Extended Mind

As we continue to walk into the wiki experiment, we began to explore a thesis put forth by Andy Clark and David Chalmers in "The Extended Mind":

>In philosophy of mind, the extended mind thesis (EMT) says that the mind does not exclusively reside in the brain or even the body, but extends into the physical world. The EMT proposes that some objects in the external environment can be part of a cognitive process and in that way function as extensions of the mind itself. Examples of such objects are written calculations, a diary, or a PC; in general, it concerns objects that store information. The EMT considers the mind to encompass every level of cognition, including a physical level. > wikipedia

In many ways, this thesis does not feel new – in fact, it feels like a natural extension of Vannevar Bush's creative vision where he introduced in 1945 the concept of the 'memex' – that which inspired the wiki – a concept he introduced in As We May Think.

And an extension of thoughts first proposed in 1960 by J.C.R Licklider in Man-Computer Symbiosis . In that paper, he envisioned that mutually-interdependent – "living together" – tightly-coupled human brains and computing machines would prove to complement each other's strengths to a high degree – a paper which inspired computer networks and the internet. _Thinking minds, thinking machines._

The mind is that in which a consciousness forages for meaning. We might forage within our own imagination, we might forage with the use of technological devices, or we might forage with other's imaginations. We venture out, seeking surprise, and then update our mental model to understand that surprise.

This idea of foraging is a critical component of Karl Friston's theory of active inference, one he called Epistemic Foraging.

As we explore that which we sense as Wiki's Third Dimension – one that knits together the richness of wiki for collective _convergent_ and _divergent_ thinking for collective _emergent_ thinking – we ponder its potential for empowering our collective creative imagination.

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