The Ticket Rail Is Doing Half My Thinking

Closed the kitchen a little early Tuesday, dishwasher called in, and I ended up on the porch with this instead of a game for once. Supersizing the Mind, Andy Clark, Oxford University Press, 2008. Philosophy of mind, not something I read much, but a regular kept bringing it up over closing drinks until I grabbed a used copy.

Clark’s whole case is that the “brainbound” view, cognition and computation happening in the skull alone, should get replaced by an “extended” view, where memory and thinking aren’t confined to brain states at all. Working a line, that landed different than it probably should have, the ticket rail is doing half my remembering some nights, I’m not holding twelve orders in my head, the rail is.

He points to Alva Noe’s Action in Perception as the book to read alongside this one, the one where perception is something we do, and Clark argues with the more radical parts of that while keeping the spirit of it. It’s dense, though, genuinely difficult if you’re not coming at it as a scholar, which I’m not, prep-burned fingers and a GED don’t exactly prepare you for enactive externalism.

But it’s got models in here you don’t find laid out this clearly anywhere else, which is probably why a stranger’s review mentioned using it on the job as a technology designer. He also spends a good number of pages battling naysayers in his own niche, arguing with people who disagree with him, and I could have done without most of that, felt like eavesdropping on an academic fight I wasn’t invited to. If you’re into brain-machine interface stuff, apparently it’s worth a look on that front too, not my world but noted.

Would I hand this to the crew? no. Would I hand it to the one guy who’s always overthinking his plating? maybe.

Three stars. Worth the slow read, not worth pretending it was easy.