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“Where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin?”
“Could my mental states be partly constituted by the states of other thinkers? We see no reason why not.”
everywhere we look we see problems with attention and memory, with motivation and persistence, with logical reasoning and abstract thinking.
Thinking outside the brain means skillfully engaging entities external to our heads—the feelings and movements of our bodies, the physical spaces in which we learn and work, and the minds of the other people around us—drawing them into our own mental processes.
The modern world is extraordinarily complex, bursting with information, built around non-intuitive ideas, centered on concepts and symbols. Succeeding in this world requires focused attention, prodigious memory, capacious bandwidth, sustained motivation, logical rigor, and proficiency with abstractions. The gap between what our biological brains are capable of, and what modern life demands, is large and getting larger each day.
The smart move is not to lean ever harder on the brain but to learn to reach beyond it.
“I used to think that the brain was the most wonderful organ in my body. Then I realized who was telling me this.”)
