David Chalmers Extending Our Minds

It was standing room only at the talk by philosopher David Chalmers. In a room that sits maybe 200 people, about 15 or 20 had to stand because all the seats were full. On a Friday night. Thirty years ago you might have said that's because there's nothing to do in Anchorage, but that is definitely not true today.


Chalmers' talk at UAA reminded me of what I like and don't like about the discipline of philosophy. What I like is the imagination and creativity where a proposition is made that goes beyond how we normally think about things. A bit like science fiction. But philosophers then make careful and detailed, excruciatingly detailed arguments, to support this newly created conceit, to attack it, and to defend it. I like the conceits and the thought that goes into initially developing the logical argument to support the conceit. What gets old for me is how long they'll argue over things that seem irrelevant to anything that matters. But then I'm sure that people who accidentally get to this blog often react the same way to what they read here.



In any case, the conceit that Chalmers and his colleague Andy Clark created about ten years ago (in a paper called The Extended Mind)is the idea that something outside your skin - like your i-phone or like an Alzheimer's patient's notebook where he keeps track of things he needs to remember. I'm using 'he' because in his example, Otto is the Alzheimer's patient who is compared to a 'normal' human named Inge who performs the same functions (the notes in the notebook) in her mind.

Chalmers challenged us to think outside the skin and it was an interesting exercise. He argued that objects can act as mind extenders if they had several characteristics. Sort of like the way a cane helps aid in the act of walking, a calculator or a notebook, can aid the act of thinking. And when it does, it becomes part of the mind. Or put another way, the mind expands outside the skin to include the notebook.

The video gives a snippet of the talk. This is not the most important point, but it was a time when he walked over to our side of the room and there weren't so many heads in the way.



It was good to see so many people out for a philosophy talk. No, our governor was not there. But others were and they stayed around to ask questions afterward.