One fun way to think about extended cognition is in terms of creating unrecognizably alien mental states.
eg: someone who has never used Hindu-Arabic numerals can't imagine what is going on in the mind of someone using them to solve a problem. Unrecognizably alien mental states!
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Ditto musical notation: someone who's never used it can't imagine what's going on in the mind of a composer who has.
But also, Lisp does this to how I think about representing data; drum machines do this to how I think about rhythm; probably a Bloomberg terminal qualifies; etc.
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In general, the more transformative the environment, the more unrecognizable—alien; magic!—the mental states it produces.
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It's hard to appreciate this happening fully. e.g. I notice that "networked note-taking" produces a sort of consciousness I'd not quite recognize a few years ago.
How alien would a 1950's "tech" person find my typical working mental states? Could go either way, really—not sure.
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(I notice that I find the mental states of "extremely-online Zoomers who spend all day hanging out in Discord doing meme engineering" quite unfathomably alien… which is a real sign of some meaningful social technology being invented/enacted!)
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pretty easy feeling to recreate with languages as well. even within the same notation when new vocal sounds are created from letters you know. eg like Icelandic
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And there being the wine dark sea in Ancient Greek and no fucking blue.
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Reminded of how people can be alienated from their own mental states: a writer can no longer return to a particular moment in mind when their writing is stripped and consolidated to its punctuation. Despite each comma previously being a conscious choice.
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What does your writing look like if you take out everything *but* the punctuation?
I made a little web tool that lets you do this -- and see what yours looks like: link.medium.com/yKpJeyhMbkb
Go give it a try!
(Inspired by @neuroecology's terrific work analyzing novels)
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I love that way of looking at it!
The subconscious placement of punctuation as a way to somewhat revisit the subconscious moment
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Hindu/Arabic script is easy, being resident East of Suez, but try and do that mind experiment in Roman numerals... a bit like Greek/Roman Latin - but with no punctuation as we now have. Just way too many I and II never mind III and IIII (or the occasional IV), etc.
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.. but educationally grown up with 1, 2, 3 and V, X and L.