The Blogosphere As an Artifact of Distributed Cognition

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The Blogosphere As an Artifact of Distributed Cognition
Over on the other blog today I have posted a longish item called What I am Working On. It's another attempt to explain things like learning networks and distributed cognition (if I try enough times I'll eventually get it, right?). The sorts of things discussed in this article constitute the sorts of things I think about on a day-to-day basis - and while the author is showing how brains are different from computers, there is a flipside, which is, how computers could be the same as brains, but aren't, yet. Lots of room for invention. Like this, for example: "The brain uses content-addressable memory." What does that mean? The author says, "The end result is that your brain has a kind of 'built-in Google.'" Well, yeah. But: "memories are composed of linked sensory fragments -- odors, sights, sounds, and even body positions". More...