Thinking Beyond the Brain. Educating and Building from the Standpoint of Extended Cognition

Abstract

According to the hypothesis of extended cognition (ExC), our thinking is not just happening in the brain but spreads out to the beyond-the-skin environment. Following an introduction to the basic idea of extended cognition, this essay explores that idea in relation to two issues: first, it looks at the hybrid education in an increasingly networked world; second, at the situating of organic cognition within so-called “intelligent buildings.” It is argued that we should understand these contemporary developments as the latest realizations of an age-old human ontology of dynamically assembled, organic-technological cognitive systems, since it is of our very nature to enhance our raw organic intelligence by forming shifting human-arte-fact coalitions that operate over various time-scales.