The Notebook

The Moleskine story has been told many times, by Sebregondi and others. The fullest, and best, account is in David Sax’s excellent The Revenge of Analog (New York, 2016), although I have also referred to other print sources including Adrienne Raphel’s ‘The virtual Moleskine’ (The New Yorker, 14 April 2014), Hannah Roberts’s ‘Maria Segrebondi, Moles

Now imagine how it must have felt to grow up in that world, and then to see pen and paper in use for the first time, making baffling ideas simple, defying memory’s inherent slipperiness, and allowing for complicated sums, lifelike drawings, gripping verse, lengthy memoirs, and surprising harmonies. You could say that the arrival of the notebook gav

But we can easily picture a world in which there are very few such things. What objects in the everyday life of an early medieval peasant allowed them to extend their minds? The parish Bible, a measuring stick or string, perhaps; the counting board in a shop, a dice game, a sundial. With such limited opportunities, it’s no surprise that this enviro

What would traditionally be seen as property crime may instead count as a crime of violence. And it helps to explain the strange strength of the bonds that we form with our notebooks and diaries if we understand them to be extensions of our minds, parts of our belief and cognitive systems that happen to reside outside our skulls but are otherwise i

The last paragraph of ‘The Extended Mind’ anticipated this, noting that the ‘reconception of ourselves’ that the hypothesis demanded would have ‘significant consequences’, not least moral and ethical implications. ‘In some cases,’ it said, ‘interfering with someone’s environment will have the same moral significance as interfering with their person

It helped that the simultaneous development of digital technology made it easier for people to accept the idea that we can enter into a cognitive partnership with an object. Smartphones, tablets and the internet all blur the ‘skull and skin’ boundary, and the Australian philosopher Ned Block, according to Chalmers, ‘likes to say that the thesis was

sited in the notebook or in the brain doesn’t, therefore, matter. So long as one trusts the information stored in the notebook, relies upon it, and uses it, there is – philosophically speaking – no meaningful difference between the notebook and the mind. Therefore, Otto’s mind has expanded to include his notebook, and your notebook – if you use it

Our beliefs and minds are inextricably intertwined, so if the former found themselves (in part) outside our skulls, so would (in part) the latter.

The pair then pressed on with their logic, pointing out that it challenged the conventional view that a person’s mind exists within their brain, and nowhere else. It would challenge it still further, if they could show externalism to apply not just to our thought processes but also to our beliefs – understood in the wide, philosophical sense: what