What is ChatGPT and what does it do? Everyone is raving about the new AI chatbot, and in fact, I have been quite impressed by it. It far surpasses all of my expectations and I want to share an essay I had it write earlier.

But, first, a story — back in about 2014, I was a young grad student looking for information about cognitive processes in general. I spent the summer trying to find my way into a magazine called Synthese, which I admired. I was interested in cognitivism — the idea that human minds and their thought processes are not black boxes, but in fact can be understood in great detail if we know which parts of them to poke and prod upon.

I remember discovering one single paper on distributed cognition, which fascinated me — I was coming at this from the standpoint of my recent introduction to cognitive neuroscience and then philosophy of mind angle that I had been led to by my talented professor, who had the great presence of mind to share with us the work of Antonio Damasio.

At the time, it was both incredibly passé and simultaneously somehow revolutionary to think that cognitive processes could take part in individual minds on one level, and on groups of minds at another. Being a bit of a lone wolf, at least in terms of my studies, I didn’t think a lot about the ways in which other minds could directly help me solve problems. I was more content to read the things they’d written down, then try to find my way to a meaningful contribution if I could.

I remember being disappointed when my searches of the usual databases came back generally empty, and I spent some time working toward an ethics book I still haven’t written almost ten years later which is intended to take as its philosophical input the revolutionary concept that ethics is not about norms or good and bad, but rather about coordination of individual human beings around shared goals.

One of my goals was to answer a core ethical theory question that has been around at least as long ago as Aristotle’s time:

Why does every individual person act as virtuously as possible and still end up surrounded by a vicious society that devalues our virtue and causes us pain?

If we’re all trying to do the right thing, shouldn’t we have had success in creating a more nurturing environment for ourselves?

With these thoughts in mind (there will be more on them to come, I promise I haven’t given up the idea of the book!), it seems fitting now to reveal the content the computer created in response to my prompting:

Distributed cognition is a term used in cognitive psychology and the study of human intelligence to refer to the idea that cognitive processes are not limited to individual brains, but can also be distributed across individuals, tools, and other external components in a cognitive system.

In other words, distributed cognition describes the way that people, objects, and technology can work together to solve problems, make decisions, and perform other cognitive tasks. This can include using tools or technology to perform cognitive tasks that would be difficult or impossible for an individual to do on their own, or collaborating with other people to share knowledge, ideas, and expertise.

For example, consider a group of people working together to solve a complex problem. Each person in the group brings their own unique knowledge, skills, and experiences to the table, and they use these to generate ideas and come up with solutions. The group may also use tools, such as computers or whiteboards, to organize their thoughts, share information, and test out different ideas. In this way, the group’s collective intelligence is distributed across the individuals, the tools, and the interactions between them.

Distributed cognition is a useful concept for understanding how people and technology can work together to solve problems and achieve goals. It can help us to design systems and technologies that support and enhance human cognitive abilities, and to understand how these systems can be used to support collaboration and problem-solving.

For example, distributed cognition can help us to design technology that is easy to use and understand, and that helps people to perform tasks more efficiently and effectively. It can also help us to understand how people collaborate and communicate in teams, and how to design systems and technologies that support and enhance these processes.

Distributed cognition can also help us to understand the limitations of human cognition, and how these can be overcome through the use of technology and other external components. For example, humans have limited memory and processing abilities, and can struggle to process large amounts of information or solve complex problems. However, by using tools and technology, we can offload some of these cognitive tasks, and extend our cognitive abilities in ways that would not be possible on our own.

Overall, the concept of distributed cognition provides a useful framework for understanding how people, objects, and technology can work together to support human cognition and problem-solving. By considering the ways that cognitive processes can be distributed across individuals, tools, and other external components, we can design systems and technologies that support and enhance human intelligence, and help us to solve complex problems and achieve our goals.

The quality of the prose is fairly strong, and the computer’s search apparently went far better than my own all those years ago! I was pleased enough by this result to write this article, but one final thought begs to be written: this sort of AI can greatly enhance the searchability of vast tracts of human literature, and skilled scholars will find their academic experience improved by it.

In fact, I might go so far as to argue that the purpose of AI that primarily interacts with people is, at the end of the day, to work on that same old ethical problem — the problem of distributed cognition. To some extent, I do think the algorithm just put the words together and defined them. The descriptions aren’t really all that deep (perhaps soon though!) and in general there is plenty of room for progress… but my philosophical journey through this life keeps pushing me in one direction — not DAOs and not blockchains and not AI but the human culture, writ large. I’m pretty sure most of what we find meaning in has to do with one form of distributed cognition or another, and perhaps even philosophy itself could end up being thought of as a species-wide metacognitive process; understandable, sensible, distributed through time and space.

If you liked this article, you may also enjoy this preview of Formal Dialectics.

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Thanks for reading!