What I've Been Reading

Just as clean air makes respiration possible, silence, in this broader sense, is what makes it possible to think. We give it up willingly when we are in the company of other people with whom we have some relationship, and when we open ourselves to serendipitous encounters with strangers. To be addressed by mechanized means is an entirely different matter.

To attend to anything in a sustained way requires actively excluding all the other things that grab at our attention. It requires, if not ruthlessness toward oneself, a capacity for self-regulation.

The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction by Matthew B. Crawford. I was totally surprised reading this lesser know book; Crawford gives Nicholas Carr run for this money. A gem of book - "Cognitive Extension" is the recurring theme of the book which he delivers through analogies of racing, organ makers (yes, did you know they cost over a million bucks and are handmade?) and other "lesser" known crafts.

There is a very real sense in which a tool may be integrated into one’s body, for one who has become expert in using the tool. There is a growing number of studies that support this idea of “cognitive extension”; the new capacities added by tools and prosthetics become indistinguishable from those of the natural human body, in terms of how they are treated by the brain that organizes our actions and perceptions.

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Surprisingly, it is in the field of robotics that some of the most convincing evidence has emerged that inference, calculation, and representation are a grossly inefficient way to go about negotiating a physical environment. In his now-classic article “Intelligence Without Representation,” published in the journal Artificial Intelligence in 1991, Rodney Brooks wrote that “the world is its own best model.” Roboticists are learning a lesson that evolution learned long ago, namely, that the task of solving problems needn’t be accomplished solely by the brain, but can be distributed among the brain, the body, and the world.

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In a variation on the old funk dictum, we might say, “Involve your ass, your mind will follow.” And conversely, “Free your ass, your mind will wander.” I suspect John Muir is right with his image of the Aztec hood ornament: having some skin in the game would seem to be an important safety variable.

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In a culture predicated on this autonomy-heteronomy distinction, it is difficult to think clearly about attention— the faculty that joins us to the world— because everything located outside your head is regarded as a potential source of unfreedom, and therefore a threat to the self. This makes education a tricky matter.