Status Updates From Supersizing the Mind: Embod...

Imagine Braintenberg vehicles, unable to compute XOR. One is an AND gate that lifts the wheels of a thing off the ground, the other an OR gate that gets them moving. When nothings ON nothing happens. When the OR gate opens the thing moves. But when both gates open the wheels move but they also get lifted off the ground so the thing doesn’t move. So the whole thing computes XOR!

"It is the brain’s great plasticity and thirst for cheap, outsourced labor that drives the distributed engines of sociotechnological adaptation and change.

"human cognitive strategies actively favor the use of information in the world over information in the head. ..the resource-recruitment process minimizes the use of biomemory and maximizes the use of environmental support.., crucial for our problem-solving activity. ..the biological control system doesn’t care about the resource,.. it uses whatever it can, relative to some cost–benefit trade-off, to get the job done.

We self-engineer ourselves to think and perform better in the worlds we find ourselves in. We self-engineer worlds in which to build better worlds to think in. We build better tools to think with and use these very tools to discover still better tools to think with. We tune the way we use these tools [and] even tune the way we tune the way we use our cognitive tools by devising environments for educating ourselves.

"[we are] creatures built to engage in ..“ecological control”: systems evolved so as to constantly search for opportunities to make the most of the reliable properties and dynamic potentialities of body and world.

"Total state explanations do not fare well as a means of understanding systems in which complex information flow plays a key role.