Introducing the Extended Mind Bookcase
By Steven HroticThe ever-extending ‘to-read’ list isn’t an unfamiliar occupational hazard, I trust. Nor are the reciprocals: the to-read pile, the have-read pile … and the faintly distressing haven’t-finished pile. Add in concepts like a finite lifespan and a finite number of bookshelves that will fit in the basement (and the finite number of boxes that will fit in the basement, and your father-in-law’s attic, and your mother’s spare room), and the other occupational hazard is inevitable: the never-ending discussion (with ourselves and our long-suffering spouses) about how many books one rationally needs. Or, worse, do you really need that book?
There’s a Japanese word I’m inordinately fond of: tsundoku. It means (as best I understand) the embarrassing situation of buying books faster than one reads them. That makes perfect sense, except for the ‘embarrassing’ part. What’s wrong with that? Umberto Eco wrote a lovely essay on the value of unread books … which I’d quote, except I can’t lay my hands on it right now. It was right there, no more than a year ago … I’m sure it’s around here somewhere.
Anyway, one strategy for winning those arguments … I mean, ‘to decide what needs to stay’ … is to have a different strategy for each category of book that you (might) need. One of these, related to the “extended mind bookcase” backfired slightly. I need to add a preface: my co-author on this blog, Beth, dared me to make a list of 30 desert-island fiction books. Now, the idea of a desert-island book is ridiculous: I’d rather try to swim to the mainland. You’d inevitably pick something that would take a long time to exhaust … but I don’t want to read James Joyce or the Mahabharata every day. (There’s a reason I didn’t get very far in either … ) But thirty … hmm. Could one pick fill a shelf or two and still keep oneself stimulated and entertained for a few years? I was a little startled to find that I could.
But could I do it with non-fiction? That depends: what category of non-fiction? Am I teaching on the island? Am I doing research? In what discipline? Is the goal to pick the best, the most useful? Then it hit me: the extended mind bookcase.
Here’s the idea, in a nutshell. The human mind is finite. Little things, like limitations on working memory, difficulties in accurately encoding long term memories, etc., can be a drag. Yet, over the last 50,000 years, we’ve accomplished remarkable things, without growing Star-Trek-pilot-sized crania. Instead, we’ve found ways to make the most of what we have – but we’ve also managed to supplement and support what we have internally with external tools. Teeth not particularly threatening to a bear? Sharpen a stick. Not enough fur? Use the bear’s. Can’t remember something? That took a little longer … but eventually, writing allowed us to concretize, and crucially to share, our memories.
The collective memory aspects of writing preceded using writing to boost our capacity for complexity for complex thought: initial stages weren’t deeper than who owes what to whom. But soon enough, we extended our mind into the external level of environment. We could share more and more complex thoughts, perpetuate memories … shape the world as a giant mnemonic device, until the boundaries between us as individual minds and us as a collective mind start to get a little fuzzy, as well as the skin-and-bone boundary between the brain and the world.
I suppose, phrased like that, (that is, poorly, compared to the more careful arguments of people like Mark Rowlands, Andy Clark and David Chalmers) extended mind sounds like an abstract thought experiment, but I think it’s almost literally true. Functionally, what’s the difference between me learning a mnemonic to remember a list (‘Oh be a fine girl – kiss me!’ got me through astronomy) and writing something down? Sure, you might lose the piece of paper … but you might misplace the memory, too.
Getting back to the topic (bet you thought I forgot!): as many books as I’ve read to at least some degree, there is a much more constrained list—maybe a couple dozen, certainly less than a bookcase—that stand out as having fundamentally shaped the way I think. These are the ones, when I pick them up again, even if I don’t remember the contents explicitly very well, that feel familiar.
Extended mind is a philosophy of mind idea, but philosophers of mind aren’t the only people to think along such lines. Situated cognition, embodied cognition, etc. Nor is it a new idea. In “modern” times, Ludwig Fleck wrote about the Denkkollektiv; Kuhn wrote about paradigms; Foucault described epistemes—all complementary ways to recognize that the “you” between your ears isn’t just the product of your own thoughts ruminating on external inputs, but the interaction between you as an individual and an external body of coherent thought that you internalize. Note that the last three align with the idea that different groups, even though made up of individuals with free will and all that, tend to think similarly, and that those similarities change over time.
Fleck in particular has been bothering me lately. As an anthropologist, especially one who “met” Dan Sperber’s Explaining Culture at a formative moment (now that would definitely have to be on my EM bookcase), culture is learned and shared—and has always included the sharing of more than “don’t eat that” and “pointy end goes towards the bear.” They include stories, and thoughts. Members of a group don’t just know the same things; they think about them in similar ways.
I began by suggesting that the problem of book ‘management’ (optimistic word choice!) is something that would be familiar to lots of people in academia. But that’s faintly trivial—important as a practical survival skill (we’d do well to remember that our spouses have their limits, and we’re not the only ones who know which end of the pointy stick to hold), but not much deeper. Fleck suggested that one reason we’ll never achieve a universal truth is that each group—each disciplinary clan within the Academic Tribe—thinks in a different way; truths can’t be universal, if we see a different universe.
But on the other hand, until fairly recently, one could be reasonably sure that anyone with an education in your field would at least overlap with a few key texts. Anyone in the social sciences, for example, would at least know the major works of Durkheim and James. Go back a little further, and every educated person in every field would be relied upon to get a joke based on Hesiod or Shakespeare.
That is, they shared a culture. I don’t think that’s the case anymore. Our minds are extended, more and more, but not systematically, and with ever-narrower possibilities of overlap. I did a series of interviews with professors in psychology and anthropology a few years ago, and asked them what books they would expect every undergraduate to have read. The only consensus I found was that maybe no such books exist.
The point of this blog is to explore the idea of academia as a tribe, made up of disciplinary clans; to talk about shared experiences, shared dangers; and, frankly, to amuse a couple of people who are, by most standards, over-educated. Until I get bored with the idea, I thought it would be interesting to include book reviews—not of new books you should read, but old books I think you should have read. If we were all to share a single shelf that could create a Denkkollektiv and a shared culture, what should make the list?
A couple caveats. First, I do not mean the “Great Books,” or even important books in any field; rather, I mean the ones that I personally have found that are potentially transformative for anyone with a basic liberal arts education—that shape the mind in interesting ways; that function as “interpretive lenses” (sensu Bill Paden … whom you really should read) enabling you to see the world in ways you wouldn’t have thought possible.
The other caveat: the books I review as part of the Extended Mind bookcase (until and unless I get bored) are taken from a list that is fundamentally autobiographical. These are the ones that have shaped me, and the way I see the world. One might infer that, therefore, I’m suggesting that it would benefit all of academia if everyone thought a little more like me. Right! Now you’ve got it. Don’t like it? Get your own blog. ;o)
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