The previous issue of the New Yorker (April 2, “The Mind Issue“) is really a tremendous collection of writing. Rachel Aviv on the mysterious wanderings of Hannah Upp in a dissociative fugue, Joshua Rothman on out-of-body experiences with virtual reality, and a profile of the maddening, dreadful Scott Pruitt at the EPA are all very insightful and well-written. And a profile of philosopher (and “theoretical cognitive scientist”) Andy Clark was particularly fascinating.

As many know, I’ve been a big fan of Charlie Stross‘s writing for years now. And so many of these essays seemed to touch on technologies that he’s written about, either conceptually or almost precisely. Rothman’s piece on VR describes the experience of inhabiting a new body in a virtual world to derive empathy with the subject. By completing a series of hand-eye-touch coordination exercises, the participant begins to physically identify with the perspective of their virtual role:

 The technology is now being used to, on a small scale, treat domestic abusers, with marked success (albeit at a small scale). But this sort of gender-bending sounds like nothing less than Stross’s Glasshouse, where in the 27th century the male-identifying protagonist is reconstituted as a late 20th century woman in the services of a social experiment, a weird interactive version of the “ancestor simulation” so often hypothesized by Nick Bostrom et al.

More revelatory – and relevant to my own everyday life – is Larissa MacFarquhar’s profile of Clark. Most of this article is about a philosophical conception of intelligence and selfhood, and how rather than developing a wholly artificial intelligence with no external reference points, there’s a synthesis between mind and body in which the two have a symbiotic relationship and, perhaps, cannot exist in isolation. We are not, contra popular perception, beings whose self exists only in our single minds. Much like humanity’s adoption of tools to accomplish tasks, we augment our own brain-based computing power in various ways:

Consider a woman named Inga, who wants to go to the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. She consults her memory, recalls that the museum is on Fifty-third Street, and off she goes. Now consider Otto, an Alzheimer’s patient. Otto carries a notebook with him everywhere, in which he writes down information that he thinks he’ll need. His memory is quite bad now, so he uses the notebook constantly, looking up facts or jotting down new ones. One day, he, too, decides to go to moma, and, knowing that his notebook contains the address, he looks it up.

Before Inga consulted her memory or Otto his notebook, neither one of them had the address “Fifty-third Street” consciously in mind; but both would have said, if asked, that they knew where the museum was—in the way that if you ask someone if she knows the time she will say yes, and then look at her watch. So what’s the difference? You might say that, whereas Inga always has access to her memory, Otto doesn’t always have access to his notebook. He doesn’t bring it into the shower, and can’t read it in the dark. But Inga doesn’t always have access to her memory, either—she doesn’t when she’s asleep, or drunk.

Andy Clark, a philosopher and cognitive scientist at the University of Edinburgh, believes that there is no important difference between Inga and Otto, memory and notebook. He believes that the mind extends into the world and is regularly entangled with a whole range of devices. But this isn’t really a factual claim; clearly, you can make a case either way. No, it’s more a way of thinking about what sort of creature a human is. Clark rejects the idea that a person is complete in himself, shut in against the outside, in no need of help.

Compare that with the protagonist of the first third of Accelerando, the fast-talking augmented-computing Manfred Macx, with a body-computer “metacortex” full of assignable “agents” to handle running down a train of thought to its ultimate conclusion:

While the sensory overload risks are as real as those of a Twitter feed or RSS reader today, the difference with Macx’s metacortex is how directed its activities are. Not the result of some obscure algorithm, but generated solely by his own interests and ideas. Imagine a Wikipedia session of several dozen tabs, but being able to consume them all in near-simultaneity.

I identify closely with this, not the least because of my own tendency towards distraction and idle thought, but also my reliance on notepads and Evernote alike to keep track of the world around me. I can walk into a grocery store with five things to buy and emerge with ten; only three of them will have been from my list and I’ll have forgotten there were five to begin with. The ability to offload a thought or a task to remember is vital towards freeing up “processing power” (metaphorically speaking and not in the sense of nootropics), and I can only hope that someday the prospect of multitasking across distributed mental processors becomes a reality. It’s only then, I tell myself, that I’ll be able to finish writing that book I never started. To pursue an idea all the way to its end. In short, to fulfill my – and our – full potential as thinking beings.

In the meantime, the closest I’ll come is to keep reading Stross’s excellent speculative fiction.