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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On the flip side, I spent 4 weeks trying to learn math/physics with an ipad and nothing stuck. Came back to pen and paper for everything this week and it's 100x better 😆
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That’s super interesting. Why do you think that is?
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The conflation with the alien with meaningfulness borders on 18th century Orientalism; different is not implicitly better or more successful.
