Do you know what time it is?

Now, what are the ramifications of this view of the mind and knowledge for what we're doing here: education and learning?

I think most people nowadays secretly (or openly!) assume that there are certain things they will never need to understand or know how to do, and never need to remember. From how to do multiplication of fractions to remembering phone numbers, there are some things the machines seem to do for us better than most of us can do them for ourselves. Maybe it's a waste of school time to teach young people those things. Is there any way of distinguishing between the things that seem important for our meat minds to be able to do on their own and the ones that we can safely leave to the electronic exertions of our extended minds?

One of the chief questions around the extended mind involves knowledge. Can a person now be said to "know" something if they know how to find it? For instance, if I have never memorized your phone number but I have it in my smartphone, can I be said to know your number?

Surprisingly, there might be at least one sense in which I can. We’re halfway through the course, so let’s return for a moment to the technology we began with: the mechanical clock. In what sense do you know what time it is? Robin de Lange (2013) reminds us of the argument Chalmers and Clark made that when someone comes up to you on the street and asks you if you know the time you may say "yes," and then look at your watch (or more likely your phone now) and tell them what time it is. Perhaps in this instance the "you" in "do you know what time it is?" actually means "the hybrid biotechnological system that now includes the wristwatch" (Chalmers and Clark 1998, quoted in de Lange 2013, 67). Similarly, one might ask you if you know someone's phone number and you might say "yes" and refer to your smartphone Contacts app, even though you have never memorized the number in your meat mind. The meaning of "you" here has come to include your extended mind.

De Lange asks us to imagine that wearable technology has progressed a bit beyond the first few generations of Google Glasses and we now have a pair of smart eyewear that recognizes when someone uses vocabulary words we don't know and puts up the definitions for us on the lens screen.

Now, when a friend [...] asks you whether you know the meaning of a certain word that is not in your biological memory, and a short, clear description of the word pops up immediately in the corner of your field of view, would you say that you know the meaning of this word? (de Lange 2013, 69)

De Lange goes on to suggest that after you got used to having this experience, you might well answer "yes" and even come genuinely to feel that you do know the meaning of new words if your glasses can define them for you. De Lange invites us to imagine a (near-)future in which we

store certain information that we want to remember in an easily accessible, personalized cloud of knowledge. Instead of trying to store all information in biological memory by endless repetition, this task of storing information could be off-loaded to an external source which is constantly available to us at low information access costs. (de Lange 2013, 69-70)

The focus of education would now shift from encouraging students to commit information to memory (the old-fashioned low-cost access option) toward efforts to "train the technologically extended cognitive system" (69).

There is something to be said for this view, and there are definite moves in education toward "training" students in how to get, evaluate, and manipulate information rather than how to commit the information itself to memory.

But is knowing how to find information really the same as knowing it? If I don't remember who Alan Turing was (do you?), but I know how to find out, can "I" really be said to "know" who Alan Turing was? Maybe, after all, knowing something like that is something that you can only do in your meat mind.

Often students today will write down important points from class in their notes (or type them into their laptops) but neglect to "write them down" in their heads. Why waste valuable brain space, when your notes (or your computer, or Google) can remember the information for you? The "extended mind" is a convenient place to leave stuff until you need it.

Telephone numbers and birthdays are one thing - I don't see strong reasons for remembering them when your phone is more accurate usually - but are there not problems with storing "our" knowledge of more interconnected and meaningful information (history, political ideas, social and cultural knowledge, abstract ideas and arguments, the meanings of words) in the cloud? Leaving aside political and privacy concerns, let's just think about a person's intelligence and the depth and breadth of their knowing. Is actually having knowledge in your head a necessary part of intelligence? Or do we all agree it's "smarter" to keep those "hard drives" in our heads unclogged by data that can be stored elsewhere and retrieved if needed?

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