Freshly grown on the garden this week - “How to Become a Neo-Cartesian Cyborg"
A lightning talk I gave at the end of last year on what it means to build a “second brain,” put into the historical and cultural perspective of cartesian dualism and cyborgs
maggieappleton.com/neocyborgs
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Ah not really… still researching lots in related themes and areas that bleeds into other work. But havent expanded on this one in specific. My idea ADHD is such a nuisance sometimes, haha. Open thoughts take months to come full circle 😅
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😆 It’s okay, the neo-version is much more benign than the original. Takes all the lovely embodied emotion of life into consideration :)
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Fascinating, so many interesting ideas, especially embodied knowledge and codified knowledge. I'm continually testing different ways of organising ideas to connect and build on. So what's the answer? Is building a second brain a good and valuable thing to do?
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Sure, if we replace the words “second brain” with “partial cybernetic extension of your empirical collection and reflection system to help the small conscious part of your brain do a limited number of writing-based tasks”
;)
And design our systems around embodied experiences.
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This is great - the "Second Brain" concept has never sat well with me because of the computationalist way it describes how we engage with the world. Have you engaged much with enactivism?
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It takes this argument further, suggesting that the mind is an emergent property of our relation with the world. A second brain concept is thus moot - thought is consubstantial with the world, meaning it's flawed to circumscribe a 'second brain'.
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Wonderful talk Maggie! The idea that cognition is embodied is now mainstream cognitive science, but I feel that we have barely scratched the surface of mining those insights to build better tools (systems?? enabling environments??) for thought.
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Some related thoughts from Andy Clark's other book (supersizing the mind) that have been inspiring to me along these lines:
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