1. It may surprise many, but all “individual knowledge is remarkably shallow.” So says a view-of-mind-altering book The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone, by Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach.
2. Science (and life) keep hammering nails “into the coffin of the rational individual” (Yuval Harari’s review), but rationalism and individualism still haunt and systematically mislead.
3. “Our intelligence resides not in individual brains but in the collective mind.” This “division of cognitive labor is fundamental to the way cognition evolved and the way it works today.”
4. You know how to use GPS because masses of others know things you don’t (—>key human trick is to not be limited by our own brains, or our own tool-making, tech is the materialized knowhow of others).
5. Thought “extends beyond the skull“; your mind uses its brains + body + tools (physical and cognitive) + other minds + environment.
6. Hence the “mind is not in the brain. Rather, the brain is in the mind” (the “extended mind”).
7. We’re unaware of most information we process. “Deliberation is only a tiny part” of cognition. Per Kahneman, most cognition is fast, intuitive, subconscious System 1, not slow, deliberative System 2.
8….
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