Sublime

Marshall McLuhan wrote that every new technology was an extension of the human body but also an amputation of the same function from the body itself, and computers’ ability to furnish us with a second brain implies that our first brains have correspondingly atrophied.

More than 20 years ago, two philosophers, Andy Clark and David Chalmers, wrote a journal article that opened with a question: “Where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin?” Now, that question would seem to have an obvious answer, right? The mind stops at the head. It’s contained within the skull. But Clark and Chalmers maintained that

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Human minds are not elusive, ghostly inner things. They are seething, swirling oceans of prediction, continuously orchestrated by brain, body, and world . We should be careful what kinds of material, digital, and social worlds we build, because in building those worlds we are building our own minds too.