Smartphones & Extended mind thesis: Match made in heaven?

BALMACEDA HUARTE, TOMÁS

Buenos Aires

Workshop; Emotions and the Arts; 2019

SADAF

Like many people, smart cell phones occupy a relevant space in my daily life and I depend on these types of devices for tasks related to my work, my social ties and my entertainment. Its presence is so ubiquitous in some populations that there are those who claim that this technology is changing the way we think, act and process information. The statement may sound reckless but there are studies that indicate that when people expect to have access to information in the future, they have lower rates of information retrieval in themselves and a better memory of where to access; that we increasingly rely on our smartphone to "download" cognitively demanding tasks, such as analytical reasoning and that we consider this device as an extension of ourselves: separating ourselves from it generates anxiety.This transformation in our behavior and in our habits does not seem to be explained by classical cognitivism. According to traditional cognitive science, thinking is an internal process of symbol manipulation, which leaves tools and external objects such as smartphones out of the equation. That is why in recent times many rushed to affirm that the appropriate model for the analysis was the Extended Mind Thesis. One of the most enthusiastic advocates of this idea was one of the philosophers who proposed this hypothesis, David Chalmers, who said that "my iPhone is already part of my mind." For him, smartphones have taken over what were once functions of our brain, such as remembering dates and birthdays, phone numbers and addresses, in addition to certain analytical operations. Andy Clark, meanwhile, has been less emphatic than his colleague but placed "iPhones, BlackBerrys, laptops and tablets" on a list of "genuine mental extenders."While the proposal is attractive and undoubtedly has advantages over classical cognitivism, I find some problems. Both in its original formulation and in successive works that were refining the first intuitions, the Extended Mind thesis held that the candidate objects to extend the mind had to meet four criteria, linked to the availability of the resource, the acceptance of the information, its accessibility and its previous acceptance. I believe that these requirements are not fulfilled in the case of smartphones and that, for now, the cognition model that can account for these is still vacant