Social Semantics - Social Semantics: The Search for Meaning on the Web - page 199

One of the obvious requirements for any process to be part of an extended mind is
that it is accessible when needed to solve some problem. The obvious requirement
is that the representation needed by the subject be within its effective reach, not
separated from the subject in space or time. So if Otto's notebook with the map to
the museum has been left at home in Boston when he is in New York, the notebook
cannot count as part of his extended mind. Furthermore, if his notebook exists only
in the past, having been was destroyed in a fire before Otto could use it, then the
notebook also could not count as part of Otto's extended mind. The point here is
that at least a minimal condition for anything to be cognitive technology is that it
must be accessible over the bounds of space and time when needed with a reasonable
latency - in other words, have “reliable coupling,” (Clark and Chalmers 1998). The
technical trajectory of Licklider's “Man-Machine Symbiosis” project, which could
be considered the engineering twin of the philosophical Extended Mind thesis, is
precisely to overcome the barriers of time and space that separate representations
and their users and so allow the formation of not only new objects, but also new
collective and digitally mediated subjects . The Web is just the latest incarnation of
this trend.
One of the strange repercussions that follows straightforwardly from our neo-
Wittgensteinian approach is that as more and more of language - and thus our
shared sense that guides our behavior - gets encoded in external representations with
the possibility of low-latency Web access, it becomes equally increasingly unclear
where the precise boundary between the individual and their external representation
lies. If the cycle of connection and disconnection happens constantly, over many
individuals, the very boundaries of agents become difficult to detect. If we become
dependent on the Web, defining intelligence in terms of a fully autonomous agent
then becomes not even an accurate portrayal of human intelligence, but “a certain
conception of the human individual that may have applied, at best, to that faction
of humanity who had the wealth, power, and leisure to conceptualize themselves
as autonomous beings exercising their will through individual agency and choice”
(Hayles 1999). By jettisoning this conception, yet reconstructing the commitment
to a certain kind or degree of embodiment, a new kind of philosophy that takes the
Web seriously can do justice to complex phenomena such as the advent of the Web
and the increasing recognition of what Engelbart termed “collective intelligence”
(Engelbart and Ruilifson 1999). Pierre Levy notes that cognitive science “has been
limited to human intelligence in general, independent of time, place, or culture,
while intelligence has always been artificial, outfitted with signs and technologies,
in the process of becoming, collective” (1994). The vast technological changes
humanity has engendered across the world are now reshaping the boundaries of
not only the world but ourselves. This process has been ongoing since the dawn of
humanity, whose most momentous event was the evolution of natural language, but
it has been happening on time-scales that we could not grasp within a single lifetime.
Only now due to the incredible progress of the Web do changes in our language and
ontology become self-evident within the scope of a single life. Social semantics