Abstract
The application of extended mind theory to the Internet and Web yields the possibility of Internet-extended knowledge—a form of extended knowledge that arises as a result of an individual's interactions with the online environment. The present paper seeks to advance our understanding of Internet-extended knowledge by describing the functionality of a real-world application, called the HoloArt app. In part, the goal of the paper is illustrative: it is intended to show how recent advances in mixed reality, cloud-computing, and machine intelligence might be combined so as to yield a putative case of Internet-extended knowledge. Beyond this, however, the paper is intended to support the philosophical effort to understand the notions of extended knowledge and the extended mind. In particular, the HoloArt app raises questions about the universality of some of the criteria that have been used to evaluate putative cases of cognitive extension. The upshot is a better appreciation of the way in which claims about extended knowledge and the extended mind might be affected by a consideration of technologically-advanced resources.
Highlights
According to proponents of the extended mind, human mental states and processes are, on occasion, subject to a form of wide or extended realization, such that resources lying beyond the ancient metabolic boundaries of skin and skull are included as part of the physical fabric that realizes human mental states and processes
The present paper describes a putative case of Internetextended knowledge that combines the use of online processing with the forms of visualization and interaction enabled by a mixed reality device, namely, the Microsoft HoloLens
The present paper describes a putative case of Internet-extended knowledge based around a real-world application, called the HoloArt app
Summary
According to proponents of the extended mind, human mental states and processes are, on occasion, subject to a form of wide or extended realization, such that resources lying beyond the ancient metabolic boundaries of skin and skull are included as part of the physical fabric that realizes human mental states and processes. If we accept that online information can play the same sort of functional role as that served by the information in Otto’s notebook, it seems that the Internet-extended cognizer could be subject to a significant expansion in their body of dispositional beliefs (see Ludwig, 2015) Assuming that such dispositional beliefs are true, we may wonder whether this form of doxastic expansion entails a corresponding form of epistemic expansion, such that human individuals can come to enjoy various forms of restricted omniscience—a “complete, or close to complete knowledge about a particular, fairly specific subject matter” The application of extended mind theory to the online environment yields the possibility of Internet-extended knowledge—a form of extended knowledge in which the Internet and Web are (as Clark suggests) “part of the physical machinery underpinning some of an agent’s genuine mental states.”. I will be considering Internet-extended knowledge from the standpoint of claims about the possibility of extended mental states, such as states of dispositional belief
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