Where I start to have questions is at the point where the narrator posits the idea that, fundamentally having a computer in your mind is no different than sitting at one.
I think what the video was point at is that there are a number of encoding modes, but all result in the storing and/or processing of information with the same end effect that we call “memory” when brains do it. As for Mary losing her notebook or Steve losing his arms, I’m afraid both accident and injury can lead to memory loss and cognitive dysfunction in the usual sense as well. The notebook and data files, on the other hand, have different decay rates from memories in a brain, and may be useful in different ways than their biological counterparts. The use of environmental features to create memory and association provides durability beyond that of the brain, and allows for the possibility of multiple users. The latter is why I brought Extended Mind into the discussion of culture. Remember, it’s not the artifacts themselves that create mind, but (as you observed) the ways we relate to them and they relate to each other. Importantly, this sort of extension is happening all the time automatically. e.g. Driving extends the mind-body complex to include the vehicle and any information its instrument panels display, especially after we achieve enough practice to use the controls without having to consciously think about the process. As long as we can’t help doing it anyway, we might as well use Extended Mind on purpose and try to optimize whatever we can. That includes on the multi-user level of Culture. And that is one of the huge benefits of learning to see less rigid boundaries between the “internal” and “external”.
Though, to be fair, I still haven’t found the original source. I may be misattributing something written by somebody else I was reading at the same time as the Sequences.
BTW, I’d guess that this question may be the reason somebody downvoted your comment with no explanation[1]. I’ve noticed that comments asking questions that are answered in the FAQ tend to have negative karma.
[^1] This is a bit of a pet peeve of mine. I think if you feel strongly enough to vote something down, you should at least have the courtesy and courage to tell the author why! That’s especially true for longer comments and posts. I think the author deserves to know what feature of their writing people “want to see less of”.
I’m a little curious about your background, and were you the one that produced that video?
Not my video; I don’t have all the skills I’d need to produce that kind of output right now. ;) It’s a good explainer, though, and gave me a word for a process I’d been taking advantage of for years without naming it.
For a quick overview of my background: after I completed my schooling and got my degree in computer science, I finally had time to start my education. I’ve picked up a shallow-to-moderate understanding on a broad range of subjects since then. I try to learn at least enough that I can start asking less stupid questions, and I do my best to keep my knowledge and skills integrated as much as possible since being able to do something about it has more raw use than just knowing a thing. That said, I’ve noticed that I have no fear of starting off on some interesting tangent for, perhaps, a few years before I feel conversant in the topic and/or get distracted by the next shiny thing. Looks like you might have guessed, a few years ago I picked up western secular Buddhist studies, and I can say the change in perspective offered by the associated skills has continued to hold my interest the whole time (and proven beneficial in my social interactions). That’s recently been a strong influence on how I think about the topics we’ve been discussing, but LW and the Sequences have had longer to sink in, and I tend to read very widely from other sources as well.
I’d settle for being able to make a living working on trying to solve some of the worlds problems.
The use of environmental features to create memory and association provides durability beyond that of the brain, and allows for the possibility of multiple users.
Thanks for this and the first paragraph, I understand a little better what the Extended Mind concept is about. I tend to think of this sort of concept as External Memory, in that our phones, laptops, the Internet, notebooks and the like hold media like writing, video, audio and images, that can be rather directly encoded and decoded into meaning rather efficiently.
Whereas something like a studio workspace of the type presented in the video holds tools that don’t necessarily encode and decode meaning very directly or efficiently. For instance a person with drawing skill can quickly sketch out a picture of a coffee table, using a pen and paper to quickly encode the line drawing of a table, then show it to a carpenter who looks at the lines and how they are arranged and decodes it’s meaning directly as a table. But in order to actually make the table, the carpenter uses tools that modify a medium like wood, tools like a table saw, vise grips, glue etc. to create the actual table, and this process can take weeks.
This object is a physical object like the paper with the drawing, but the woodworking in this case requires much more physical labor, and it’s utility is different than the drawing. The drawing communicates an idea, the table organizes a physical space. Both have meaning to the user, although they mean different things and communicate those meanings differently. The differences in amount of work done, time to communicate as well as the durability of the tool in relation to the meaning it communicates, between the drawing and the table are meaningful to me, although I can see how the concepts can collapse into a single category included in an idea like the Extended Mind Space. This seems still the domain of Human Factors Engineering, Industrial/Graphic/Interior/Architectural/User Experience/User Interface/Industrial Psychology.
The idea of an idea like Extended Mindspace makes more sense to me now, and I think the car analogy works well to illustrate how the tools we use can become extensions of us. They augment our innate abilities and change our neural wiring to include them and their operation into our ideas of what we can do and who we are. Am I a driver or a pedestrian? How fast can I get from my house to the store? I think of this is an internalization of an external object as opposed to the externalization of my internal mind, but in many ways it’s both, as the line between internal and external is a constantly shifting one. This is a topic I’ve dealt with a little in my writing on the development of consciousness, so I’m glad to have the opportunity to look at it from different angles.
I felt a little sheepish when I realized the answer to my question “who is EY?′ At the moment I was writing I just honestly could not figure out who you were referring to, as his name or initials hadn’t come up in our discussion up until that point. If you had referred to him by his whole name I would’ve known who you were referring to, but the use of his initials threw me lol.
BTW, I’d guess that this question may be the reason somebody downvoted your comment with no explanation[1].
I admit I was a little disappointed in the negative Karma (especially as a Buddhist who really tries to avoid creating negative Karma lol) and I was further disappointed that there was no explanation. This is in the Open Question section for newbies too right? Anyways, thanks for the explanation.
″...got my degree in computer science...”
Do you have any particular areas of interest?
Late last year I got my A+ and Network+ certifications and was attempting to get work in the IT field before the pandemic shut everything down, so I can honestly say that my knowledge of computers and networks is a lot better now then they were before I took those classes. I was interested in Cyber Security more than the Network Engineering career track at the time, although I did contemplate a Computer Science degree. I truly believe the fact that most people are pretty much oblivious as to how all these computers and networks actually work at the component and software level is a tragedy. We literally entrust our lives to these devices and communication systems, but to most people it’s something akin to magic.
I have an interest in Quantum Computing too as it jibes well with a major theme in my thinking, namely the problems with Binary thinking. That is where a lot of my conceptual work comes from, and I’ve been trying to understand how we might make use of Quantum Computing. I tried reading The Holographic Universe in the 90′s and was greatly influenced by the ideas of ‘Fuzzy logic’ around that time, as I’ve always been interested in the latest cutting edge science and tech, but frankly in the last decade it’s become increasingly hard to keep up on all of it.
″...since being able to do something about it has more raw use than just knowing a thing.”
I tend to agree, although from what I hear and see on the internet, often times people with the technical skills struggle with finding good reasons to do their thing. They know how to do something, but don’t know what to do with it.
My schooling was basically in conceptual art, and what my teachers did was to come up with a concept, and then hire people with the technical skills to actually create the thing well. The upshot was that if one of my professors came up with a concept for a piece of public art that required bronze casting on an industrial scale, it was often a welcome challenge to the people at the metal shop who were usually tired of the monotony of their work anyway. When a job with a unique set of challenges came along, it stretched their abilities in some pretty rewarding ways, and at the same time leaving the metal work to experts was a far better idea for my professor than trying to figure out how to do it himself.
Besides, that’s what teamwork is for! I did an internship with a large multinational corp in 2013, and ended up working with a whole team of engineers, psychologists, and designers. During the second half of the internship, what I was doing was essentially researching other peoples jobs in order to prototype technological solutions to augment their workflow. In that sense, I think good design always involves putting yourself as the designer, into the shoes of people doing work you don’t know how to do yourself, so that you can give an outside perspective. But as a user experience designer, the amount of psychology you need to understand in order to design better experiences means learning to understand how other people understand. How best to produce, and the actual act of producing the solution? That’s more of an engineering concern, and not necessarily the strength of a designer.
″...I picked up western secular Buddhist studies, and I can say the change in perspective offered by the associated skills...”
What types of skills did you pick up?
I practice lay Tibetan Buddhism. I spent about 20 years studying Buddhism and practicing it here and there, reading books and watching videos, meditating on the basic precepts, but finally took refuge under Garchen Rinpoche in 2010 I think. It seemed time to formalize my relationship to Buddhism as at that point it had influenced my thinking and behavior at a very deep level, and his story was so powerful it made sense to take the plunge under his watch. He spent 20 years in a Chinese labor camp, but still held onto his practice and belief in secret. Anyway, I was at a retreat he was teaching at and decided it was the right time. Im too tired right now to think about how my study and practice have developed my skillset.
often times people with the technical skills struggle with finding good reasons to do their thing
I used to be a pretty competent programmer, but I graduated at a time when the field was pretty flooded and couldn’t find a job right away. My skills quickly became out of date (my year specialized in PalmOS, of all things) and I stopped looking for work in the field. These days I’m almost fully lapsed in this area. I mostly use my understanding of algorithms and data structures to organize my day-to-day tasks where possible, and I usually have a clue what the tech headlines are talking about. I have used my programming background to automate some of my work tasks, but I haven’t needed to work on those programs in a few years now beyond basic maintenance.
what my teachers did was to come up with a concept, and then hire people with the technical skills to actually create the thing well
Specialization is an excellent strategy! I find it pairs well with my style of learning: either I know enough about a thing to speak fluently with the experts, or I know how to learn that much. As I said before, practical skills are important too, and one reason is that almost all tasks have so much more detail than a how-to can convey. If I can learn to do the basics well, it helps me find the good experts too.
What types of skills did you pick up [from Buddhism]?
My meditation practice has resulted in a great deal of… let’s go with “maturation” over the last few years, at a speed that I would call inconsistent with the decades prior. As far as specific skills are concerned, I’d say the core of that is patience: patience with my mind, my tasks, and other people. The increased patience is most obvious to me as an improved set of social skills at work and with my family. Also, I’ve noticed I’m able to better abide my ADHD tendencies (diagnosed as a teen) resulting in more tasks getting finished, more tasks getting started in the first place, and better results from my work; again both at home and at my job.
My practice is mostly informed by Theravada, though I can’t say I’ve ever had any formal instruction with a teacher. It’s hard for me to take any significant time off from work and family (I’ve got a 5yo at home) to go on retreat an such, and I don’t know of anybody nearby, so my strategy is to read a lot, and make sure to get some cushion time in before bed and as much in-the-wild practice as I can remember to do while I go about my day. I listen to dharma talks, mostly from dharmaseed.org, and I’ve learned to focus my practice on whatever has the strongest ugh-field around it since that’s typically what I need the most work on in the moment.
I mostly use my understanding of algorithms and data structures to organize my day-to-day tasks where possible
I’d be curious to hear about how you do this at some point. Much of my own Graphic Design training has been about Information Design, and I’ve often used that to organize as well.
I have a concept of Algorithms, know roughly what they can be used for and roughly how they go about doing it, but because I’m not a programmer, I couldn’t distinguish one from another one if I saw them side by side. Data structures are also an interest, Databases and all that stuff. Info isn’t any good if you store it improperly and can’t retreive what you’re looking for when you’re looking for it!
PalmOs. I remember my first PDA, and it wasn’t my only PDA. I can honestly say I think I’ve single-handedly kept the tech sector in business with all the ‘latest tech’ I’ve bought over the years. Not only has the software changed since then, but so has the hardware. Whoosh! And now it’s all been crammed into a smartphone.
If I can learn to do the basics well, it helps me find the good experts too.
Agreed. Plus I’m pretty sure there isn’t a single domain where understanding of the advanced stuff isn’t helped by a strong grounding in the basics. Is that why you came to LW in the first place?
My meditation practice has resulted in a great deal of… let’s go with “maturation” over the last few years, at a speed that I would call inconsistent with the decades prior.
Not to give meditation short shrift, but I’ve no doubt becoming a father probably helped in that regard too. I can definitely say though, I noticed maturation in myself when I was meditating, and it did help me develop my interpersonal relationship skills.
Can’t say as I recall. It’s been a good while! But it’s part of the reason I’m still around after (checks comment history) probably more than a decade.
I’ve no doubt becoming a father probably helped in that regard too.
I certainly consider my kid one of my most important teachers! Though I doubt I would have had the presence and patience, or perhaps even notice the opportunity to learn many of the lessons I’ve assimilated by being a parent if I lacked the support of routine meditation.
I think what the video was point at is that there are a number of encoding modes, but all result in the storing and/or processing of information with the same end effect that we call “memory” when brains do it. As for Mary losing her notebook or Steve losing his arms, I’m afraid both accident and injury can lead to memory loss and cognitive dysfunction in the usual sense as well. The notebook and data files, on the other hand, have different decay rates from memories in a brain, and may be useful in different ways than their biological counterparts. The use of environmental features to create memory and association provides durability beyond that of the brain, and allows for the possibility of multiple users. The latter is why I brought Extended Mind into the discussion of culture. Remember, it’s not the artifacts themselves that create mind, but (as you observed) the ways we relate to them and they relate to each other. Importantly, this sort of extension is happening all the time automatically. e.g. Driving extends the mind-body complex to include the vehicle and any information its instrument panels display, especially after we achieve enough practice to use the controls without having to consciously think about the process. As long as we can’t help doing it anyway, we might as well use Extended Mind on purpose and try to optimize whatever we can. That includes on the multi-user level of Culture. And that is one of the huge benefits of learning to see less rigid boundaries between the “internal” and “external”.
(FAQ: Who is this Eliezer guy I keep hearing about?)
Though, to be fair, I still haven’t found the original source. I may be misattributing something written by somebody else I was reading at the same time as the Sequences.
BTW, I’d guess that this question may be the reason somebody downvoted your comment with no explanation[1]. I’ve noticed that comments asking questions that are answered in the FAQ tend to have negative karma.
[^1] This is a bit of a pet peeve of mine. I think if you feel strongly enough to vote something down, you should at least have the courtesy and courage to tell the author why! That’s especially true for longer comments and posts. I think the author deserves to know what feature of their writing people “want to see less of”.
Not my video; I don’t have all the skills I’d need to produce that kind of output right now. ;) It’s a good explainer, though, and gave me a word for a process I’d been taking advantage of for years without naming it.
For a quick overview of my background: after I completed my schooling and got my degree in computer science, I finally had time to start my education. I’ve picked up a shallow-to-moderate understanding on a broad range of subjects since then. I try to learn at least enough that I can start asking less stupid questions, and I do my best to keep my knowledge and skills integrated as much as possible since being able to do something about it has more raw use than just knowing a thing. That said, I’ve noticed that I have no fear of starting off on some interesting tangent for, perhaps, a few years before I feel conversant in the topic and/or get distracted by the next shiny thing. Looks like you might have guessed, a few years ago I picked up western secular Buddhist studies, and I can say the change in perspective offered by the associated skills has continued to hold my interest the whole time (and proven beneficial in my social interactions). That’s recently been a strong influence on how I think about the topics we’ve been discussing, but LW and the Sequences have had longer to sink in, and I tend to read very widely from other sources as well.
I certainly hope you succeed!
Thanks for this and the first paragraph, I understand a little better what the Extended Mind concept is about. I tend to think of this sort of concept as External Memory, in that our phones, laptops, the Internet, notebooks and the like hold media like writing, video, audio and images, that can be rather directly encoded and decoded into meaning rather efficiently.
Whereas something like a studio workspace of the type presented in the video holds tools that don’t necessarily encode and decode meaning very directly or efficiently. For instance a person with drawing skill can quickly sketch out a picture of a coffee table, using a pen and paper to quickly encode the line drawing of a table, then show it to a carpenter who looks at the lines and how they are arranged and decodes it’s meaning directly as a table. But in order to actually make the table, the carpenter uses tools that modify a medium like wood, tools like a table saw, vise grips, glue etc. to create the actual table, and this process can take weeks.
This object is a physical object like the paper with the drawing, but the woodworking in this case requires much more physical labor, and it’s utility is different than the drawing. The drawing communicates an idea, the table organizes a physical space. Both have meaning to the user, although they mean different things and communicate those meanings differently. The differences in amount of work done, time to communicate as well as the durability of the tool in relation to the meaning it communicates, between the drawing and the table are meaningful to me, although I can see how the concepts can collapse into a single category included in an idea like the Extended Mind Space. This seems still the domain of Human Factors Engineering, Industrial/Graphic/Interior/Architectural/User Experience/User Interface/Industrial Psychology.
The idea of an idea like Extended Mindspace makes more sense to me now, and I think the car analogy works well to illustrate how the tools we use can become extensions of us. They augment our innate abilities and change our neural wiring to include them and their operation into our ideas of what we can do and who we are. Am I a driver or a pedestrian? How fast can I get from my house to the store? I think of this is an internalization of an external object as opposed to the externalization of my internal mind, but in many ways it’s both, as the line between internal and external is a constantly shifting one. This is a topic I’ve dealt with a little in my writing on the development of consciousness, so I’m glad to have the opportunity to look at it from different angles.
I felt a little sheepish when I realized the answer to my question “who is EY?′ At the moment I was writing I just honestly could not figure out who you were referring to, as his name or initials hadn’t come up in our discussion up until that point. If you had referred to him by his whole name I would’ve known who you were referring to, but the use of his initials threw me lol.
I admit I was a little disappointed in the negative Karma (especially as a Buddhist who really tries to avoid creating negative Karma lol) and I was further disappointed that there was no explanation. This is in the Open Question section for newbies too right? Anyways, thanks for the explanation.
Do you have any particular areas of interest?
Late last year I got my A+ and Network+ certifications and was attempting to get work in the IT field before the pandemic shut everything down, so I can honestly say that my knowledge of computers and networks is a lot better now then they were before I took those classes. I was interested in Cyber Security more than the Network Engineering career track at the time, although I did contemplate a Computer Science degree. I truly believe the fact that most people are pretty much oblivious as to how all these computers and networks actually work at the component and software level is a tragedy. We literally entrust our lives to these devices and communication systems, but to most people it’s something akin to magic.
I have an interest in Quantum Computing too as it jibes well with a major theme in my thinking, namely the problems with Binary thinking. That is where a lot of my conceptual work comes from, and I’ve been trying to understand how we might make use of Quantum Computing. I tried reading The Holographic Universe in the 90′s and was greatly influenced by the ideas of ‘Fuzzy logic’ around that time, as I’ve always been interested in the latest cutting edge science and tech, but frankly in the last decade it’s become increasingly hard to keep up on all of it.
I tend to agree, although from what I hear and see on the internet, often times people with the technical skills struggle with finding good reasons to do their thing. They know how to do something, but don’t know what to do with it.
My schooling was basically in conceptual art, and what my teachers did was to come up with a concept, and then hire people with the technical skills to actually create the thing well. The upshot was that if one of my professors came up with a concept for a piece of public art that required bronze casting on an industrial scale, it was often a welcome challenge to the people at the metal shop who were usually tired of the monotony of their work anyway. When a job with a unique set of challenges came along, it stretched their abilities in some pretty rewarding ways, and at the same time leaving the metal work to experts was a far better idea for my professor than trying to figure out how to do it himself.
Besides, that’s what teamwork is for! I did an internship with a large multinational corp in 2013, and ended up working with a whole team of engineers, psychologists, and designers. During the second half of the internship, what I was doing was essentially researching other peoples jobs in order to prototype technological solutions to augment their workflow. In that sense, I think good design always involves putting yourself as the designer, into the shoes of people doing work you don’t know how to do yourself, so that you can give an outside perspective. But as a user experience designer, the amount of psychology you need to understand in order to design better experiences means learning to understand how other people understand. How best to produce, and the actual act of producing the solution? That’s more of an engineering concern, and not necessarily the strength of a designer.
What types of skills did you pick up?
I practice lay Tibetan Buddhism. I spent about 20 years studying Buddhism and practicing it here and there, reading books and watching videos, meditating on the basic precepts, but finally took refuge under Garchen Rinpoche in 2010 I think. It seemed time to formalize my relationship to Buddhism as at that point it had influenced my thinking and behavior at a very deep level, and his story was so powerful it made sense to take the plunge under his watch. He spent 20 years in a Chinese labor camp, but still held onto his practice and belief in secret. Anyway, I was at a retreat he was teaching at and decided it was the right time. Im too tired right now to think about how my study and practice have developed my skillset.
Thanks, good wishes never hurt.
I used to be a pretty competent programmer, but I graduated at a time when the field was pretty flooded and couldn’t find a job right away. My skills quickly became out of date (my year specialized in PalmOS, of all things) and I stopped looking for work in the field. These days I’m almost fully lapsed in this area. I mostly use my understanding of algorithms and data structures to organize my day-to-day tasks where possible, and I usually have a clue what the tech headlines are talking about. I have used my programming background to automate some of my work tasks, but I haven’t needed to work on those programs in a few years now beyond basic maintenance.
Specialization is an excellent strategy! I find it pairs well with my style of learning: either I know enough about a thing to speak fluently with the experts, or I know how to learn that much. As I said before, practical skills are important too, and one reason is that almost all tasks have so much more detail than a how-to can convey. If I can learn to do the basics well, it helps me find the good experts too.
My meditation practice has resulted in a great deal of… let’s go with “maturation” over the last few years, at a speed that I would call inconsistent with the decades prior. As far as specific skills are concerned, I’d say the core of that is patience: patience with my mind, my tasks, and other people. The increased patience is most obvious to me as an improved set of social skills at work and with my family. Also, I’ve noticed I’m able to better abide my ADHD tendencies (diagnosed as a teen) resulting in more tasks getting finished, more tasks getting started in the first place, and better results from my work; again both at home and at my job.
My practice is mostly informed by Theravada, though I can’t say I’ve ever had any formal instruction with a teacher. It’s hard for me to take any significant time off from work and family (I’ve got a 5yo at home) to go on retreat an such, and I don’t know of anybody nearby, so my strategy is to read a lot, and make sure to get some cushion time in before bed and as much in-the-wild practice as I can remember to do while I go about my day. I listen to dharma talks, mostly from dharmaseed.org, and I’ve learned to focus my practice on whatever has the strongest ugh-field around it since that’s typically what I need the most work on in the moment.
I’d be curious to hear about how you do this at some point. Much of my own Graphic Design training has been about Information Design, and I’ve often used that to organize as well.
I have a concept of Algorithms, know roughly what they can be used for and roughly how they go about doing it, but because I’m not a programmer, I couldn’t distinguish one from another one if I saw them side by side. Data structures are also an interest, Databases and all that stuff. Info isn’t any good if you store it improperly and can’t retreive what you’re looking for when you’re looking for it!
PalmOs. I remember my first PDA, and it wasn’t my only PDA. I can honestly say I think I’ve single-handedly kept the tech sector in business with all the ‘latest tech’ I’ve bought over the years. Not only has the software changed since then, but so has the hardware. Whoosh! And now it’s all been crammed into a smartphone.
Agreed. Plus I’m pretty sure there isn’t a single domain where understanding of the advanced stuff isn’t helped by a strong grounding in the basics. Is that why you came to LW in the first place?
Not to give meditation short shrift, but I’ve no doubt becoming a father probably helped in that regard too. I can definitely say though, I noticed maturation in myself when I was meditating, and it did help me develop my interpersonal relationship skills.
Can’t say as I recall. It’s been a good while! But it’s part of the reason I’m still around after (checks comment history) probably more than a decade.
I certainly consider my kid one of my most important teachers! Though I doubt I would have had the presence and patience, or perhaps even notice the opportunity to learn many of the lessons I’ve assimilated by being a parent if I lacked the support of routine meditation.