[snippet id=”305″ label=”Emma Gordon and Adam Carter”]<\/p>\n
By J. Adam Carter and Emma C. Gordon<\/p>\n
Suppose you wanted to know who the first pope was after St. Peter (answer: Pope Linus, born 10 AD), or what the oldest continuously habited city in the world is (answer: Damascus, Syria, continuously inhabited since the 3rd<\/sup> millennium BC) or what the terrifying entity \u2018Krampus\u2019 is (answer: a horned, anthropomorphic goat-like figure who, during the Christmas season, punishes children who have misbehaved). You don\u2019t need to be a genius or even well-travelled or well-read to know such things. You\u2019ve got it all on your phone. (And so does the person next to you).<\/p>\n Is this a good thing<\/em>? Maybe so. As Socrates tells us in the Meno <\/em>(and also as common sense seems to indicate), knowledge is valuable<\/em>. And being able to get knowledge quickly and without much effort or skill seems like a fact of modern life that\u2014absent some good reason to the contrary\u2014we should celebrate (imagine what people in the past had to do to learn such facts as the above? Travel to the Library of Alexandria? Ask an Oracle?)<\/p>\n Even chess legend Garry Kasparov, the first world chess champion to lose a match to a computer (in 1997, to IBM\u2019s Deep Blue<\/a>)\u2014someone you\u2019d perhaps expect might be grudgingly \u2018anti-computer\u2019\u2014has finally warmed in recent years[1]<\/a> to the idea that outsourcing cognitive tasks to our intelligent machines might just be for the best. In fact, Kasparov has gone even further and suggested that we\u2019d be better off just letting such machines do much of our mundane thinking for us. As Kasparov puts it:<\/p>\n Let\u2019s look at this historical process. Machines that replace manual labor, they have allowed us to focus on developing our minds. More intelligent machines, I understand that they will take over more menial aspects of cognition and will elevate our lives towards curiosity, creativity, beauty, joy.<\/p>\n Curiosity, creativity, beauty and joy\u2014this all sounds great!<\/p>\n Though we might want to slow down here a bit. Consider, after all, that a consequence of outsourcing cognitive tasks to our gadgetry is that we\u2019re doing less\u2014and storing less<\/em>\u2014in our heads. Does this matter?<\/p>\n It might. Especially, perhaps, if we begin to lose track of what is stored where. In a 2015 paper in the\u00a0 Journal of Experimental Psychology<\/em><\/a>, Matthew Fisher, Mariel Goddu, and Frank Keil have argued, on the basis of experimental evidence, that that the very act of online searching (i.e., exactly the thing we do when we want quick knowledge) generates a kind of illusion whereby \u2018externally accessible information is conflated with knowledge \u201cin the head\u201d, specifically by causing us to conflate mere access to information <\/em>for personal knowledge (2015, 674). The first two (of nine in total) of Fisher et al.\u2019s experiments showed that searching for explanations on the Internet increases one\u2019s self-assessed ability to answer questions about an unrelated <\/em>topic, while a third shows that this result occurs even after time, content and features of the search process have been controlled for. Meanwhile, another three experiments show that this tendency comes not from (i) general overconfidence, or (ii) a different understanding of what counts as internal knowledge, but rather from a genuine misattribution <\/em>of the sources of knowledge.<\/p>\n Put simply, results like Fisher et al.\u2019s suggest that \u2018Googled knowledge\u2019 may come with a (perhaps surprising) epistemic price: we get facts quickly but at the cost of an impoverished and inflated perspective of our own mental lives.<\/p>\n Such skewed self-assessments (and especially when inflated in our favour) are, in general, not good. At one extreme, consider Calvisius Sabinus, as described by Seneca the Younger[2]<\/a>, who relied extensively on his expensive slaves to memorise and recite epic poetry so that Sabinus himself could receive the credit (while knowing not a verse of poetry himself). From Calvisius Sabinus\u2019s perspective, it seemed as though since he owned the slaves, and the slaves had the epic poetry memorised, it stood to reason that he <\/em>should receive the plaudits for the slaves\u2019 poetic oration[3]<\/a>. (In fact, he even believed he should be viewed as \u2018cultured\u2019).<\/p>\n We are surely not as deluded as Calvisius Sabinus. But it\u2019s not obvious we\u2019re entirely in the clear. If constantly availing ourselves to quick (as Michael Lynch<\/a> calls it) \u2018Google facts\u2019 causes us (a la<\/em> Fisher et al.) to end up mistakenly claiming more knowledge than we have a right to, then a deeper worry materialises, one that has to do with our intellectual character. Consider that Calvisius Sabinus seems not only deluded but in some sense intellectually arrogant<\/em>. Intellectual arrogance, on at least one notable way of thinking, is displayed when one infers an entitlement to behave in certain ways of superiority toward others on the basis of one\u2019s assessment of one\u2019s own intellectual merits[4]<\/a>. It\u2019s not hard to see how results like Fisher et al.\u2019s might rightly make us a bit uncomfortable\u2014at least, if we think that intellectual worth and intellectual flourishing involve more than quick knowledge but also good intellectual character traits. What is Google doing to us?<\/em><\/p>\n We are not here, though, to issue a pro-luddite jeremiad. In a recent paper<\/a>, we actually suggest that results like Fisher et al.\u2019s may lend themselves to an entirely different kind of interpretation, one that has much less disconcerting consequences. And so we\u2019ll end this post on a slightly happier note (albeit one with some heterodox overtones).<\/p>\n The very question of whether Fisher et al. are right that searching the net engenders a tendency for us to conflate <\/em>access to knowledge for, as they call it, \u2018personal knowledge\u2019 presupposes something about personal knowledge. That it\u2019s in the head<\/em>. That surely seems<\/em> right. But recent work in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science<\/a> is increasingly sceptical[5]<\/a>.<\/p>\n Take, for example, the cognitive process of memory storage and retrieval.\u00a0 This all plays out between the skull and skin\u2014at least, when we rely on biomemory. But what if we used a smartphone just like we use memory? Suppose, for example, that when you encounter new information, you store it in your phone, and when you need old information, you look it up where you stored it. Over time, you phase out your biomemory and start using the phone exclusively. Is there any reason to think your memories are not now stored in your phone?<\/p>\n According to Clark and Chalmers (1998), there\u2019s really no<\/em> good reason, just old fashioned \u2018bioprejudice\u2019. As they see it, our theorising about what kinds of things can serve as the material realisers of a genuinely cognitive<\/em> process should be guided not by questions of location (is it in the head or not?) and material constitution (is it made of brain stuff or not?), but by a more egalitarian principle they call the parity principle<\/em>:<\/p>\n Parity Principle<\/em>: If, as we confront some task, a part of the world functions as a process which, were it to go on in the head, we would have no hesitation in accepting as part of the cognitive process, then that part of the world is part of the cognitive process.<\/p>\n More recently, Orestis Palermos has argued that a case for extended memory can be made on the basis of dynamical systems theory<\/em><\/a>\u2014by showing how certain memory processes involve feedback loops that cross boundaries between the brain, body and the extracranial memory technologies we interact with[6]<\/a>.<\/p>\n If extended cognition is plausible\u2014and we think that it is (though here is not the place to try to sell you on it)\u2014then an interesting result follows: at least some cases of apparent conflation (between access to knowledge and personal knowledge) aren\u2019t conflation at all. Think about it: if cognition doesn\u2019t exclusively take place in our head, then what looks like mere access to knowledge <\/em>to some (with an intracranial view of cognition in the background) might in fact be the real thing. Whether or not that\u2019s so will depend not on where the information is stored, but on how we\u2019re interacting with the information\u2014and this is a matter for epistemology as well as the philosophy of mind and cognitive science.<\/p>\n [1]<\/a> See, in particular, Kasparov, G. (2017).\u00a0Deep Thinking: Where Machine Intelligence Ends and Human Creativity Begins<\/em>. Hachette UK.<\/p>\n [2]<\/a> Lucius Annaeus Seneca<\/a>,\u00a0Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium<\/em><\/a>, 27.<\/p>\n [3]<\/a> Thanks to Mike Wheeler for drawing our attention to this case. For a helpful discussion by Wheeler, see Wheeler, Michael. 2017. \u2018Knowledge, Credit and the Extended Mind, or What Calvi- sius Sabinus Got Right\u2019. In Extended Epistemology, edited by J. Adam Carter, Andy Clark, Jesper Kallestrup, S. Orestis Palermos, and Duncan Pritchard. Oxford: Ox- ford University Press.<\/p>\n [4]<\/a> See, for example, Roberts, Robert C., and W. Jay Wood. 2007. Intellectual Virtues: An Essay in Regulative Epistemology<\/em>. Oxford University Press, p. 243; and Tiberius, Valerie, and John D. Walker. 1998. \u2018Arrogance\u2019. American Philosophical Quarterly <\/em>35 (4): 379\u2013390. For a self-delusion model of intellectual arrogance, see Tanesini, Alessandra. 2016. \u2018I\u2014\u201cCalm Down, Dear\u201d: Intellectual Arrogance, Silencing and Ignorance\u2019. Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume <\/em>90 (1): 71\u201392. doi:10.1093\/arisup\/akw011.<\/p>\n