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December 27, 2021 - January 5, 2022
Humans evolved to handle the concrete, not to contemplate the abstract.
The brain is well adapted to sensing and moving the body, to navigating through physical space, and to interacting with other members of our species. On top of this basic suite of human competencies, civilization has built a vast edifice of abstraction, engaging our brains in acts of symbolic processing and conceptual cognition that don’t come as naturally. These abstractions have, of course, allowed us to expand our powers exponentially—but now, paradoxically, further progress may depend on running this process in reverse. In order to succeed at the increasingly complex thinking modern life
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Consider: research from neuroscience and cognitive psychology indicates that when we begin using a tool, our “body schema”—our sense of the body’s shape, size, and position—rapidly expands to encompass it, as if the tool we’re grasping in our hand has effectively become an extension of our arm. Something similar occurs in the case of mental extensions.
Of course, it’s possible that such a test would be misused, as IQ tests have so often been misused—employed to rank, divide, and exclude people instead of helping them to develop. But such misuse need not be inevitable. Once we make mental extensions visible, what we do with our new awareness is up to us.
Defenders of the status quo have long argued that social and economic inequality merely reflects a kind of organic inequality, determined by nature, in the talents and abilities with which individuals are born. That argument appears less plausible when viewed through the lens of the extended mind. If
Unlike innate intelligence, which we imagine to be an inseparable part of who we “are,” access to mental extensions is more readily understood as a matter of chance or luck.
