(no subject)
If we take the extended mind hypothesis seriously, even in its most banal scientific formulation, it means that to understand the mind we have to look at it as conditioned by history. It has already been clearly demonstrated that the brain reconfigures itself given different patterns of use, to a dramatic degree. The brain can reconfigure itself in startling ways, that, for example, the heart or kidneys never could. To really understand how the brain works then, we would have to look at it under a broad variety of kinds of use. Generally, neuropsychology is done on 'average' people. That is, people conditioned to a dense semiotic field of historically unique proportions, and a set of tasks likewise unique in the animal world. Lots of interesting work is done on people with aberrant body-minds, of course. But given that it is such a young field, nothing so far can be done to compare, say, the neuropsychological differences between those in the renaissance and people now. Foucault's The Order of Things suggests to me that cognition is immensely mutable, and that the answer to "How does cognition work?" partly depends on which culture and epoch you're talking about. Could it be possible to take The Order of Things as a map to explore the different ways we can use our brains?