Caseorganic: Created page with "===Author=== Andy Clark (b. 1957), British philosopher of mind and cognitive science, now Professor of Cognitive Philosophy at the University of Sussex, previously at Edinburgh, Indiana and Washington University in St Louis. With David Chalmers he wrote "The Extended Mind" (1998), the paper this book develops. ===Publication Details=== ''Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence''. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. 240 pp. IS..."

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Created page with "===Author=== Andy Clark (b. 1957), British philosopher of mind and cognitive science, now Professor of Cognitive Philosophy at the University of Sussex, previously at Edinburgh, Indiana and Washington University in St Louis. With David Chalmers he wrote "The Extended Mind" (1998), the paper this book develops. ===Publication Details=== ''Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence''. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. 240 pp. IS..."

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===Author===
Andy Clark (b. 1957), British philosopher of mind and cognitive science, now Professor of Cognitive Philosophy at the University of Sussex, previously at Edinburgh, Indiana and Washington University in St Louis. With David Chalmers he wrote "The Extended Mind" (1998), the paper this book develops.

===Publication Details===
''Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence''. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. 240 pp. ISBN 978-0-19-517751-0.<ref>[https://global.oup.com/academic/product/natural-born-cyborgs-9780195177510 Natural-Born Cyborgs], Oxford University Press.</ref>

===Description===
Clark's thesis is stated in the title and is deliberately deflationary about the cyborg's novelty. Human beings are not becoming cyborgs; they always were. What distinguishes the species is not raw processing power but an unusual, biologically-grounded readiness to '''incorporate external structure into thought''' — to offload, delegate and restructure cognitive work onto whatever is at hand and to treat the result as part of the thinking rather than as an aid to it.

On this account, writing, notation, the abacus, the map, the calendar, the diagram, the wristwatch and the smartphone are the same kind of thing, differing in bandwidth rather than in kind. There is no pre-technological human mind against which the augmented one could be measured, because the mind that literacy produces is already the product of a technology.

===Key Ideas===
* '''The extended mind.''' The parity principle from the 1998 paper: if a process performed in the head would count as cognition, then the same process performed partly outside it counts as cognition too, provided the external resource is reliably available, readily accessible and automatically trusted. Otto and his notebook are the standing example — see [[Extended Self|extended self]].
* '''Cognitive scaffolding.''' Structures in the environment that make hard thinking possible: the notation that makes long division tractable, the diagram that makes a proof visible, the checklist that makes a complex procedure reliable. Intelligence is a property of the person plus the scaffold.
* '''Transparent technology.''' Clark's criterion for genuine incorporation is that a tool becomes '''transparent in use''' — it stops being an object of attention and becomes something one thinks ''through'' rather than ''about''. The blind person's cane, the driver's sense of the car's width, and fluent typing are all cases. A tool that keeps demanding attention has not been incorporated, which is one reason [[Frictional Interface|friction]] matters cognitively and not merely aesthetically.
* '''Soft selves.''' If the boundary of the mind is negotiable, so is the boundary of the person. Clark treats this as an ordinary fact rather than a crisis.
* '''Wideware.''' His term for the external props, aids and structures that participate in cognition.

===Criticism===
The standing objection is Fred Adams and Ken Aizawa's '''coupling–constitution fallacy''': that being causally coupled to a cognitive process does not make something part of it, and that Clark and Chalmers slide from dependence to constitution. Others argue the parity principle sets too low a bar, since a great deal that no one wants to call cognition would satisfy it. Clark's reply is that the objection presupposes a "mark of the cognitive" located inside the skull, which is the very thing in dispute.

===Relevance to Cyborg Anthropology===
This is the philosophical charter for the broad reading of [[Cyborg|cyborg]] — the position on which everyone with a phone or a notebook already qualifies. Its value here is less the conclusion than the consequence: if incorporation is ordinary and ancient, then the interesting questions are not about whether to permit it but about what is being incorporated, how transparently, and on whose terms. A mind extended into a system owned by someone else is a different proposition from a mind extended into a notebook.

===Related Reading===
* [[Extended Self]]
* [[Cyborg]]
* [[Prosthetics and Their Discontents]]
* [[Douglas Engelbart]]
* [[Me++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City]]
* [[Bodies in Code: Interfaces with Digital Media]]

===References===
<references/>

[[Category:Books]]
[[Category:Cyborg Anthropology]]
[[Category:Critical Theory]]

Natural-Born Cyborgs - Revision history