The extended mind as the advance of civilization
Six Ways to Think Long-term: A Cognitive Toolkit for Good Ancestors
None of these six ways is enough alone to create a long-term revolution of the human mind — a fundamental shift in our perception of time. But together — and when practised by a critical mass of people and organisations — a new age of long-term thinking could emerge out of their synergy.
Extended mind thesis
In philosophy of mind, the extended mind thesis says that the mind does not exclusively reside in the brain or even the body, but extends into the physical world.[1] The thesis proposes that some objects in the external environment can be part of a cognitive process and in that way function as extensions of the mind itself. Examples of such objects are written calculations, a diary, or a personal computer; in general, it concerns objects that store information. The hypothesis considers the mind to encompass every level of cognition, including the physical level.
Thinking—Fast, Slow, and Artificial: How AI is Reshaping Human Reasoning and the Rise of Cognitive Surrender
People increasingly consult generative artificial intelligence (AI) while reasoning. As AI becomes embedded in daily thought, what becomes of human judgment? We
Thinking through other minds: A variational approach to cognition and culture
The processes underwriting the acquisition of culture remain unclear. How are shared habits, norms, and expectations learned and maintained with precision and reliability across large-scale sociocultural ensembles? Is there a unifying account of the mechanisms involved in the acquisition of culture? Notions such as “shared expectations,” the “selective patterning of attention and behaviour,” “cultural evolution,” “cultural inheritance,” and “implicit learning” are the main candidates to underpin a unifying account of cognition and the acquisition of culture; however, their interactions require greater specification and clarification. In this article, we integrate these candidates using the variational (free-energy) approach to human cognition and culture in theoretical neuroscience. We describe the construction by humans of social niches that afford epistemic resources called cultural affordances. We argue that human agents learn the shared habits, norms, and expectations of their culture through immersive participation in patterned cultural practices that selectively pattern attention and behaviour. We call this process “thinking through other minds” (TTOM) – in effect, the process of inferring other agents’ expectations about the world and how to behave in social context. We argue that for humans, information from and about other people's expectations constitutes the primary domain of statistical regularities that humans leverage to predict and organize behaviour. The integrative model we offer has implications that can advance theories of cognition, enculturation, adaptation, and psychopathology. Crucially, this formal (variational) treatment seeks to resolve key debates in current cognitive science, such as the distinction between internalist and externalist accounts of theory of mind abilities and the more fundamental distinction between dynamical and representational accounts of enactivism.
Problems of Proliferation — LessWrong
Scientific progress and its perils. TLDR: The vulnerable world hypothesis is likely correct. Once enormous amounts of cognitive labor start getting a…
Development Beyond Information: Human Becoming in the Age of AI
Abstract. Discussions of artificial intelligence in education increasingly equate development with the acquisition and deployment of information. This article argues that such accounts rest on false assumptions. Development is better understood not as an informational state but as a relational, historical process of becoming through which persons emerge and continue to change. Drawing on Vygotsky, on Ilyenkov's distinction between living and petrified ideality, and on the enactive approach to cognition, we characterise development through four features: its historicity, its dependence on reciprocal sense-making, its mediation by others who orient the learner, and its cultivation within relations of care. Large language models operate over the sedimented products of these processes without participating in them. As objectifications of human purposes, such systems may mediate human development or foreclose it. We conclude by considering what this account implies for education.
The misunderstood limits of folk science: an illusion of explanatory depth
People feel they understand complex phenomena with far greater precision, coherence, and depth than they really do; they are subject to an illusion—an illusion of explanatory depth. The illusion is f...
57 Ideas & Questions about Cognitive Infrastructures
Commodity Intelligence
The seductiveness of “general intelligence” is rooted in a costly category error
Rethinking Norm Psychology
Norms permeate human life. Most of people’s activities can be characterized by rules about what is appropriate, allowed, required, or forbidden—rules that are crucial in making people hyper-cooperative animals. In this article, I examine the current cognitive-evolutionary account of “norm psychology” and propose an alternative that is better supported by evidence and better placed to promote interdisciplinary dialogue. The incumbent theory focuses on rules and claims that humans genetically inherit cognitive and motivational mechanisms specialized for processing these rules. The cultural-evolutionary alternative defines normativity in relation to behavior—compliance, enforcement, and commentary—and suggests that it depends on implicit and explicit processes. The implicit processes are genetically inherited and domain-general; rather than being specialized for normativity, they do many jobs in many species. The explicit processes are culturally inherited and domain-specific; they are constructed from mentalizing and reasoning by social interaction in childhood. The cultural-evolutionary, or “cognitive gadget,” perspective suggests that people alive today—parents, educators, elders, politicians, lawyers—have more responsibility for sustaining normativity than the nativist view implies. People’s actions not only shape and transmit the rules, but they also create in each new generation mental processes that can grasp the rules and put them into action.
Brainchildren
Minds are complex artifacts, partly biological and partly social; only a unified, multidisciplinary approach will yield a realistic theory of how they came i...
Does modernisation erase cultural difference – or amplify it? | Psyche Ideas
We understandably fear the flattening effect of modernity. But global data from China to Peru tells a hopeful story
The mistake we all make... and the simple experiment that reveals it
Your answer reveals how you see the world – and the common error that hampers our decision making. In an extract from his new book, psychologist Richard Nisbett reveals the ‘mindware’ to help us think smarter
A World Unobserved
Humans have always generated knowledge and judged it. That's changing fast.
No need to stop the 'brain rot': Modern kids aren't less intelligent | New Scientist
The idea that the rise of tech means today's young people are less intelligent than previous generations is rife – but wrong, says neuroscientist Dean Burnett
