2.8EN3

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Despite its length, the passage deserves to be quoted in its entirety here: “Andy Clark illustrates [the potential to make use of objects to enable more sophisticated thoughts than would otherwise be possible] with a story about Richard Feynman, the Nobel Prize—winning physicist, meeting with the historian Charles Weiner to discuss a batch of Feynman’s original notes. Weiner remarks that the papers are ‘a record of [Feynman’s] day-to-day work,’ but Feynman disagrees. ‘I actually did the work on the paper,’ he said. ‘Well,’ Weiner said, ‘the work was done in your head, but the record of it is still here.’ ‘No, it’s not a record, not really. It’s working. You have to work on paper and this is the paper. Okay?’ Feynman makes clear that he did not have his ideas in advance and wrote them down. Rather, the process of writing down was an integral part of his thinking, and the paper and pencil were as much a part of his cognitive system as the neurons firing in his brain. Working from such instances, Clark develops the model of extended cognition (which he calls EXTENDED), contrasting it with a model that imagines cognition happens in the brain (which he calls BRAINBOUND). The differences between EXTENDED and BRAINBOUND are clear, with the neurological, experimental, and anecdotal evidence overwhelmingly favoring the former over the latter.” (Hayles 2012, 93)