know that our brains treat the tools we use as extensions of our physical bodies.
So say someone puts a hammer down, and later you come and find it and you have a nail that really needs to be in a piece of wood. You already know what to do. It’s a tool we know how to use, with a clearly defined function. What happens if we don’t recognize it as a tool?
Humanity has long valued physical accomplishments over purely intellectual pursuits, because for most of human history it was generally a better life plan to be really kick ass at physical labor. The industrial revolution changed all that, and suddenly you could become really successful with just an idea. (Granted, you still need other people to do the actual work.) So at some point in history, ideas themselves became working tools.
This vague notion is the theme behind the David Cronenberg film Videodrome, a movie about James Woods being a sick weirdo. Jack Creley (Police Academy 4) plays Professor Brian O’Blivion, a sort of proto-transhumanist who makes the claim that “the television screen is the retina of the mind’s eye. Therefore the television screen is part of the physical structure of the brain. Therefore whatever appears on the television screen emerges as raw experience for those who watch it. Therefore television is reality, and reality is less than television.” Eventually this turns into a very Lovecraftian tale of cosmic body horror and existential loathing, but there is wisdom in this notion. Television, and by extension all forms of mass communication, is a tool in the same way a hammer is. Instead of nails, ideas are driven into the skulls of everyone who watches them; and once there, they are impossible to unwatch.
I don’t believe Eric Kaplan set out with a singular dream to make millions of people sad about cartoon dogs. Yet his act of creation never actually stopped, since it continues to effect other cognitive processes external to those of the original creator. This rambling essay, for instance.
The maturation of the internet is going to test this theory in ways no human has personally experienced in recorded history. The advent of the printing press made it possible for people who weren’t extremely wealthy to publish books, which led to an entirely new era of civilization. Television and radio have historically been exclusive to the extremely wealthy in our society, but now the dissemination of ideas has been made so accessible that even some random autistic guy can have conversations with television writers and people with doctorates and politicians who get mad at them. It means that a globally syndicated journalist can have a career-damaging confrontation with some teenager who made a casual fart joke.
I see these concepts as fractals, and some of the edges are outside of my ability to understand them. But I am still fascinated by this idea where someone can create some distillation of a concept without a real beginning or end, because it reveals something universal about the nature of creation itself.
The series of events that led to the writing of Jurassic Bark are really only fully understood by the people who lived them. They had lived full lives up to that point, and whatever their motivations; drew on those experiences to create this episode. Their act of creation complete, they send this crystal of experience out to the Fox viewership. Some of those viewers maybe inspired by this creation to combine it with their own experience, which includes watching Jurassic Bark, but does not include any knowledge of the circumstances that led to its creation (unless they watched the DVD commentaries or decided to be a nerd about it).
Now here’s where it gets really stupid:
Someone who had the original experiences that led to the initial creation can experience the work inspired partially by their creation, but still have no real understanding of the experiences that led to that creation, even though it includes watching the thing that they originally made using a different set of experiences.
This could even keep going further, if this newly created thing inspires the original creators of the first thing to create another thing based on that experience, which by now includes all of the circumstances that led to the creation and broadcast of Jurassic Bark, some random person watching that broadcast combining it with the collected experience of their life, and then the experience of experiencing that in whatever form it took.
“No.” you say. “That’s enough of that. Nobody even knows what you’re talking about anymore.”
