In this book the editors have gathered a number of contributions by
persons who have been working on problems of Cognitive Technology
(CT). The present collection initiates explorations of the human
mind via the technologies the mind produces. These explorations
take as their point of departure the question What happens when
humans produce new technologies? Two interdependent perspectives
from which such a production can be approached are adopted:
- How and why constructs that have their origins in human mental
life are embodied in physical environments when people fabricate
their habitat, even to the point of those constructs becoming that
very habitat
- How and why these fabricated habitats affect, and feed back
into, human mental life.
The aim of the CT research programme is to determine, in
general, which technologies, and in particular, which interactive
computer-based technologies, are humane with respect to the
cognitive development and evolutionary adaptation of their end
users. But what does it really mean to be humane in a technological
world? To shed light on this central issue other pertinent
questions are raised, e.g.
- Why are human minds externalised, i.e., what purpose does the
process of externalisation serve?
- What can we learn about the human mind by studying how it
externalises itself?
- How does the use of externalised mental constructs (the
objects we call 'tools') change people fundamentally?
- To what extent does human interaction with technology serve as
an amplification of human cognition, and to what extent does it
lead to a atrophy of the human mind?
The book calls for a reflection on what a tool is. Strong
parallels between CT andenvironmentalism are drawn: both are seen
as trends having originated in our need to understand how we
manipulate, by means of the tools we have created, our natural
habitat consisting of, on the one hand, the cognitive environment
which generates thought and determines action, and on the other
hand, the physical environment in which thought and action are
realised. Both trends endeavour to protect the human habitat from
the unwanted or uncontrolled impact of technology, and are
ultimately concerned with the ethics and aesthetics of tool design
and tool use.
Among the topics selected by the contributors to the book, the
following themes emerge (the list is not exhaustive): using
technology to empower the cognitively impaired; the ethics versus
aesthetics of technology; the externalisation of emotive and
affective life and its special dialectic ('mirror') effects;
creativity enhancement: cognitive space, problem tractability;
externalisation of sensory life and mental imagery; the engineering
and modelling aspects of externalised life; externalised
communication channels and inner dialogue; externalised learning
protocols; relevance analysis as a theoretical framework for
cognitive technology.
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