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particular to the Museum of Modern Art (1998). Let us assume Otto has a serious
memory impairment. Otto is trying to navigate to the Museum of Modern Art
and uses his notebook as a surrogate memory in order to discover the location.
Otto has a map in his notebook to the Eiffel Tower made for the precise purpose
of navigating individuals to the monument. Otto can get to the museum with the
map, but without the map he would be lost. In this regard, the map qualifies as
an 'external' representation that can drive the cognitive processes of an agent in
a similar fashion to the way that classical artificial intelligence assumed internal
representations did. Interestingly enough, Clark points out that if external factors
are driving the process, then they deserve some of the credit, for “if, as we confront
some task, a part of the world functions as a process which, were it done in the head,
we would have no hesitation in recognizing as part of the cognitive process, then
that part of the world is (so we claim) part of the cognitive process” (1998). The
map and other external representations have been dubbed “cognitive technology”
(Clark 2000).
The Web then presents an interesting twist on the Extended Mind Hypothesis.
Again, Otto is using a web-page on his mobile phone to find his way to the Museum
of Modern Art. While we could have had Otto using the Web as ordinary Web
users did years ago, simply downloading some directions and following them,
we now add a twist. Imagine that Otto and Otto's friend Inga are using a map-
producing web-page that allows users to add annotations and corrections, a sort
of wiki of maps. Inga, noticing that the main entrance to the Museum of Modern
Art is closed temporarily due to construction and so the entrance has moved over
a block, adds this annotation to the map, correcting an error as regards where the
entrance to the Museum of Modern Art should be. This correction is propagated
at speeds very close to real-time back to the central database behind the Web
site. Otto is running a few minutes behind Inga, and because this correction to
the map is being propagated to his map on his personal digital assistant, Otto
can successfully navigate to the new entrance a block away. This (near) real-time
updating of the representation was crucial for Otto's success. Given his memory
issues, Otto would have otherwise walked right into the closed construction area
around the old entrance to the Museum and been rather confused. This active
manipulation with updating of an external representation lets Inga and Otto possess
some form of dynamically-changing collective cognitive state. Furthermore, they
can use their ability to update this shared external representation to influence each
other for their greater collective success. In this manner, the external representation
is clearly social, and the cognitive credit must be spread across not only multiple
people, but the representation they use in common to successfully accomplish their
behavior. Clark and Chalmers agree that cognition can be socially extended: “what
about socially extended cognition? Could my mental states be partly constituted
by the states of other thinkers? We see no reason why not, in principle” (1998).
We could extend their story by arguing that socially extended cognition is now
mediated by external representations, in particular by digital representations and
other information on the Web.
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