Hello everyone, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll.

When you think about how we conceptualize human beings, someone once pointed out that

we're always using metaphors that depend on our current best technologies, you know, when

clocks were just invented, wristwatches and so forth. It was the clockwork universe when robots

and machines came on the scene. We thought of organic beings kind of like that. And now we have

computers besides which we have the old cameras and video cameras and audio recorders and so forth.

So we tend very, very roughly, you know, we tend to think about a person as kind of like a robot

with some video cameras for eyes and audio recorders for ears hooked up to a computer inside. And

the sensory apparatus brings information into the computer which then tells the robot body

what to do. It's a simple kind of straightforward compelling picture. It's also wrong. That's not

actually a very good description of what we are, how we behave. For one thing, intelligent design

is not the way that human beings came about. We evolved over many, many years and we weren't aiming

for that. You have to think about what is the kind of architecture that actually best serves the

purposes of surviving and procreating and reproductive fitness and so forth. And it turns out to be very

different. So today's guest is Andy Clark who is a philosopher and a cognitive scientist. In fact,

his title at the University of Sussex is Professor of Cognitive Philosophy. Very well known in philosophy,

very, very highly cited for thinking about the brain and the mind and how they're related and how

they work. He became very famous with a co-author paper with David Chalmers where they proposed the

extended mind hypothesis. The idea that what he should count as your mind is not just your brain,

but also all the little extensions of the brain that help us think, whether it's inside our bodies

or whether it is things we scribble down on a piece of paper or used to enhance our memories or

calculation abilities and so forth and so on. He also has a great interest in the idea of the brain

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