Only as old as you think

Now what was that Ancient Greek mystic-philosopher‘s name again?
Was it Anaxamander? Anaximander? Anixamander?

And what about the nidanas?
Does vinnana give rise to sankhara or is it the other way around?

Did Wittgenstein get his notion that logic is tautology from Russell?
Or did Russell pick up his belief that mathematics is tautological from Wittgenstein?

And where does that metaphor about inductive reasoning and causality come from?
The one with the snakes going past a slit in a fence.

Surely I knew all this only a few years ago. Am I showing my age? I may not yet be mentally incompetent but I seem to be becoming mentally incontinent. The stuff in there keeps dribbling out.

Thank god for the internet. Memory prompts are just a few keystrokes away. I would never have got around to checking all this if I’d had to go through a library. I did that once when I first learned it. It would be too much if I had to do it all again. And again. And again.

Or is my reliance on the internet what’s causing all this? Have I just learned to lean on the facts at my fingertips and reassigned my memory capacity to more important things? Like what my girlfriend of thirty years ago looked like in the nude.

In his 2003 book Natural Born Cyborgs, cognitive scientist Andy Clark posits that part-human part-machine beings are not only already among us. They are us. (Or was that a 2002 book? And was it ‘Clark’ or ‘Clarke’?). We humans have adapted to our tools so well we have made them extensions of our bodies. We drive our cars as naturally and unthinkingly as we walk and the feedback we get from the controls bypasses our conscious awareness and goes straight to the parts of the brain that action it (Dammit! Which parts were they again?).

But there’s a cost. The more we rely on technology the less we can rely on our bodies.

It started with fire. Once we had an artificial means of keeping warm we began to lose our body hair more rapidly. When we learned to cook our jaws and teeth began to atrophy. And how many of us think we can walk as far and as easily as our car-less forbears could at our age? Heck, I’m only five generations away from nomadic hunter gatherers who could navigate vast distances just by singing! I could barely find my way around a mulberry bush that way.

We produce our tools and our tools produce us.

From the late 20th Century we have been using tools to augment not only our bodies but our minds. Well, I guess we’ve been doing that for as long as writing has been around – probably longer – but in the last few decades the rate of integration between our brains and our information technologies has been increasing rapidly. Not only has using computers and smart phones become ‘natural’, not using them is becoming ‘unnatural’. So when my computer’s on the fritz it feels like I’ve been mentally crippled. Sure I forgot things before, but now I forget lots of things. Or have I just gotten so used to ‘remembering’ so much with computers that it’s inevitable  more details will slip my mind without them?

How dependent on external technology has my mind become?
How dependent can it become?
How long will it be before there’s a power failure and I black out?

                                                                                                              

Postscript:
The WordPress editor just suggested I tag this post ‘mentally incompetent’.
I wish it would keep its bloody opinions to itself!