[intro music]
[applause]
Hi everyone, I want to talk to you about a new way of looking at the mind.
What I call the extended mind is the idea that the technology we use becomes part of
our minds, extending our minds and indeed ourselves into the world.
I’ll start with something that might be a little bit more familiar, the extended body.
We’re used to the idea that we can extend our bodies with technology, we know about
prosthetic limbs.
Here's the athlete Oscar Pistorius running on is prosthetic legs. You don’t need prosthetic
limbs to extend your bodies. Blind people say their canes serve as an extension of their body.
It feels exactly like a body from the inside, or in more mundane everyday experience,
a car can feel like and extension of your body, a bike, or indeed a musical instrument.
You saw a great illustration of that a few minutes ago with Rives using an extension
of his body.
And so it is with the body, so it is for the extended mind. Where a technology gets incorporated
into our human mind. Now you might think that to incorporate technology into your mind you’d
have to turn yourself into a cyborg.
Something like that! A whole bunch of, you know, pipes and tubes inside your head,
or a whole bunch of fancy technology like this in your head. I actually think there is a
more ordinary kind of mind extension which as happening to us right now – all the time.
As we move into the technological future.
Take our friend the iPhone. I’ve had one of these for maybe three or four years and
it’s basically started taking over a whole bunch of the functions of my brain.
[audience laughter]
Things my brain used to do are now done by my iPhone.
I mean there's a million examples. Take memory. How many people use their brain to remember
numbers anymore? Not me. See my iPhone does all the work. It used to be the biological
memory used to carry the load. Now the iPhone gets to carry it for me – acting for my memory.
The iPhone serves to control planning functions that my brain used to do. Spatial navigation,
offloaded from my brain into Google Maps.
The iPhone even stores a repository of my desires. I’ve got a program on the iPhone
that tells me my favourite dishes at the local restaurant. When we go there I just look it
up and say, "This, this, this, this." This is the iPhone controlling my desires for me.
It even makes decisions for me [audience laughs]. Here’s the Executive Decision Maker.
Am I going to go speak at that TED conference? Oh definitely.
So um, so ok you might say ok well this is all a big metaphor. It’s a little bit like
a mind in some ways. But I think there is actually a philosophical thesis here that
I want to defend. Because in some sense the iPhone is literally becoming part of your mind.
Your mind is extending from your brain into the world so the iPhone is actually part of it.
Your iPhone hasn’t been implanted into your mind. But you might think it’s as if it were.
Here’s an iPhone implanted into your mind. It’s as if it was implanted into your mind,
although it’s actually out there in the world. It’s actually extended mind thesis.
So the iPhone’s memory is basically my memory. The iPhone’s planning or navigation is my
planning and navigation. It’s as if it has happened inside the brain.
Now for me as a philosopher this is really interesting because one of the central philosophical
problems about the mind – maybe the central philosophical problem about the mind is what
we call the mind-brain problem. How does your mind- your thinking and your feeling relate
to your brain – this bunch of mushy neurones you have inside your head? Is it something
more or something less. You may ask most people where the mind is and they say, “Oh somewhere
in there”.
This extended mind thesis I think it can transform our vision of the mind – the mind is not
just in the brain it’s partly in the world around us, in the environment that we interact with.
You might think this is kind of crazy or even totally mad.
When my collaborator and I – my collaborator Andy Clark and I first put this thesis around
back in the mid 1990s, and you know we came across a bit of resistance. A lot of people
made objections – back then we didn’t have iPhones. Our central example was the notebook.
People writing stuff down and using that as a memory. You don’t need high-tech
to get the idea of the extended mind going. Um you know, the very first time someone counted
on their fingers that was a kind of mind extension, a kind of addition that could have been
taking place in your head, but is happening on your fingers. But technology really amplifies
this extension of our mind and I think its made the thesis ring true for more people,
as well because the experience actually happens to us.
You might object in various ways – this iPhone is just a tool – not really part
of the mind. For it really to become part of your mind you would have to implant
it like this. To be in your mind it’s got to be inside you skull. Or maybe it can’t
be part of your mind – it’s metal mind’s are biological they involve a soul or something.
Now I think this kind of reaction that you get it’s like a brain chauvinism.
It's like you know, gender chauvinism, race chauvinism, species chauvinism. What’s so special about
the brain? I mean what’s so special about the inside of the brain compared to the outside?
For a start, you know it’s like you’ve got stuff going on on the inside of the brain,
the same stuff could in principle go on on the outside of the brain. We want to say there's
no difference in principle, as long as it’s driving the processes inside the brain, the action,
the consciousness in the same way than would happen otherwise. There’s no
principle barrier about the skull you know, that would be skull chauvinism.
Likewise, metal versus biology - if the metal does the same job as the biology is doing,
that also counts as part of the mind, otherwise that would be biology – DNA chauvinism
So I think that objection can be rejected. You might think that, um somehow consciousness
is at the very centre of the mind and I’ve got some sympathy with this – consciousness
is a deeply internal state. But I think that what we are thinking and feeling in the present
moment is at the core of the mind. But there’s always a whole lot to our minds that is outside
our consciousness, what we think, our inner most desires, our hopes, our fears, our personality traits,
and a lot of this, most of it is not passing through your mind at any given moment.
Any given moment is a tiny little snapshot. What makes you you is a whole bunch of
stuff that is outside your consciousness available to affect it your memories are mostly outside
your consciousness? It doesn’t matter whether it’s stored in your brain or out there in
the world. If it’s out there accessible to you, driving your state, then it counts
as part of your mind. I mean there is still a brain at the core of all this. I’m not
saying the iPhone is itself a mind; you are still the mind with your brain and consciousness
at the core. But the iPhone is part of it, is mind extension if you like. Oh what was that?
My iPhone begs to differ – it thinks it’s the mind and I’m the extension.
Um, so this thesis I think is not just – it’s a new way of looking at the world, which is
kind of cool – a new way of looking at the mind. I think it actually makes a difference
for some of our um, some of our practices. I mean, in Alzheimer’s disease when people
describe themselves as losing their mind, one thing we found happens that works really
well in how many people with Alzheimer’s is the use of mind extension technology.
People use notes in the environment for example to act as a kind of memory external memory
with labels everywhere that really helps to slow down the loss of mental function, keeping
aspects of their mind out there in the world.
There are issues about – makes a difference to education. There are debates about open
book examinations and the use of calculators in exams. So to take the extended mind thesis
you’ll also be testing the whole extended self. If a calculator or computer is going
to be with you, coupled with you reliably available in the future, it’s part of your
extended self and you’ll be also be testing the whole extended self.
Is this a case of extended perception? A blind person who starts using his iPhone as
a vision tool – this is a colour identification program, colour ID, you can download it. It
basically reads out colour, you point it at something and it reads it out. He is going
to use this to see a sunset for the first time. He held it up and it went red, orange,
yellow, azure, crimson. He was moved to tears, felt like he was seeing a sunset for the first time.
Using this as an extended vision mechanism, an extended perception mechanism.
And as wearable computing becomes more and more ubiquitous in our lives, this is going
to become more and more common, here we have glasses that compute stuff for us to extend
our perception. There is also the socially extended mind.
We all know that other people become extensions of your mind. We all know long term couples
where one person acts as another person’s memory. You know, reminding each other of
things at the right time or when they finish each other’s sentences or speak as a single
individual in a conversation. In effect what’s happening now is one person is becoming an
extension of another person’s mind and vice versa. I’ll be in my mind – I’ll be
in your mind if you’ll be in mine. I think Bob Dylan said that.
Um, there’s also um, social networking is really amplifying this, so um, so when
I was preparing for this talk about a month ago, I posted up on Face Book,
“I’ve got to give a TED talk next month a 15 minute talk in Sydney on the extended mind.
Any ideas on how to approach it?” And I got a whole lot of responses, some pretty
useful responses from this social network, which is surrounding us – becoming part
of our extended mind. There were more, and there were more, including a whole bunch of
useful suggestions, not least this one “Maybe you could work Face Book into it?
[audience laughter] or “Well you could start by mentioning you crowds ourced the whole talk”.
Thanks guys, that was handy.
Now there are some downsides and dangers to this whole extended mind thesis. As our minds
move into the world we become more vulnerable to their loss than when they are protected
on the inside of their skulls. There’s already something familiar like, things like something
tragic, the floods in Queensland or the bushfires in Victoria. We often talk about the greatest
tragedy being that people lose their memories. You know their house and their possessions
and so on. And basically it’s become part of them, the loss of them feels like the loss
of one’s self. And the more one’s mind gets extended, the more there is vulnerability.
I mean, just say someone stole my iPhone [audience laughs], you might think that’s a pretty
serious – that’s a form of theft you know and they should be punished for it.
So if I’m right this should be reconceived as a really vicious form of assault,
like someone getting into my brain and messing with my neurones. That really captures the
attitude I have about my iPhone.
You may worry this is going to turn us into robots – remember the guy from Lost in Space,
Will Robinson. I think we have to remember we always have consciousness in the middle
of it, and judgement. Um, an extension of our mind doesn’t abrogate us from using
our judgment. With better and better technology which becomes more and more flexible I think
there’s the hope that the interplay between judgment and technology might move us forward
in interesting ways.
So I actually think then, to conduce, this extended mind thesis offers us some hope,
an optimistic worldview. People say “Is Google making us Stupid?” This is a debate that
has been out there in the media. Well if I’m right about extended mind thesis, there's a
sense in which Google is actually making us smarter. Google is getting inside our minds.
I don’t know about you but when I sit down and Google my IQ goes up 30 points. You know
it’s like all that knowledge, and they say knowledge is power of a kind.
It leads to a kind of potential democratisation too of the power of the mind. As technology
gets cheaper and available to more and more advanced it’s going to spread. You know
phones are already spreading; Google is spreading, with time it’ll become available to everyone,
so in a way I think what’s going on is a trend; we are in the very early stages of,
turning us into super heroes of the mind. Technology is gradually giving us super powers
turning us into cognitive super geniuses if you like. It’s going to be more and more
this way in the future, the question is will we use these powers for good, or for evil?
That’s the er, I think that’s the gift of the extended mind and the challenge it
presents as we move into our extended future. Thank you very much.
[Applause].