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Natural-Born Cyborgs? Reflections on Bodies, Minds, and Human Enhancement
01:24:32
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- [00:01]
A
Okay, I think we should start. Welcome, everybody, to the lse, to the Forum for European Philosophy. Thank you for coming, despite the icy cold. Thanks for kind of having us in its grip. My name is Christina Mussold. I'm the deputy director of the Forum and a fellow here in the philosophy department at lse. And today's topic, as you can see, is Natural Born Cyborgs. The idea being that we are living in an age where we're kind of surrounded by different ways of enhancing ourselves, doesn't just have to refer to enhancement by means of drugs. We had an event on that topic a few weeks ago, but also just technological enhancements in general. So if you think of Oscar Pistorius with his prosthetic legs, but also just think of the phones, the computers that you use, all the kind of technological things that surround us in our lives. And that raises the question as to, well, to what extent do these enhancements actually become perhaps part of ourselves? So that's the big question for today. And there could be no one who's better qualified to talk about this than our speaker tonight, who is Andy Clark, who is a professor of logic and metaphysics at the University of Edinburgh, where he's been sincere since 2004. And before that he has taught at the universities of Glasgow, Sussex, Washington, St. Louis and Indiana. And his research interests are in philosophy of mind, artificial intelligence, including robotics, artificial life, embodied cognition and mind, technology and culture. And as you probably know, he has published numerous papers in all of these different areas, as well as a number of books, including books on printing, embodied cognition, including a book actually entitled Natural Born Cybox, which was published in 2003. And he has also published an excellent introduction to the philosophy of cognitive science, which my students, some of who are here tonight, will be very familiar with. Maybe more familiar than they want, I don't know. Anyway, so it's my great pleasure to welcome Andy here tonight and I look forward to, to the talk that he will give. He'll be speaking for about 50 minutes and then we'll have 30 minutes for discussion.
- [02:24]
B
Okay, thank you. It's great to be here. I slightly lost my voice at the weekend. I think it was really incredibly cold in Brighton. We people that live in Edinburgh don't expect it to be that cold. So if I start losing my voice halfway through this, apologies for that. It'll stay there, more or less. Okay, so in the interest of making sure there's no suspense, I thought I'd start with the conclusions to this talk and work my way back. The conclusion as the title suggests, is that we human beings, probably more than the dogs, cats, hamsters, although we can talk about them in discussion. But we human beings in particular are just prone to a kind of ongoing incremental process of self cyborgization. Obviously this started a long time ago. I saw people walking in here wearing earmuffs. A lot of earmuff cyborgs around today, it's that kind of weather. So the thought is that this is our human nature, that if you go searching for what's deep and abiding about human nature, the thing that's deep and abiding is our tendency towards change, our tendency towards self re. Engineering. I think we've done this in so many different kinds of ways, all the way from engineering your own body by means of bodybuilding, engineering your own mind by means of old memory palaces, and of course all the kind of more obvious technological wraparounds that we use. So I guess the thing I want to head towards is just raising the question where the UN and the rest of the world actually begin. Then if it is all sort of a process of ongoing self creation and cyborgization, how should we think about things like the self, the individual? What's the difference between yourself and your property? Okay, so that's the sort of places we're going to. I guess that one of the themes of this talk is that the deepest, the most transformative biotechnological mergers aren't always the most obvious ones. They're not necessarily things like this where, you know, bodies are deeply penetrated and transformed. They're not even necessarily things like this. This is Spider Jerusalem from the rather wonderful Trans metropolitan comic Seldom seen without a laptop, not to mention various other accoutrements. But I'm thinking by the time we get to the end of this, we'll probably be thinking that Patrick Jones, a Catholic deacon in Colorado Springs, might be one of our best living examples of a natural born cyborg. And this isn't some sort of strange cyborg claw through his head. This is just some kind of trick of the light on this picture. I realize it's just. So. Just a little bit of background maybe to start with. The term cyborg was coined around 1960 in a paper called Cyborgs and Space published in the journal called Astronautics by Kleins and Klein, Nathan Klein and Manfred Klines. Roughly. The idea was that instead of trying to provide artificial earth like environments inside your rockets, you know, rockets were quite a big thing at the time. Why not try and retrofit the humans that are going to Go inside the rockets to the conditions of space. The idea was that this is just going to be cheaper and it's going to be better. Why not create human machine hybrids, implanted electronics, cybernetic techniques of feedback control? You're coming here just at the tail end of the sort of, the kind of 50s explosions of 40s and 50s work on cybernetics, the beginnings of sort of rocket science as we know it today. So the idea was to use these sorts of techniques of homeostasis and feedback control to try to sort of keep the bodies of things like this poor little rat in the right sorts of conditions for outer space. So this rat doesn't have a name. The pump that the rat has attached to it has a name. The pump is rather sad, isn't it? The pump is called a rose osmotic pump. And the idea was that something like this could be, could be sort of monitored, the rat's heart rate monitored. And the pump could be used to sort of monitoring the heart rate of the rat, kind of introduce adrenaline or some sort of vasodilatory substance in order to accommodate the changing conditions, harsh environments it was going to be exposed to. Donna Haraway in one of her books says that this picture belongs in man's family album. I think she means that rather literally. Okay, this is Manfred Klein's, this is a quote from that paper. Manfred Kleins, by the way, is still Alive today. He's 87, lives in Vienna and works on kind of human computer symbiosis, working around touch and music. So he's basically spent most of the latter part of his life working on touch, music and the use of computer interfaces to make that a good combination. So here's a sort of famous quote. For the exogenously extended organizational complex, we propose the term cyborg. The cyborg, the cybernetic organism, deliberately incorporates exogenous components, extending the self regulating control function of the organism in order to adapt it to new environments. So this is roughly the vision of the little rat with the pump, only taken to extremes. I think that nowadays we mean something a bit broader by the term cyborg. So if you go into Wikipedia, bound to know what we mean by things these days, Wikipedia says a being with both biological and artificial, electronic, mechanical or robotic parts. So if you take that as your definition, then you'll begin to ask the question, under what conditions is something a part of you rather than just something that you have to hand. What remains though, and I think you kind of see it even in the Wikipedia entry, is something like the hint of the idea that hybridization requires something like physical incorporation, attachment, implantation, root wiring, something some kind of direct physical connection between the organism and these new layers of kit. It was pretty obvious in the rat, you know, the osmotic pole pretty firmly attached. So it seems to me, basically, one of the things I've been arguing for a long time is that the demand for brute wiring or physical attachment is simply unprincipled, that no matter how you try to cash that demand out, you'll never find a consistent, stable way to do so. Something we'll perhaps talk about in discussion. I think it reflects a kind of tyranny of the bodily implant and that it tends to blind us to what might really matter about these processes of hybridization and cyborgization. And we go the wrong way. So I think what should matter in all these cases is not the nature of the connection, not the physical nature of the connection, but if you like something like the quality of the connection or something, that will be evident perhaps in the resulting synergies, the way that the old stuff and the new stuff get to work together. And of course, it's not necessarily the most modern equipment that provides the best synergies. We can talk about that. And lots of people, of course, have said things in this ballpark. Whenever I deliver a talk like this, I get to add one or two new people to this list. So this is kind of rolling list. So all these people have spoken about these things in different ways. And I can think of several more that could be added already. So let me know if there are other people that should be up there. Okay, so that was a preamble. Sidewalks and space. I'm going to then just sort of run us through the kind of various bits of us. If you like, I'll talk about augmenting the body, then extending the senses, and then enhancing the mind. And then at the very end, I'll try and say something about why we might actually want to care about this. So, augmenting the body. This is somebody using a prosthetic limb, part of DARPA's Revolutionizing Prosthetics program. That prosthetic limb is a. A very nice piece of kit that in that particular picture is being controlled by little twitches of the toe. The goal of this work is to have it controlled by direct neural motor commands. And that's ongoing work that some of you will have seen works in monkeys at the moment. Okay. Dan Dennett, philosopher, talks sometimes about what it is to be a human being and what makes you the human being. You are. And in one of those discussions, Dan says, I'm the sum total of the parts I control directly. That sounds to me like it's kind of on the right track. There's something right about that. But of course it makes us ask, you know, what are the parts that we control directly? How can we spot a part that we control directly over a part that we don't? So I think that Heidegger gives us a good clue to this. You know, if you're doing the washing up in a normal sort of daily way, you don't feel as if you're controlling your hand in order to do so. You just feel as if you're doing the washing up. Now, you know, if you've got an injury to your arm or your hand, you might start to feel slightly differently. You might start to feel like you're trying to control your hand in order to do the washing up. But in a normal state of affairs, there your hands function in as what some philosophers have called transparent equipment. Equipment through which you can, if you like, directly influence the world. You can act on the world with transparent equipment without having to, if you like, go through the intervening stage of consciously willing an action on something else. And that brings us to Stellark, a performance artist. Australian performance artist. Stellark still performs, but not currently with the third arm. So this is Stelart with the third arm, and there's some of the stuff that sort of underlies the third arm if you're going to use it. So the third arm is controlled by means of EMG surface electromyography signals, and those are being picked up off of the muscle sites on his legs and abdomen. So basically what Stelhart has to do is he has to send commands to those muscle sites in order to control that rather elaborate and rather heavy piece of kit, the third arm. But it doesn't feel to Stellar anymore as if he has to do this. Apparently when Stellart first started performing, yes, it did feel like that. You know, you have to practice a lot, but it doesn't feel any more as if he has to control his muscle parts, his sort of abdominal muscles in order to do this. Instead, he just feels as if he wills that third hand to move. So he's got fluent intuitive control. The third arm, if you like, has become transparent equipment. As far as Stelak's concerned, he's very good with it. This is him writing the word evolution backwards, using three hands all at once. I certainly couldn't approach doing that. I guess he practiced that quite a bit. So the Third hand is, I think, a clear case of transparent equipment. He can use the third hand to act on the world without first willing an act upon anything else. And it's pretty clear that we're good at this. I mean, we do this with cars, we do this with musical instruments. We do this with tennis rackets. And we do it mostly using kit that is only held or touched, not actually permanently attached to us. So I think this is already a kind of indication that when we going to start thinking about the directness of control over other sort of new bodily parts, if you like, it won't have much to do with the nature of the medium through which the signals are passing. In that sense, it won't have much to do with the nature of the signals, but it will have a lot to do with what those signals enable you to do. What those signals enable to happen. Okay, so one of the reasons that I think we can do these sorts of things so well is that our sense of where our bodies are is itself a kind of fluid construct. It seems to be something that is created by the brain on the fly in a way that is very, very good at factoring in new bits of equipment. So here's a picture. I find it very hard to keep in mind exactly how to say verbally what you do here, but this is a demonstration that you can try. You need to get a couple of willing volunteers, or just volunteers. Line them up one in front of the other. Grab the hand of the one that's blindfold behind. Use that hand to tap on the nose of the one in front while you tap the nose of the one behind in exact synchrony with the way that you're using his hand to tap her nose as it happens. And don't just do it sort of regularly. Don't go into the sort of dong, dong, dong. Do it sort of irregularly, dong, dong, dong, dong, dong. Kind of like Morse code, something like that. For an awful lot of subjects, not everybody. So, you know, if you try this, it doesn't work for you. You know, you can probably still use tennis rackets and things. Fine. But for a lot of subjects, this causes quite a strong illusion. In this particular case, it tends to cause the illusion of a very, very long nose. And if you think about it, from. If you like the sort of brain's position that makes a certain kind of sense, you know, the brain of the person. The person is feeling the nose tap in there is sort of. They're feeling the hand outstretched, they're feeling where the finger is but they're also feeling, in a very sort of ecologically unusual time lock, something going on, something that they're transducing through here. And in order to make sense of that rather unusual situation, it seems as if a common strategy, it works for me, is to create the illusion of a long nose. You can do this also to create the illusion of a very small waste and leave the rest to your imagination. You can do many things. It's the same technique. Yeah. So the brain, if you like, here, is looking for correlations, notices that your right finger's tapping your arm is at full strength, notices the tactile signal, comes up with a nice explanation. But that shows that your brain is busy trying to compute this stuff all the time on the fly. You're not locked in with a particular body image of this kind, at least at birth. This is what Ramachandran and Blake see. It was Ramachandran, I think, that first came up with this particular demonstration. But there were things like it around before. They say your own body is a phantom, one that your brain has temporarily constructed purely for convenience. And of course, you know, there are good reasons for biological creatures why this might be so. We humans do change quite a bit over our lifetimes. You know, we kind of start off small, we get bigger along the way. Some bits drop off and then, you know, if you're in a kind of cyborg world, then new bits might get added. But just for ordinary biological purposes of growth and change and injury, it seems like a good idea to be able to recompute your body image on the fly. So the moral there, I think, is that the body, if you think of the body as something like the most stable set of transparent equipment through which you confront the wider world, is essential but negotiable, its form and limits constantly being computed and recomputed. And this is good if you're going to have bits drop off or change. And this is, of course, where we come to Oscar Pistorius. You might imagine I kind of hummed and ha'd about how much Oscar to have in this. There used to be a bit more. I didn't want to distract people too much. He's obviously in our minds for all the wrong reasons right now. But on the other hand, they've made a huge impression on our thinking about these kinds of things. So recent waves of prosthetically enabled athletes offer a strong illustration, I think, of this kind of effect. Another one or two, in fact, at the bottom, Richard Whitehead down there is a double leg amputee runner. He can Run a marathon on the blades in 2 hours and 56 minutes. Connor Ballard, the little guy down there is rather cute, taking part in a scoop scootathlon. And he's got all kinds of cyborg kit there. I mean, he's got the one leg, he's got the crash hat, he's got the scooter. This is Amy Mullins, another double amputee. She set Paralympic Records in 1996. She's, in a way, a kind of poster child for the, I don't know, the most upbeat ways I think of being a double leg amputee. She currently has 12 sets of legs and likes to vary her height between 5 foot 8 and 6 foot foot 1, according to the event that she's attending. So she's popular with fashion companies like Kenneth Cole. So maybe the thought is maybe our own bodily parts aren't all that different. This isn't a very new thought. A Persian philosopher, Avicenna, who lived between 980 and 1037 AD, said, these bodily members talking about our normal parts are, as it were, no more than garments, which, because they've been attached to us for a long time, we think are us or parts of us. And the cause of this is a long period of ateris. We're accustomed to remove clothes and to throw them down, which we're entirely unaccustomed to do with our bodily members. Unless, of course, you're Amy Mullins or Oscar Pistorius. So, you know, I think that sort of quote does raise an interesting question, given where we're going, because you can think of the kind of bodily parts as somehow just garments, a little bit like clothes. But if you think of them like that, then you can ask the question, well, if they're just garments, then what are they garments for Natural arts will be. They're garments for the mind, the core of the actual agent. But I think it will turn out that it sort of garments all the way down. And that's the line I'm going to try to pursue. So that was the body. Now let's have a look at the senses. This is famous old work, tactile visual, sensory substitution work carried out in the 60s, hence a very 1960s looking guy here. The early versions of this stuff involved a kind of fairly large. Well, the first versions actually involved a touch pad on the back of a chair and you would sit down, there was a kind of a camera mounted on your head. And it was only that that version didn't work stunningly well because it wasn't inviting the person really to move the sensor stuff around. Perhaps it would have been a swivel chair or something. It would have done more of that. So what happens here is that you have the head mounted camera, a little sort of pokey thing that goes on your back. Like those things that you can put your head in to make a kind of face imprint. You see those rather like that. And the idea is that the camera images get translated into touch at the back and that after a while you can begin to use that information to control your actions. So that's 1969, famous paper in Nature there, Vision substitution by tactile image projection. So Baki Rita and colleagues were working with blind subjects, but subjects who had been able to see at some point in their lives. So these were people that had been able to see but were now blind. Those subjects, after a while wearing this sort of equipment, using this kind of equipment, started to report a few rough quasi visual experiences. There's a lot of debate about how visual these things get, but things like a ball suddenly thrown at your head after a while of wearing the touchpad. You could do a kind of instinctive duck so as to get away from the lumen ball. This is a more modern version, someone using something called the Voice that uses sound. These are some of the more modern touch pad ones. That's about the size of a penny coin. And it gets mounted on your tongue and works by a little electrical stimulation. So there's a soundscape versions the thing called the voice. None of these things work quite as well as you'd hope that they would. The Voice is not doing that badly. But the real reason seems to be that this would be a long and side discussion. But it seems as if what they really need are much more intelligent front ends. So the sort of. The basic sensory systems that we have seem to be doing quite a lot of pre processing that is important to the kind of role that those signals get to play. Whereas what's being done in most of this work is a kind of direct channel in sort of just taking camera stuff and then turning it directly into sort of that vibro tactile elements. So I think we're seeing some better sort of more illustrative results from coarser sensory systems. For example, leprosy patients have lost feeling in their hands. If you fit a leprosy patient that's lost feeling in the hands with a sensor laden glove that transmits to a touch pad on the forehead, they rapidly report feeling sensations of touch projected to the fingertips. So again, this is a little bit like you Know, this is not that different to what's going on in the case of the long nose thing. You know, you're getting sensations that systematically vary as you move your hand around. It's true those sensations are being channeled through a disc on your forehead. But to make sense of the way that you're able to change those sensations by moving your hand around, the brain projects the sensations to the hand. So it's the same kind of effect, I think. And it's pretty clear that the potential of sensory substitution systems is a lot more than just restorative. Instead of just seeking to use these tools to recreate old or lost abilities, we could just change what human beings can sense. There's a little bit of work on stuff like this. In fact, there's probably a lot of work on stuff like this, but most of it is in the military. But some stuff that's outside the military is a field space project. This comes from Osnabruck. Saskia Nagel and others are involved in this. This is very nice. I tried the field space belt on at one point. Basically, it's just. It's just like the vibro tactile, the sort of vibrating arrays that you have in your phone. You get those sort of put inside a belt system that goes around you. You wear the belt. You also wear the little control unit that detects magnetic north. And as you turn around, you get a little. Sort of a little pipe pulse of vibration that moves in the direction of magnetic north. So if magnetic north was over there and I was wearing the belt and I sort of turned that way, I would feel sort of vibrations getting stronger and stronger over here until I was in line. So that's what the field space belt does. They have people wear this for quite a while. There's a paper on this 2005 paper, Beyond Sensory Substitution Learning the Six Sense, in the Journal of Neural Engineering. People wear these for six weeks, constant daily wear. People took them off at night. They had specific training on these. So subjects were taken out and sort of put through particular routines. Most subjects like to have the belt. They displayed improved spatial awareness that would say, you know, for example, if you ask me, I don't know where is. Where is. Where is. Where is this room facing with respect to Aldwych tube station or something like that. I'd be better at answering that question if I'd been equipped with the field space belt for a few weeks and got used to it. If this was an area that I didn't know. People say things like, I was intuitively aware of the direction of my home or of my office. For example, I would wait in line in the cafeteria and spontaneously think, I'm living over there. During the first few weeks, I had to concentrate on it afterwards. It was intuitive. I could even imagine the arrangement of places and rooms where I sometimes stay. There were also, interestingly, signs of the kind of unconscious integration of the new information. So this would be very interesting if there was, you know, if lots of this happened. So in some subjects, the effects of the belt got integrated into unconscious eye movement control loops. This was investigated using a rather complicated array of stuff involving what they call nystigmus, which is a kind of automatic compensation of the eye to bodily movement. Some of those compensations under conditions of rotation of the body are actually non beneficial. They're kind of bugs rather than features. Normally this is a feature, but we can get confused by sort of ongoing rotation. And people that were wearing the belt were less confused by the ongoing rotation. And so there'd been some kind of unconscious integration of the two senses. So it's suggestive. Overall, this is what Kevin O'Reagan in this book is out now. Sorry, I should have updated that slide in. Why Red doesn't sound like a Bell. He says, it therefore seems that with practice it's possible to start creating a kind of six magnetic sense, which may sometimes be integrated into automatic unconscious behaviors. So the moral would be, well, maybe our senses are just garments, more tools and props that aren't just this sort of fixed repertoire that you're stuck with. Instead we can take on board new equipment. But the thing is that even at this point you'll be thinking, well, the thing that's taken on board all this new equipment, it's still, now we really get into the core of you. Because now we get into the sort of, you know, the deeper bits of the brain, not just the kind of surface transducers like the eyes, etc. But whatever's sitting behind those. So that brings us to the last major stop on this tour, which is enhancing the mind. So I think the starting point for thinking about enhancing the mind is a particular vision of how to think about the brain. And I think it's a vision in which the brain is, if you like, a master of productive laziness. As if the brain's job, sitting there at the center of this sort of swirl of body and sensing and external equipment, is to get the most done with the least possible effort on its own part. And it looks like our brains really are great at learning to do the least to get the best results. They exploit all kinds of opportunities to simplify their own computations and to offload stuff onto body world, etc. So a few demos of that and then we'll think about it a bit. You should pick a card, look very hard at one card. Pick a card and try and remember the card that you've picked. Remember your card, nobody else's. We'll do some kind of bit of magic and then see whether I managed to get your card. I hope that I did. Let me go back a little bit. Let's do that again. Pick a card, different one this time. Concentrate very much on that card. Make sure you're going to remember it. Go back to the magic and surely got the card again. If I didn't, you're doing it wrong. You can do this actually with just a couple of photocopies of the cards and take them into a pub and people can see that you're using exactly the same bits of paper again and again. And it can be rather. You can earn money this way if you get the right people and the right publisher. Of course, in a way it's fairly obvious what's going on. If you go back to the first set of cards here and look hard at them. Now actually, these are all different to the second set of cards. So every single card in this array is different to every card in this array. So no matter what card you pick out of that first array, it's going to be gone from the second array. They're all gone from the second array. But what's going on there as far as the brain's concerned? You might think, well, you know, what's the brain busy encoding here? It looks as if probably what the brain's encoding is just something rather rough and ready instead of, you know, it's encoding your card because you've been asked to remember that. But as for the rest of that stuff, it's probably just encoding something like royal cards, you know, something like that. High ranking cards. You can do the same trick with low ranking cards and it gets less and less robust as you mix the low and the high ranking cards up. So it looks as if you're encoding something a little bit less. There's a lot of debate about this and there are some interesting results that might suggest that you encode more, but you just forget it before I test you the second time. So there's, you know, it's not entirely obvious what's going on here, but it doesn't look as if you're Encoding, and you're certainly not encoding and maintaining a representation of each of the cards. So what's this look like from the brain's eye view? I think it literally looks like something like this. You're the brain kind of sitting there and thinking, why should I bother encoding all that stuff? Because I can see roughly what it's like. And if I need to get any more information about any of that, then I can just card to it. Normally that array is sitting there in front of you. So maybe it's like this when I'm looking out at the audience, maybe it's like, okay, I'm having an impression of lots of different colors of clothing and faces and jumpers and things. It seems as if I've encoded all of that, but actually maybe I've just encoded a little bit of it and something like more of that, more of that sort of stuff. Faces, colors, jumpers. And then if you say to me, well, surely you can see all of it. Well, I'll saccade to one side or the other. I can bring back any piece of information I want to. And in a way, I think the suggestion I'm going to be making about the mind is that as far as the mind's concerned, that's good enough. The mind doesn't actually care whether something's got encoded inside the brain, left out in the world, encoded in your notebook, encoded on your iPhone. What matters is just what information you can get hold of in a way that enables you to use it at the right moment to pursue your goals, magic tricks, etc. Trying to trip you up there. So here's another kind of example that a lot of people will have seen many of these. These are change blindness examples. I've tried to find a couple that are less common, but I still think that at least half of everybody here will have seen even these particular ones. So look at the image and see that something is changing. As this image flashes, it can be harder than you would expect to see what it is. There is a big change from image to image here. And in this particular case, if you haven't seen it yet, put your hands up. If you have seen it, it's about half, a bit less than half. Look at the wall behind the nuns, look at the color of the wall behind the nuns. So the wall behind the nuns is a fairly large part of the visual field here and quite a large scale change in it. There's another one, this one is actually quite difficult. People tell me it's still completely fair. I'm not sure this is a hard one, but apparently it's. Yeah, apparently it's like, it's quite important if you are at sea in a boat and it's the sort of the position of the sea relative to the horizon is changing by a significant amount from picture to picture picture. And here's the last one. I don't know if this one is flashing too slowly, but it seems far too easy to me. But here's another one. In this case, there's somebody doing something on top of the bus, popping in and out of dj. I think that one needs speeding up a bit anyway. There's loads of these and Kevin O'Reagan on the site, the Paris site that's there just to change blindness into Google. You'll get lots and lots of these demos. They can be done in different ways as well. They can be done using a kind of mud splat paradigm. They can be done using very, very slow changes. So even without the flicker, if something changes very, very, very slowly, often we won't pick up. So, you know, for example, you could change one of those walls, the white one, into the orange one by very, very slow gradations would be just as good. So there's a load of cases like this, a lot of large literature on active perception. And I think what it shows is that brains like ours are very, very good at trading easy access against internal storage, against what might be expensive internal RE encoding and upkeep of a RE encoding. So, for example, another case, one that Dan Dennett likes to point out here, is that we experience the visual scene as colored and detailed all the way out. But in fact, if I asked you to sort of fixate my nose and I held two, I brought two cards from a playing deck out like this and started moving them in, it would only be when I got to about there that you'd be able to tell which was a red card and which was the black card. And yet the scene doesn't look like that to us. It looks like it's colored. It looks like we're seeing it colored all the way to the edge. It looks like we have detail all the way to the edge. But maybe that's just because we can get color and we can get detail so easily just by a little tiny flick of the eye, a little flick of the head. Maybe that's what it takes to be in command of the information, if you like. So it's as if what matters is being in command of the information about color and detail rather than actually having it directly encoded into the brain. In fact, if it was directly encoded into the brain, maybe we wouldn't be able to retrieve quite so much quite as fast. Maybe that would even be worse, depending on your sort of mode of encoding and retrieval. What have I done? So I think that the feeling of seeing all the detail and color is due to a kind of meta nine, in a way, the extended mind kind of story. Is that what I sometimes call these sorts of stories. They're sort of stories in which the brain gets to do a lot of meta knowing, as if that's what brains are really about. So here our brains would know that they can usually retrieve detailed information as and when needed. So you feel as if it's all there already. Maybe that's not really a mistake. Normally it probably doesn't matter where the information is kept. You know, it doesn't matter if it's, you know, on my hard drive, in the cloud, on a memory stick, you know, it only really matters as far as my interactions with that machine go, insofar as that makes a difference to what information I can get back and when. If the brain is in a situation like that, then it doesn't matter whether it's left information inside itself out on the tabletop, encoded it by, I don't know, crossing your fingers as a sort of a little reminder that you've got something very important to do in the next five minutes. So there's a lot of work out there on robotics and cognitive psychology that pushes this sort of line. Rodney Brooks in robotics has coined the phrase the world is its own best model. The idea is something like, you know, don't spend huge amounts of computational resources and operations in encoding everything. If you can leave it out there in the world and let the world do the encoding and have some quick and dirty routines for making the most of that, then do so. Kevin o', Regan, the guy that does the change blindness stuff, or one of those people, spoke a long time ago about the world as external memory, which I think is the same kind of idea. And I think this isn't true just of sensing, but of knowing as well. If I ask you a question, like, if I say, do you know what month this is? You'll probably say, yeah, yeah, I know what month it is. But this obviously isn't because as a kind of a conscious agent, you're walking around all the time saying to yourself, february, February, February. Your knowing what month it is is a matter of you being able to retrieve from your biological memory information about what month it is as and when required. For example, on demand. So I think that it's actually about your meta knowing that if I say, if I ask you, do you know in advance of retrieving from bio memory the information about what month this is, do you know right now what month it is? Even before retrieval from bio memory, I think you have the right to say, yes, I do. And that's because you, meta know that it's the kind of thing you do know, and you know that you can get that information back when you need to. But of course, if you bought that as an analysis of what it is for you to dispositionally know, to know something that you're not currently rehearsing in your conscious mind, if you bought that as an account of that, then I think you would pretty well have to buy the extended line story, which is a story that says roughly, leave it where you like. As long as you can get hold of the information at the right time and put it to the right use, then Newcount is already knowing that stuff. So it's rather like, I think, learning what kind of thing is on Google and what simple search string will access it. Some people think that's a reductio. The position. I'd be willing to argue it's not a reductio. It's certainly like that. So, you know, I think we've all begun to learn what kind of stuff we can reliably get back from Google and what kind of search string it will take to do it. And here, this doesn't work for every language, but I think there's a little germ of truth in it. If you say to someone, do you know the time? And they're an English speaker, they very well say, yes, I know the time. And then they'll look at their watch and tell you the time. And I think that's sort of. It's natural enough. There's a sense in which that question is a question about command in the time. Do you command the time? So I think a lot of our best loops into the world, of course, are much, much fancier than this. I mean, the trouble with those examples is they're kind of like. They're a bit like writing something on a yellow sticky and then re encountering it. It's a very, very simple little loop. But I think that the fancier loops are much more interesting. Time will preclude us from going through them. But the literature is full of long discussions, many of them mind, about loops like these. So think of loops like gesturing while you talk. There's a lot of very interesting cognitive psychological work out there on the cognitive role of gesture. So if you get people to do certain kinds of problem solving and then tell you about what they were doing and how they did it, it turns out that if they're allowed to gesture while they do the explaining, they're much better at if you like fulfilling this task. If you prevent them from gesturing, they do, they feel worse. This is work by Susan Golden Meadow in a number of books. Some sort of minor evidence for the cognitive role of gesture comes from the fact that congenitally blind folk also gesture while they're talking. And they also do that when they're talking to other congenitally blind folk. So it's not, you know, the thought might be it's all about kind of gesture in communication that you have to see my arm movement or perhaps I have to see it myself. But that doesn't seem to be the case. Or think about this is more intuitive for me. Easier, closer to home somehow. Just scribbling while you think. The fact that if you're trying to prepare a philosophy talk or an essay or something, actually being able to do a little bit of the work with either pen and paper or an open file in front of you seems to make a difference. There's something about looping out there and being able to re encounter that information and get it back that really seems to help. Or think of working with a highly practiced software package, maybe something that loops into an active semi intelligent subsystem. You know, these are just the cognitive equivalents of ABS breaking. I think they're just, you know, these are just external things that do a bit of the processing. The brain, being super lazy, gets to learn that it doesn't have to do that bit. It can just rely on it being done outside. And I think the upshot is an extended cognitive system. In fact, I think it's an extended cognitive system that for the time being is you is your extended cognitive system. I think we can get a little sense of this complexity in the famous exchange between Richard Feynman and the historian Charles Weiner. So Feynman, of course, is a Nobel laureate physicist and historian. So the historian reporting on this says Weiner once remarked casually that. Oh, sorry, this is him writing about his encounter. Remarked casually that a batch of notes and sketches represented a record of Feynman's day to day work. Feynman characteristically reacted sharply. I actually did the work on the paper. Feynman said. Well, Viner said the work was done in your head, but the record of it is still here? No, it's not a repl. Not really. It's working. You have to work on paper, and this is a paper. Okay. So I like to think that Feynman is just doing a bit of extended mind theory. The thought would be that not all the thinking in these cases, in the gesture case, the scribbling while you're thinking case, perhaps even in the conversing with a colleague or a friend case, that not all of the thinking is going on in your head, that some of that thinking is actually getting distributed across this wider system. The loops to external media here would form part and parcel of a complex integrated biotechnologically hybrid system for thinking. And that's the kind of extended mind story that I've been pushing around for many years. Okay, time in. Can I do five minutes more, do you think? Five minutes. Okay, five minutes and then I'll draw this to a close. So it's not. You might think that biou, if you like, whatever you at this point are thinking is the remaining core has to be the instigator of the loop. But I think that notion of what instigates one of these loops is very fuzzy. So this is a nice example. Maybe this is one I'll more or less end on. This is. Richard Duvall at MIT Media Lab did work on memory glasses. And these are glasses that would be fitted and are being fitted to people that have either impaired memory or sometimes like visual formagnosia. So impaired visual recognition skills. If you had visual formagnosia, you would not be able, for example, to name objects that are visually presented to you yet say, you know, this is a Coke can, etc. And obviously just ordinary impaired memory cases as well. So the memory glasses are a kind of wearable computing that matches the current scene face, for example, to store the information and then cues the subject with relevant information. Could be a bit like the Google glasses are soon to be available at a store near you. Using the glasses mounted display, you get a little flash that says, you know, that's granny or that's a Coke can, or, you know, that's your husband and this is their name. Interesting thing about this, I think, is that the cue doesn't actually have to be consciously perceived by the subject. So although there's a sort of clumsy version of the memory glasses where the cue remains there for long enough for the subject to know they're being cued and to actually have the experience of reading it, you can actually cue them so quickly that they don't have the experience of seeing the cue, but nonetheless their performance significantly improves. We humans seem to like that. Obviously, I think given my own story here, we shouldn't really care, but for some reason we like to think that the bio bits of us are doing as much of the work as possible. And so the less cueing that you know you're getting, the better you feel about yourself. So for some reason or other people like it better when it's done quickly and subliminally. Okay, you could easily imagine the use of things like that that enhance what we know rather than merely restore it. There was a controversial app that Apple purchased a few years back and it takes a photo and turns it into a 3D face map. And the thing about a 3D face map is you can then use that to match other photos online. So if you can take a photo, turn it into a 3D face map, then all the other photos that are out there in the social media, etc. Taken from different angles of you can be matched. That enables, if it works, a fantastic kind of rapid sort of uptake of identity. Point your phone camera at someone or just turn your head towards them. If you're wearing the Google glasses immediately, all kinds of information can be sucked up using the 3D face map from any site that's got a picture of you. Get your name match to all of those sites very quickly. You could be presented with, for example, a little vibro tactile buzz or something imperceptible to you consciously that will let you know whatever you really care about, subject to the reliability or not of the information that is being trawled. So you might, for example, be able to start to intuitively know who's a fan of what kind of band, what kind of sports team. You could have this sort of given as a little vibro tactile bars every time a fan of the St. Louis Cardinals seems to come by. Or you could take it subliminally and just start to feel that people are fans of the St. Louis Cardinals. Okay, so I think I can probably bring this to an end now. I think that innovations like that will start to blur the boundaries between what we know, what we sense and what we unconsciously infer. Those sorts of boundaries that seems to make sense to. But the more you push on it, the less clear that is. I'm going to skip a few bits now. Obviously this talk could have gone on a bit longer. The last impossible question was going to be, is this a good thing? I won't use slides for this last bit. So as to make sure there's plenty of time for discussion. But I was going to mention one of my favorite cases here, which is a bunch of patients in St. Louis where I used to work, who were they were scarring very, very badly on tests like the Cerad protocol, which was a test for whether you're going to be competent at living at home, whether you're going to be able to take care of yourself. But they were doing very well in a harsh inner city environment. And when my colleague Caroline Baum went out to try and find out what was going on, she found that the patients that were doing well like this were doing well because their worlds were really highly structured around them. So they were living in rooms where things were in sort of clear view, things were labeled. Some of this structure was put in place by the patient, some was put in place by caregivers. But I guess one of the reasons I think the kind of extended mind story matters is that I think if you ask yourself the question, what would it mean to take someone out of an environment like that and put them into a kind of environment where those cues are not available, where that structure is taken away, I'd like to suggest that that would be tantamount to causing a kind of brain damage without their permission. It would be rather like doing some sort of wanton destruction to part of the equipment that makes you who you are. I don't think we should think that all of that equipment has to be forever on the inside. I think that I should probably stop there in the interest of time. Let me just. See. You're going to get the nice little bloaty creatures, you know, so people. So some people worry that this is going to make our cells spread too far. I guess I'm a bit more worried about ourselves not spreading far enough. And that's kind of what the kind of inner city Alzheimer's sufferers there I think would be an example of. Okay, there we go. I'm just going to get to the very last slide. So in the case of the people with the deficit living successful lives in inner city St. Louis, some people's reaction to that example is, well, that just confirms the extent of their deficit. You know, they require all this complex structure wrapped around themselves to do okay. But I think that you just have to reflect on your own life to that. That's not really a very good move to make. Imagine a world in which standard brains like ours, neurotypical human brains, had the same profile as those folks. And imagine we gradually evolved a society in which the use of all their kinds of props and aids was the norm and now reflect that. That's exactly the society we live in. We wrap all this stuff around ourselves to complement our own biological brains activity. But we don't say of successful artists and designers, poor thing, they're not really responsible for that stuff because look at how they had to lean on the world around them in order just to write that paper, deliver that talk, etc. We don't say that in their case and I don't think we should say it in anyone else's case either. I'll leave it there. Thank you. Great.
- [51:58]
A
Thank you very much. As I said, we have about half an hour for questions and discussion though, so are there any questions? Yeah, yeah, sorry, Maybe we could just wait.
- [52:31]
C
Yeah, maybe. The question I'm going to ask is tangential to your interest, but I take it, trying to physicalize what we normally call the mind.
- [52:39]
B
Physicalize. Yeah, it's okay.
- [52:42]
C
Takes all the blame in honesty.
- [52:46]
B
Yeah, physicalize. Okay, yeah, finish the question. We'll see.
- [52:49]
C
Yeah, it's kind of crazy for the software, but at the moment I'm fixating this continually and I'm not able to translate this visual impression into physical talk or engineering thought.
- [53:00]
B
Okay.
- [53:00]
C
And it seems to be an imprint objection. Now, I'm not subject to soul talk. I'm just. There's a pretty basic problem which if you say, if you use this analogy of successive discarding of, as it were, doll's lair of God, says no core. But I agree, there's no core as such. But there seems to be something sensory which is not captured by the kind of narcissist.
- [53:21]
B
I suppose that the question would be, exactly what kind of thing is that? You know, in one way, you know, one of the things that people could reasonably say about the whole extended mine story is it's rather weird because mines don't have locations in the first place. That's something that you could say. But on the other hand, there's physical stuff going on that clearly makes a huge difference. And I think that what we can show is that it doesn't matter for a lot of these purposes where that stuff is going on. So, you know, there's, of course, finding examples that reach right into human experience is difficult. There's a nice example of a spiny lobster, a Californian spiny lobster that has one silicon neuron. And that silicon neuron has enabled the spiny lobster to carry out spiny lobster goals. Again, like, you know, chewing its food properly, etc. I guess I'm inclined to think it would be the same for us, that there's nothing, I'm sure we could substitute.
- [54:27]
C
All our newer minds. So how would the service produce. This is the question.
- [54:33]
B
This is a kind of qualia question then. Right? This is. Right. Okay, I'm with it now. Yeah, yeah. Yes. I mean, there's no take here on qualia really. For what it's worth, my own sort of sneaky view about qualia is that they're all. So I'm kind of donetting about them. I kind of sneakily think that it's all about the judgments that we make about, you know, so you're saying things like, oh, there's this interesting, you know, interesting colored experience going on and there's a lot of stuff science is going to find very, very hard to ever successfully explain. And I'm inclined to take a step back and try to say, well, you know, if we could explain why it is that these things seem so puzzling to us and explain the responses that we make, then maybe we'd have done the job. But then if you're Dave Chalmers or perhaps if you're you, then you say you haven't done the job yet. You're right. So all this stuff is about extending the non conscious mind. There are people in this area that think that you can extend the conscious mind as well. And I must say that I'm not one of them for reasons that have more to do with the nature of our existing interfaces.
- [55:42]
C
Okay, thanks for your answer.
- [55:43]
B
Cool. Okay. Okay.
- [55:48]
A
Other questions.
- [55:51]
B
One of the things I was sort.
- [55:52]
D
Of made me think during that talk was when you're talking about externalizing our memory and externalizing our ability to do things, I think one of the resources that perhaps didn't get mentioned mentioned is other people.
- [56:04]
B
Yeah.
- [56:04]
D
How much we put where we rely on other people to do stuff. And I think certainly using the artist example there, being a musician, I find far easier to create better work when in collaboration, I guess. So how much of that is.
- [56:19]
B
Yes, I think that, you know, other people are, they're sort of, they're mentioned in a footnote in the original paper. But it's a very artificial footnote in a way, and I think revealingly so. So in the footnote I think that the case that Dave Chalmers and I try to give is one where a long term couple have come to rely on each other for certain operations. So, you know, you practiced in the world for a long, long time and basically you've learned that, you know, your spouse has this kind of information available and your spouse has learned that their spouse has this other kind of information, information available. And you sort of just factor that deeply into everything you do. But the cases that seem closer to home and more interesting are the ones where you get together with other people and kind of unexpected things happen. So you know, the case is sort of artificial because we're relying on the expected. And so you've got exactly the meta 9. So what do you get in the other cases? Something interesting, a kind of Metameta 9. It's a sort of. It's a kind of knowing that if you get into a sort of swirl of musicianship or philosophy or whatever with this group of people, that certain good things may come out and maybe you learn how to sort of nudge that complex system along in ways that will make it more likely that those good things will come out. And I think that is what we're really good at. Human brains and human beings are good at learning how to nudge complex systems in including themselves in ways that are beneficial. I suppose there's a question whether those are cases of, as it were, extended personal cognition or sort of emergent multi personal cognition. And I'm not quite sure where one of those things stops and the other one starts. Maybe it's not even sometimes I have the kind of midnight time thought that the whole notion of personal cognition that I took as a starting point for this stuff might be kind of somewhat dodgy and that kind of interpersonal cognition might be the best starting place with personal cognition as a kind of a weird limiting case or something.
- [58:31]
A
Yes, there would have been like follow up to that question in a sense, because I mean, some people would say that, well, look, if you think that your partner then becomes part of you, that is reductio for that kind of position because clearly there's me and there's the other person and it's not the same thing.
- [58:47]
B
Right.
- [58:47]
A
But if you think of it as the process, as an emergent property maybe of that specific interaction, give the client a slightly different perspective on it.
- [58:55]
B
Right.
- [58:55]
A
So then you journal, I mean, in some of the, some of your papers you emphasize also the coupling and the reliability. I mean, in those cases that you mentioned, you have one session where you improvise together, where you play music together, but it's not as though that's always the case.
- [59:12]
B
Right.
- [59:12]
A
So how important on your view is that kind of reliability or that the thing always needs to be there? I guess a lot of you.
- [59:21]
B
Well, I think it's reliable for. I think it's important if what you're trying to do is extend the standard notion of dispositional believing. So, you know, if you take it, what you're trying to do is make an argument so that some of the substructure for your standing beliefs, the fact you believe that the battle of hastings was in 1066, but you weren't thinking of it until right now, but you believed it even before you brought it back to conscious awareness. The kind of thought was you can extend that sort of set of beliefs by having stuff encoded outside and reliably available. I think there you do need something like reliability. Because if I could only bring that piece of information back sort of once every 50 years or something under exactly the right conditions, I don't think I would count as dispositionally knowing that or having that standing belief. There is a sort of reliability condition built in, I think, to that notion. But that's because that notion is probably constructed out of the sort of biological basic notion. When you think about extended cognition more generally, then I think it's open to us to think that different requirements for different kinds of extended cognizing, and if some of those kinds of extended cognizing are kinds that have no internal single person biological analog, then I think that that question about whether it's an extension of individual cognition or something kind of emergent multi agent co would have no answer. Or else perhaps the answer is it's.
- [60:56]
A
Emergent multi agent once in a lifetime general session.
- [61:01]
B
I mean, I did, I was once on a panel discussion with N. Katharine Hales and a couple of other people and I was given the example of, you know, leaning on your spouse in that way. And there was a worry that this was actually not the right way to treat your spouse. You know, that it was kind of treating them as an end rather than a means. Can I ask what's happening in artificial intelligence then? If you've got this lazy concept of the brain, then how are you going to create robotic intelligence that simulates that capability as opposed to the asset which is this plant full of high power.
- [61:41]
E
Processing and huge volumes of data?
- [61:43]
B
Yeah, I mean, I think that, you know, in a way, ways of working in sometimes called sort of cognitive developmental robotics is a kind of nice area there. But, you know, basically you want lots and lots of tricks and strategies for making the most of your own abilities to move in the world. So one of the most interesting areas that I've seen over the last 10 years or so is work on what's sometimes called the self structuring of information so you know, it's not as it were, making do with nothing on the inside or very, very little, you know, because that really rapidly hits a sort of, hits a kind of ceiling. But on the other hand, having systems that one of the most important things they know is how to get better training information, how to use their sensors to train themselves to do the job better. That seems really important. I think, I think self structuring our own information flows is a huge part of the answer to how to build an intelligent system. You need a communal system in terms of robots talking to robots to be.
- [62:51]
E
Able to nail that.
- [62:53]
B
Yeah, well some people are looking at the communal system stuff, but they're not the same people on the whole as they're looking at the self structure and of information flow stuff. So I think the answer would be. That would be nice.
- [63:12]
E
Just like to go back to this idea of these ideas of externalized memory and the extended mind. So if I followed your argument correctly.
- [63:22]
B
When we do things like to use.
- [63:24]
E
A retro example with bits of paper in a filing cabinet with bits of information on, we are in a sense externalizing our memory. And then later on you talked about how memory was a process of retrieving from bio memory, if you like. And that's akin to going to a filing cabinet, getting out a bit of paper.
- [63:44]
B
Don't put too much in the akin there, but yeah, akin. Fight the akin.
- [63:48]
E
It seems to me you've defined memory as just being as like the extended version of memory. And you've sort of brought this definition of memory is retrieval from bio memory. Sort of quite slyly because you've sort of gone in one direction to say that we're externalizing memory but then gone back in another direction to define memory in terms use the model of extended memory to define memory in itself. And you come up with this I think slightly strange idea of what memory actually is by basing it on what you've said extended memory is. I don't know if this is making much sense.
- [64:31]
B
Yeah, no, it makes sense.
- [64:31]
E
Just mean on the, you know, I appreciate this as a lecture and you perhaps rely on metaphors, perhaps more so.
- [64:37]
B
Than you would in a book or.
- [64:38]
E
Article, but I'm not entirely sure. The filing cabinet metaphor and the retrieval metaphor, memory, not least because you know, with the actual filing cabinet I could, I could get wasps on the way or I could stop and something while I'm on my way or I could go to this filing cabinet and find a bit of paper that's put in there by someone else and find out something new that I don't think you could do. But when I was retrieving from bio memory and also, I mean, and I think what's a really important point in the filing cap when I have that, say I have the address of LSE in a filer cabinet in my office and someone says, do you know the address of lse? I could say, yes, I do, and go to the filing cabinet. I could also say, no, I don't, but I'll find out for you. If I knew, if I just, you know, knew in the normal sense of the term, the address of the llc. And someone says, do you know the address of llc? And I went, I don't, but I'll find out for you. They went, oh, I don't actually know the address of llc. You think there's something seriously wrong with me? And I wouldn't know what I was talking about. So I'm not entirely sure this.
- [65:35]
B
Well, you're certainly right that, you know, bio memory and filing cabinets are different. I think that's true. And there's lots of ways that you can sort of bring out those differences. Well, the same in some respects that bear on issues about what would count as a stand in belief. So that's. It was really quite a restricted claim in there. So if you think about, for example, stand in beliefs about slightly weird things like somebody's telephone number, you know, things that actually by their nature shouldn't be integrated very much with other things of that nature that you happen to have stored. So, you know, with telephone numbers, it's rather important to keep them apart from each other. You don't really want them to start sort of integrating and blending and, you know, get into groups with each other in that sort of way, and yet you will still count as having standing beliefs about people's telephone numbers, I think on that particular model you can see enough similarity to say that there could be classes of standing beliefs that actually aren't that different to things that you could retrieve. If I said to you, for example, do you know, do you know the date of the Battle of Hastings? You might actually be someone that says, well, I think I might. Hang on. Yeah, okay, yeah, I got it. You might. There is a case of. It's not the standard, absolutely fluent case of biomemory, but just because you had to say, you know, maybe I wouldn't think that that deprived you of counting.
- [67:05]
E
No, I mean, but at the same time, in the case of the filing cabinet, you can quite legitimately say, I don't know. No, One would quibble with you, but with ballot hastenings, things you could say, I don't know, and then remembering, you'd say, oh, actually no, I was wrong.
- [67:17]
B
I did know. I think you've got slightly, you're having a bit too little faith in the external and a bit too much in the internal there. You know, I think I'd want to sort of slightly, slightly push on both sides of the equation for you. You know, you can set kind of memory insertion situations up where you can be made to think that you remember something that you don't. You know, was this item presented to you earlier and you're giving people a list of items and there's something else that would fit very well in there that's a little bit like someone sliding something into the filing cabinet that you didn't actually have put in there. You know, I don't think bio memory is quite as fluid and reliable as you paint it there. And I don't think the external stuff has to be as kind of unfluid and unreliable as you paint it. But I have no trouble about them being very, very different. After all, my own background is in artificial neural networks, one of whose kind of major claims is that think about memory as just a kind of set of files.
- [68:25]
E
So if they're very different, what holds.
- [68:27]
B
Them together as part of the extended mind? Well, I think what holds them together is that there's actually a notion of memory that applies to both of them already. So yeah, but it's in a way with the extended mind arguments, I think it becomes kind of difficult to see how to run the arguments without begging the question one way or the other. If you start off with a conception of memory, that is, if you like, That is trying to be neutral between whether something is encoded internally or externally, then I think you are going to end up with an extended mind story. If you start with the conception of memory that is tied very closely to the idiosyncrasies of bio memory or to what you might say, the essential ingredients of bio memory, then you'll end up with an account that is actually inimical to the extended mind arguments. And I've never quite seen how to get around that. It keeps looking to me as if you're almost bound to be begging the question one way or the other.
- [69:35]
A
Okay, I think we should move on to some other questions. So you, then you, and then you.
- [69:41]
B
Please.
- [69:43]
E
I wanted to come back to this as your meta knowing.
- [69:48]
B
And we talked about, and so on.
- [69:51]
E
And I'd like to distinguish between Facts and feelings.
- [69:56]
B
You've been talking very much about facts, phone numbers and so on.
- [70:00]
E
Yeah, trying to adapt that to the sort of the AI world of Steiner and Pompa and Berlin and so on.
- [70:11]
B
The conception of the meaning of meaning. The meaning of the meaning of meaning. Then carrying on like that.
- [70:19]
E
You actually took examples of composers and designers in one of your slides.
- [70:24]
B
And I was just wondering where, yeah.
- [70:26]
E
Today and tomorrow we can use the 3D design designs that we can do on a flat screen, which we couldn't.
- [70:32]
B
Do 50 years ago.
- [70:33]
E
They took a real genius like Leonardo.
- [70:34]
D
To have an idea of heavier than.
- [70:37]
E
Air machines fly and so on. How do you relate your concept of meta knowing to these earlier ideas?
- [70:48]
B
I think the truthful answer is that I don't, but I would like to. I think it's, you know, it's an interesting and important area in particular how to think about things like extended emotional circuitry. Clearly we do a lot of stuff that is a bit like this. Music might be thought of, I think as a kind of technology of kind of extended emotion. At the very least, it's a kind of self stimulating technology for manipulating our own emotional states or it can be used that way. And I think there's a sort of link here to some of these issues about memory actually, because I think that we can actually think about what goes on in both bio memory and external memory in terms of self stimulating loops. You know, you have to. Very often we actually do need to cue ourselves to remember things. And the way that we remember things is by self cueing. In the case of sort of trying to reconstruct episodic memories of things that happened to us several years ago. In the construction of memories like that, looping through external artifacts versus just doing it straight inside the head. It seems to me like we're on a kind of continuum there. And in the kind of emotional case, I think the sort of larger circuits where we kind of self, where we manipulate our own emotional states, those are definitely part of what we human beings do. Are they extended emotional circuitry? Well, going back to one of the earlier issues here, they're not. You know, you might well say that the qualitative experience is entirely supervening on the biological parts of that system. I think it is. On the other hand, the rest of the stuff is doing very, very important work. It's making stuff come along in a certain sequence with a certain, certain kind of quality and where that sort of stuff is going on just inside the head. We probably think, hey, that's all part of the circuitry of cognizing, Even if some of that stuff isn't supporting conscious experience of the qualities of the world around us. So in all of these cases, I guess I kind of think that the larger circuits are genuinely cognitive. They can be genuinely emotional, but they won't be. They won't be the kind of core, the most minimal circuit that supports the experience of the emotion or the experience of the visual qualia or whatever. Maybe I'm sort of off at the edges of what you're asking about there. Was it sort of about larger circuits for emotion? That's certainly where Manfred Kleinz has gone with everything, actually, through sort of music, touch and emotion as well.
- [73:35]
E
I was also just wondering how this.
- [73:36]
B
All fits into the concept of the.
- [73:38]
E
Collective unconscious and the collective memories. Or whether, in your point of view, we each have our own, which starts from zero with no background.
- [73:50]
B
Yeah, yeah. There's some interesting and difficult issues there. Developmentally, it kind of looks as if you don't really start with your own. So Susan Hurley has some interesting work on this, I think, where I think she's got a paper that was out in Behavioral and Brain Sciences some years back called the Shared Circuits Model. And part of her idea there, coming from developmental psychology, is that the individual mind, if you like, is a developmental achievement. You kind of start off with a mind that is kind of merged in interesting ways with the kind of whole caregiver system. And then somehow, out of certain patterns of interaction there, this sort of strange, limiting case of the individual mind comes into being. That would be very interesting from an extended mind perspective, if you like. The baseline was something that was extended and socially extended in particular. And the notion of individual cognizing, which I actually started with and then tried to extend, Is itself just a kind of contraction of extended cognizing. So, yeah, this may have been touched on a bit already, But I'm wondering if everything you've said might be understood as entirely consistent with the Cartesian conception of the mind.
- [75:11]
D
That the body as a mechanism or.
- [75:14]
B
Anything else in the world might be.
- [75:16]
D
Understood as a aesthetic that's required for the performance of a whole range of cognitive tasks.
- [75:21]
B
But that could still leave an essential view of the mind. Yes, I think that's right. There's nothing in my story that, if you like, makes it the case that the mind has to be physical. It could be that there's all of, you know, that the extended stuff just somehow manages to be in communication with or somehow affected by or moving along with the other stuff. In fact, I Had a colleague at Sussex that thought that. I mean, this guy was Katz, Bruce Katz. He was in AI there. You know, his basic thinking was the extended mind story is exactly right. But, of course, all consciousness depends on. You thought it was some kind of resonance with a general sort of global field of consciousness that was out there. There's nothing. There's certainly nothing in my story to rule out anything like that. It seems to be more natural, though, to ground the story like this in the idea that it's all physical stuff going on. And then you can just say, if it's just physical stuff going on, then maybe it doesn't matter that much where certain things are going on. So if you ground it that way, it's a kind of an outgrowth of a sort of functionalism, really. If you thought of functionalism as saying something like, it doesn't matter what it's made of. What matters is how it's organized. This says. Doesn't really matter where it is either.
- [76:51]
F
I attended a lecture, transhumanist lecture by the couple of weeks ago. And I was wondering if you could expand on one of the things that.
- [77:02]
B
He said as a possibility.
- [77:03]
F
Since you say that bodies as well as minds are negotiable. If we take a flight of fantasy and let's just say Siri has expanded it can now talk to my computer. It runs my diary and does all kinds of things for me. And then I'm 97 and not very able. This person that knows so much of me persists after I go, I go on. If that Siri could continue to persist with all my memories, all those things in either a box or a robot. Could that person. You haven't really spoken about identity, but you have spoken about extended life. To what extent is it possible in terms of the studies that you know and things like extended neural networks or whatever, could that persist as a form of me?
- [78:06]
B
Yeah, good question. I don't know of anything that would count as a kind of decent empirical study that really bears on the question. So I will merely speculate. But I guess it does seem to me that if you allow that in a way it's all just equipment. And there's nothing that it has to be equipment for that. I could kind of, you know, I could renegotiate my own bodily shape. I could renegotiate every element of the cognitive engine. I suppose that I think I could renegotiate the stuff that supports qualitative experience. It's just we don't know enough about how all that stuff works. So really, to put my cards on the table, I guess I think we could renegotiate all of that too. And given that it looks as if the idea of sort of personal survival, at least in many very, very altered kinds of form, seems entirely possible, the question whether it's exactly you that gets to survival or something close to close to you is probably the same one that we'd raise already with regard to, you know, changing sets of interests, etc. Over a lifetime. So, yes, I mean, I think there's, you know, you could think of it this way, if you're able to extend and kind of renegotiate the of sort system enough, you could get to a point where the only bit that's left of the biological thing that you started out with is kind of a couple of neurons in here or something that are communicating with all this stuff. And then you can just get rid of those. And at that point, clearly you've moved the system along. But, you know, I'm not much of a. I'm not really any kind of realist about persons, so it's relatively easy for me to say that, you know, I don't think there is some kind of core thing that makes, that makes me who I am. Yeah, don't try. That's how I think of it.
- [80:19]
A
Yes, I'm Vivek.
- [80:21]
D
You've talked about how all of these ways of extending the mind, but it's very much sort of an extension of self that then loops back to ourselves in the kind of bouncing off what we were just talking about to sort of turn that around in the context of modern day or the ability of the last 20, 30 years to have a virtual representation of self in the computer now in the wider Internet, how does that whether it be your Facebook profile or in Second Life or whatever it might be, fit into this idea of the extended mind model? So going back the other way, so to speak, rather than I have storage, potentially externally that isn't bio storage, but more now I'm potentially representing myself outside of the physical form in a way that is something that someone else can interact with as a. I see.
- [81:15]
B
So the kind of Second Life example would be a kind of core example there, would it be? Yeah, I think that goes roughly the same way as the sort of alterations of the, of the body image on the, you know, as you, as you kind of get certain sets of correlations, except that's being done with the physical body. If you get the time delay stuff, you know, well under control and you feel that, you know, the Kind of the second life body is something that you're not sort of desperately trying to control and kind of move around into the right places, but it's just a way of being. And other agents treat you the same way then. I think that's just at that point we get to. We probably get to be in more than one place at once for a while there. At least that's right. So I think that those are just cases of sort of kind of interesting because they don't quite feel like extended mind cases to me. They're more like projected self cases. But certainly the general negotiability claim would apply to those quite well. I think the kind of cognitive creature we are is a creature that really, really requires to be embodied and interacting with things, but it doesn't require to be embodied this way and interacting with things through these particular sensory systems. So in that way, I guess, yeah, I guess it would be a case of projected embodiment. It wouldn't feel projected, it would just feel like a way of being.
- [82:55]
D
A lot of it is just the current hardware constraints. But at the end of the day, all of our sensory input is just information.
- [83:05]
B
One of the questions that I would have got to if I'd gone for about another 15 minutes and everyone would have been fast asleep, would have been questions about what might set the limits on this sort of stuff. Are there limits on what kind of forms of embodiment we could take on board? For example, are there limits to the kind of body you could have in second life? Could you have something with a hundred eyes on the. Like that, you know, if some of the processing is being done by the, by the old biological system, it's quite likely that brains like ours aren't set up to cope with, you know, 100 foveation points all at once. In order to do that, you need a very substantial bit of pre processing that somehow crunches a lot of stuff together so that the old biosystems can deal with it. On the other hand, you know, we do get used to doing, using things like, you know, the sort of. The various mirrors on lorries and cars and things. So by shifting our attention around, we seem able to cope with lots of different inputs at once. On video games you can have lots of little screens showing you different parts of what's going on and we get used to that. So I think we're actually pretty plastic. But what sets the limits to it?
- [84:19]
A
I think with that great open question and for today, because we're at the end of our time, unfortunately. So thank you very much for the fascinating.