Exo-Mnemonics: Memory, Media, Machines

2023 marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of Andy Clark’s and David Chalmers’s 1998 paper ‘The Extended Mind’. Initially controversial, Clark’s and Chalmers’s essential thesis – that the mind cannot be understood exclusively in terms of internal, psychological states, but extends into the external world, and includes the material objects, environments, and ecologies that play a role in memory and cognition – is now widely recognised in cognitive science and analytic philosophy of mind. And it has informed research and technological innovation in fields as diverse as computer science, artificial intelligence, biomedical engineering, robotics, and neurology. But the principles behind the extended mind have a more expansive pedigree than Clark’s and Chalmer’s followers have acknowledged. In media studies, for instance, the notion that media are extensions of the human sensorium was one of Marshal McLuhan’s central propositions – one that Friedrich Kittler inverted (and developed) by arguing instead that the human sensorium is an extension of media. Similarly, historians, archivists, and curators have long argued that memorials, monuments, and archives do not neutrally represent the past, but constitute it, and constitute it. They are, in other words, not merely means for storing information cultural memory, but technologies of collective cognition. Indeed, the ways that the mind is extended into the material world, and the material world into the mind, could be characterised as one of the oldest problems in philosophy, stemming back at least as far as Plato’s Phaedrus, in which Socrates explores the corrupting influence of writing on thought.

The ‘Exo-Mnemonics’ project will seek to establish a research and innovation hub around the hypothesis that memory and cognition cannot be understood independent of external, material, and objective phenomena. Rather than focusing exclusively on the abstract philosophical conditions of such a claim, it will assemble a team of HASS and STEM scholars who work with and around examples of the extended mind, whether that is understood in terms of simple objects, institutions, or intersubjective relations.

Researcher(s): TBC

Funding:

HASS-STEM Collaboration Fund, ICS

Period:

August 2023 – November 2023

Contact: Associate Professor Charles Barbour