“Is this ‘animism’… Should we be accepting objective, system-based functional inventories of what does or does not count as a distinct cognizer, as we do with what does or does not count as being alive? Or does our subjective sense have some privileged say in the matter?”
As I wrote in my response to the Chalmers Article, The Extended Mind/11A, I am of the opinion that we should be accepting/creating objective inventories of what counts as being a distinct cognizer (Much like the list of 7 things that are required to categorize something as ‘alive’). As far as a subjective sense of perceiving someone else’s mental state goes, I think this is more related to those ‘mirror neurons’ discussed in this reading – in which case surely this eventually could also be made to be objective (though recording from these neurons at all times would likely not be possible with humans, at least not right now). My main point being, without a list of what constitutes a cognizer (and I realize no such list may exist/may never exist) I find it difficult to objectively categorize objects as cognizant or not. Though of course, I do feel the difference – but that hardly helps the matter, nor does it further my point.
The world wide web has the immense capacity to disseminate anything. Anything. This inconceivable power has the potential to change the world in any direction.
Its danger comes in exactly that capacity that it can help the world for the better, but also cause immeasurable harm. The breadth and depth of ideas that we can be exposed to can slowly or drastically change us. On the evil side, criminal thoughts can be planted. On the good side, fighting for animal rights can be planted.
Regardless of good or evil, the web increases our propensity to act on what we feel. The feelings that we did not feel before, we can act on those feelings. For example, there are adolescents who partake in beating the homeless because they saw it on TV or on the internet. Or adolescents who were, inspired by games like Grand Theft Auto, convicted of joyriding. On the contrary, I have watched Professor Harnad's talk at Students for Critical Animal Studies (McGill, 2014) and started phasing out animal products in my life. Is cognitive technology limited to increasing the cognitive performance capacity of its users? No. We have argued that cognitive tools are not themselves cognizers, nor do they have -- or serve as distributed substrates of -- mental states. But their effects go well beyond making human cognition more efficient and productive. Just as noncognitive technology (cars, planes, machinery) transformed our somatic lives, so the offloading of brain function onto cognitive technology is now transforming our cerebral lives. Physical technology altered the frequency, intensity, and manner of our muscle use, altering our muscular development (even introducing new ‘technological diseases’, such as carpal tunnel syndrome). Cognitive technology will do likewise, but instead of affecting our muscles it will affect our brain development, organization and capacities. Changing how we think, learn, and communicate, our cognitive tools are reshaping our minds.
What I felt from this paper was that we can make use of cognitive technologies, but we should not forget that they are means to our end. We should not let the means become an end. It is already observed in our societal patterns of social media addiction.
In addition to the anecdotal evidence of observing that the societal patterns of cognitive technologies becoming the end in themselves, I have listed the evidence, not proof, that demonstrates the danger of that switch (Source: Daniel Levitin's book, The Organized Mind).
Television: 1) Greenstein, J. (1954) Effect of television upon elementary school grades. The Journal of Educational Research, 48(3), 161-176. 2) Maccoby, E. E. (1951). Television: Its impact on school children. Public Opinion Quarterly, 15(3), 421-444. 3) Scheuer, J. (1992). The sound bite society. New England Review, 14(4), 264-267. 4) Witty, P. (1950). Children's, parents' and teachers' reactions to television. Elementary English, 27(6), 349-355, p. 396.
Computers: 1) Cromie, W. J. (1999, January 21). Computer addiction is coming on-line. Harvard Gazette. 2) Shaffer, H. J., Hall, M. N., & Vander Blit, J. (2000). "Computer addiction": A critical consideration. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 70(2), 162-168.
iPods: 1) Cockrill, A., Sullivan, M., & Norbury, H. L. (2011). Music consumption: Lifestyle choice or addiction. Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, 18(2), 160-166. 2) McFedries, P. (2005). Technically speaking: The iPod people. IEEE Spectrum, 42(2), 76. 3) Norbury, H. L. (2008).A study of Apple's iPod: iPod addiction: Does it exist? (Master's thesis). Swansea University, Wales.
iPads: 1) Aldridge, G. (2013, April 21). Girl aged four is Britain's youngest-known iPad addict. Daily Mirror. 2) Smith, J. L. (2013, December 28). Switch off--it's time for your digital detox. The Telegraph
e-mail: 1) Lincoln, A. (2011). FYI: TMI: Toward a holistic social theory of information overload. First Monday 16(3) 2) Taylor, C. (2002, June 3). 12 steps for e-mail addicts. Time.
Twitter: 1) Hemp, P. (2009). Death by information overload. Harvard Business Review, 87(9), 82-89. 2) Khang, H., Kim, J. K., & Kim, Y. (2013). Self-traits and motivations as antecedents of digital media flow and addiction: The Internet, mobile phones, and video games. Computers in Human Behavio, 29(6), 2416-2424.
Facebook: 1) Pinker, S. (2010, June 11). Mind over mass media. The New York Times, p. A31. 2) Saenz, A. (2011, December 13). How social media is ruining your mind. Retrieved from http://singularityhub.com
RE: What Distributed Cognition Is I’m a little lost in the idea of a widely distributed body vs cognition. The paper says that it is similar to widely distributed cognition which is “if the mechanism that generates mental states and bodily performance capacity could be more widely distributed in space, and still be integrated somehow as to generated coordinated mental states and bodily function, then that too would be widely distributed cognition.” Does this refer to the earlier paragraph where he talks about the idea that the robot does not have to be narrow-minded (i.e. everything inside it) but instead the functions can be outside the body? Also, what does it “distributed cognition would still not be wider than the body” mean??
I find the question about whether colonies or societies are organisms, and especially if human societies can be seen as distributed cognitive organisms very intriguing. If, as this paper argues, it is not sound to say of a group of people that it is in fact one single distributed mind (from the distributed migraine and the siamese twins arguments), there are still puzzling things about human society and masses that suggest that they are more than just a well-organized sum of cognizers. We can study the behavior of masses, we can even predict them sometimes, and these prediction are not always congruent with what one would predict of the added individual behaviors of their component. And there really seem to be a difference between how a human thinks as an individual and as part of a dividual group; just think of how many time we talk about society as it was something apart from us, yet if society is as we describe it is because of how we think and act as a part of it.
“Are our own neural states, plus Google states, plus book states, plus the neural states in the heads of other cognizers all parts of distributed cognitive states – and if so, whose cognitive states?”
I don’t think we can describe the interaction of all these states as a wide cognitive state, because that would leave the problem of trying to pinpoint who is the cognizer of this distributed cognitive state. The interaction as a whole is not itself an independent cognitive state, but it is about the mind of the beholder in a sense. The interaction of all this cognitive technology only becomes a cognitive state when looking specifically at the input and output that all of this available information creates on an individual’s cognitive process. The information or web of all this cooperation on its own is not necessarily a cognitive state, but perhaps better termed as this “Cognitive Commons” that has the power to change the way we think and immensely transform how we do what we do.
I think the conception of multiple smaller parts comprising a cingular cognitive whole is a nice metaphor and useful way to talk about things (the city and its various subsystems as a living organism, for one) but there is no reason to believe that consciousness can be distributed between a person's mind and the various tools they may use to carry out their everyday functions. Our smartphones store information, we use them to interact with the world(s), they sometimes feel like indispensable parts of our cognitive functioning, but they are not because as the essay states, they do not have minds of their own and this is how we distinguish one entity from multiple ones. As to how we can tell whether it has a mind or not, this all comes back to the hard problem and the other minds problem of how and why we feel and how w can know if anything else feels.
“Is language itself a form of distributed cognition?"
This article conceptualizes language itself as a form of cognitive technology. It is interesting to think of language as something extending our cognitive capacity rather than something inherent to it. Language has the power to link one’s internal states with society and the external world. Conceptualizing language in this way made me think about the enhanced cognitive capacities of bilinguals. Bilinguals have been shown to outperform monolinguals on tasks of executive function, and bilingualism has also been said to delay cognitive decline in old age. Moreover, knowing multiple languages would offer even more opportunity for “collaborative cognition.” In this sense, is it fair to think about each individual language acquired as a cognitive technology in its own right?
I liked that this article clearly set the boundaries of what distributed cognition can mean. It is indeed the cognizer and tool user who cognizes, not the tools themselves. It is the former who feels, which at this point i am considering a fundamental aspect of cognition. Although it is true that technologies greatly shape our cognitive abilities, i believe this is not qualitatively different from what other objects in our environment have been doing until now (e.g.: our reaction towards anything that looks like a snake).
Re: Cognitive Technology and the Human Mind -- as I read this, an advertisement I saw the other day which I thought was problematic came to mind:
"Mindset: EEG headphones: Become your most productive self. Mindset tracks your focus throughout the day, and alerts you whenever your concentration drops. Over time, these alerts train your mind and rewire your brain to better tune out distractions. The first all-natural way to improve your concentration.”
This is just one example of the commercialization of neurofeedback technology; by capitalizing on ideals of ‘productivity,’ cognitive enhancement and the prestige of NSCI, products (which are either true or guised cognitive tech.) like Mindset, can have profound effects on the way people think and on their relationship with their ‘mind.’ Such as a new trust in, and reliance, on tech. to indicate a person's own mental state to themselves, or new benchmarks and definitions of feeling states via products like meditation headsets, which provide reports on the success of your meditation based on detection of a certain neural wavelength.
Point is, moving forward we need to be careful with the way we regard cognitive technologies as making 'human cognition more efficient and productive.' This kind of language can play into the profit-driven capitalist BS framework that will (and already is) exploiting cognitive technologies. We must ask the questions: Is more efficient and productive necessarily good? What capacities are gained/ improved and lost/weakened at the cost of a cognitive technology? On the flip side, we also have to be weary of automatically criticizing emerging cognitive technologies — such as the criticisms of the way the ‘digital age’ is changing the way people read for the worse, and how new communication tools are creating an unfocused and distracted population. We have to consider a.) are these just and older generation's classic fears of new technology b.) what capacities are gained at the cost of those that might be lost. Maybe the digital layout of words is worsening people’s reading comprehension (a proposed effect), but making them better at quickly making associations between topics.
“Is this ‘animism’… Should we be accepting objective, system-based functional inventories of what does or does not count as a distinct cognizer, as we do with what does or does not count as being alive? Or does our subjective sense have some privileged say in the matter?”
ReplyDeleteAs I wrote in my response to the Chalmers Article, The Extended Mind/11A, I am of the opinion that we should be accepting/creating objective inventories of what counts as being a distinct cognizer (Much like the list of 7 things that are required to categorize something as ‘alive’). As far as a subjective sense of perceiving someone else’s mental state goes, I think this is more related to those ‘mirror neurons’ discussed in this reading – in which case surely this eventually could also be made to be objective (though recording from these neurons at all times would likely not be possible with humans, at least not right now). My main point being, without a list of what constitutes a cognizer (and I realize no such list may exist/may never exist) I find it difficult to objectively categorize objects as cognizant or not. Though of course, I do feel the difference – but that hardly helps the matter, nor does it further my point.
The world wide web has the immense capacity to disseminate anything. Anything. This inconceivable power has the potential to change the world in any direction.
ReplyDeleteIts danger comes in exactly that capacity that it can help the world for the better, but also cause immeasurable harm. The breadth and depth of ideas that we can be exposed to can slowly or drastically change us. On the evil side, criminal thoughts can be planted. On the good side, fighting for animal rights can be planted.
Regardless of good or evil, the web increases our propensity to act on what we feel. The feelings that we did not feel before, we can act on those feelings. For example, there are adolescents who partake in beating the homeless because they saw it on TV or on the internet. Or adolescents who were, inspired by games like Grand Theft Auto, convicted of joyriding. On the contrary, I have watched Professor Harnad's talk at Students for Critical Animal Studies (McGill, 2014) and started phasing out animal products in my life.
Is cognitive technology limited to increasing the cognitive performance capacity of its users? No. We have argued that cognitive tools are not themselves cognizers, nor do they have -- or serve as distributed substrates of -- mental states. But their effects go well beyond making human cognition more efficient and productive. Just as noncognitive technology (cars, planes, machinery) transformed our somatic lives, so the offloading of brain function onto cognitive technology is now transforming our cerebral lives. Physical technology altered the frequency, intensity, and manner of our muscle use, altering our muscular development (even introducing new ‘technological diseases’, such as carpal tunnel syndrome). Cognitive technology will do likewise, but instead of affecting our muscles it will affect our brain development, organization and capacities. Changing how we think, learn, and communicate, our cognitive tools are reshaping our minds.
What I felt from this paper was that we can make use of cognitive technologies, but we should not forget that they are means to our end. We should not let the means become an end. It is already observed in our societal patterns of social media addiction.
In addition to the anecdotal evidence of observing that the societal patterns of cognitive technologies becoming the end in themselves, I have listed the evidence, not proof, that demonstrates the danger of that switch (Source: Daniel Levitin's book, The Organized Mind).
DeleteTelevision:
1) Greenstein, J. (1954) Effect of television upon elementary school grades. The Journal of Educational Research, 48(3), 161-176.
2) Maccoby, E. E. (1951). Television: Its impact on school children. Public Opinion Quarterly, 15(3), 421-444.
3) Scheuer, J. (1992). The sound bite society. New England Review,
14(4), 264-267.
4) Witty, P. (1950). Children's, parents' and teachers' reactions to television. Elementary English, 27(6), 349-355, p. 396.
Computers:
1) Cromie, W. J. (1999, January 21). Computer addiction is coming on-line. Harvard Gazette.
2) Shaffer, H. J., Hall, M. N., & Vander Blit, J. (2000). "Computer addiction": A critical consideration. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 70(2), 162-168.
iPods:
1) Cockrill, A., Sullivan, M., & Norbury, H. L. (2011). Music consumption: Lifestyle choice or addiction. Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, 18(2), 160-166.
2) McFedries, P. (2005). Technically speaking: The iPod people. IEEE Spectrum, 42(2), 76.
3) Norbury, H. L. (2008).A study of Apple's iPod: iPod addiction: Does it exist? (Master's thesis). Swansea University, Wales.
iPads:
1) Aldridge, G. (2013, April 21). Girl aged four is Britain's youngest-known iPad addict. Daily Mirror.
2) Smith, J. L. (2013, December 28). Switch off--it's time for your digital detox. The Telegraph
e-mail:
1) Lincoln, A. (2011). FYI: TMI: Toward a holistic social theory of information overload. First Monday 16(3)
2) Taylor, C. (2002, June 3). 12 steps for e-mail addicts. Time.
Twitter:
1) Hemp, P. (2009). Death by information overload. Harvard Business Review, 87(9), 82-89.
2) Khang, H., Kim, J. K., & Kim, Y. (2013). Self-traits and motivations as antecedents of digital media flow and addiction: The Internet, mobile phones, and video games. Computers in Human Behavio, 29(6), 2416-2424.
Facebook:
1) Pinker, S. (2010, June 11). Mind over mass media. The New York Times, p. A31.
2) Saenz, A. (2011, December 13). How social media is ruining your mind. Retrieved from http://singularityhub.com
RE: What Distributed Cognition Is
ReplyDeleteI’m a little lost in the idea of a widely distributed body vs cognition. The paper says that it is similar to widely distributed cognition which is “if the mechanism that generates mental states and bodily performance capacity could be more widely distributed in space, and still be integrated somehow as to generated coordinated mental states and bodily function, then that too would be widely distributed cognition.” Does this refer to the earlier paragraph where he talks about the idea that the robot does not have to be narrow-minded (i.e. everything inside it) but instead the functions can be outside the body? Also, what does it “distributed cognition would still not be wider than the body” mean??
I find the question about whether colonies or societies are organisms, and especially if human societies can be seen as distributed cognitive organisms very intriguing. If, as this paper argues, it is not sound to say of a group of people that it is in fact one single distributed mind (from the distributed migraine and the siamese twins arguments), there are still puzzling things about human society and masses that suggest that they are more than just a well-organized sum of cognizers. We can study the behavior of masses, we can even predict them sometimes, and these prediction are not always congruent with what one would predict of the added individual behaviors of their component. And there really seem to be a difference between how a human thinks as an individual and as part of a dividual group; just think of how many time we talk about society as it was something apart from us, yet if society is as we describe it is because of how we think and act as a part of it.
ReplyDelete“Are our own neural states, plus Google states, plus book states, plus the neural states in the heads of other cognizers all parts of distributed cognitive states – and if so, whose cognitive states?”
ReplyDeleteI don’t think we can describe the interaction of all these states as a wide cognitive state, because that would leave the problem of trying to pinpoint who is the cognizer of this distributed cognitive state. The interaction as a whole is not itself an independent cognitive state, but it is about the mind of the beholder in a sense. The interaction of all this cognitive technology only becomes a cognitive state when looking specifically at the input and output that all of this available information creates on an individual’s cognitive process. The information or web of all this cooperation on its own is not necessarily a cognitive state, but perhaps better termed as this “Cognitive Commons” that has the power to change the way we think and immensely transform how we do what we do.
I think the conception of multiple smaller parts comprising a cingular cognitive whole is a nice metaphor and useful way to talk about things (the city and its various subsystems as a living organism, for one) but there is no reason to believe that consciousness can be distributed between a person's mind and the various tools they may use to carry out their everyday functions. Our smartphones store information, we use them to interact with the world(s), they sometimes feel like indispensable parts of our cognitive functioning, but they are not because as the essay states, they do not have minds of their own and this is how we distinguish one entity from multiple ones. As to how we can tell whether it has a mind or not, this all comes back to the hard problem and the other minds problem of how and why we feel and how w can know if anything else feels.
ReplyDelete“Is language itself a form of distributed cognition?"
ReplyDeleteThis article conceptualizes language itself as a form of cognitive technology. It is interesting to think of language as something extending our cognitive capacity rather than something inherent to it. Language has the power to link one’s internal states with society and the external world. Conceptualizing language in this way made me think about the enhanced cognitive capacities of bilinguals. Bilinguals have been shown to outperform monolinguals on tasks of executive function, and bilingualism has also been said to delay cognitive decline in old age. Moreover, knowing multiple languages would offer even more opportunity for “collaborative cognition.” In this sense, is it fair to think about each individual language acquired as a cognitive technology in its own right?
I liked that this article clearly set the boundaries of what distributed cognition can mean. It is indeed the cognizer and tool user who cognizes, not the tools themselves. It is the former who feels, which at this point i am considering a fundamental aspect of cognition. Although it is true that technologies greatly shape our cognitive abilities, i believe this is not qualitatively different from what other objects in our environment have been doing until now (e.g.: our reaction towards anything that looks like a snake).
ReplyDeleteRe: Cognitive Technology and the Human Mind -- as I read this, an advertisement I saw the other day which I thought was problematic came to mind:
ReplyDelete"Mindset: EEG headphones: Become your most productive self. Mindset tracks your focus throughout the day, and alerts you whenever your concentration drops. Over time, these alerts train your mind and rewire your brain to better tune out distractions. The first all-natural way to improve your concentration.”
This is just one example of the commercialization of neurofeedback technology; by capitalizing on ideals of ‘productivity,’ cognitive enhancement and the prestige of NSCI, products (which are either true or guised cognitive tech.) like Mindset, can have profound effects on the way people think and on their relationship with their ‘mind.’ Such as a new trust in, and reliance, on tech. to indicate a person's own mental state to themselves, or new benchmarks and definitions of feeling states via products like meditation headsets, which provide reports on the success of your meditation based on detection of a certain neural wavelength.
Point is, moving forward we need to be careful with the way we regard cognitive technologies as making 'human cognition more efficient and productive.' This kind of language can play into the profit-driven capitalist BS framework that will (and already is) exploiting cognitive technologies. We must ask the questions: Is more efficient and productive necessarily good? What capacities are gained/ improved and lost/weakened at the cost of a cognitive technology? On the flip side, we also have to be weary of automatically criticizing emerging cognitive technologies — such as the criticisms of the way the ‘digital age’ is changing the way people read for the worse, and how new communication tools are creating an unfocused and distracted population. We have to consider a.) are these just and older generation's classic fears of new technology b.) what capacities are gained at the cost of those that might be lost. Maybe the digital layout of words is worsening people’s reading comprehension (a proposed effect), but making them better at quickly making associations between topics.