Cognitive artifacts#
A core byproduct of culture is an ever-expanding reservoir of cognitive artifacts: products of cognition (that occurred previously within the culture) that are preserved and available to all so that each of us can build our intelligence upon this reservoir rather than starting from nothing.
These cognitive artifacts, then, have the propensity to augment each person's innate intelligence. For example, I did not invent numbers, did not invent geometry, or toplogy, or calculus, or number theory. These were all given to me as cognitive artifacts of my culture.
To dwell on the cognitive-artifacts component of culture is to appreciate we can think about something like a survival-fitness metric for each culture. The quality of a culture's reservoir of artifacts is certainly going the impact its peoples', and hence its own, ongoing viability.
Krakauer and two types of "cognitive artifact"#
David Krakauer is a professor of Complex Systems as the Santa Fe Institute. He is also director of the institute. On the matter of cognitive artifacts, he has made the case that there are two types that pose a dichotomy:
- complimentary cognitive artifacts: these artifacts drive a permanent change to the brain whose benefit remains even when the artifact is taken away.
- competitive cognitive artifact: these artifacts replace rather than amplify my brain's representational ability.
Maps are an excellent example of complimentary cognitive artifacts. Over the course of centuries or decades, many people contribute to the drawing of an accurate map. If you sit down and pore over that map, you find you can, in effect, spatially model the whole thing in your head, so that you now have in your mind's eye what it took thousands of people many years to construct. You've changed the wiring of your brain to encode spatial relations that you could never have directly experienced.
Conversely, an electronic calculator is an example of a competitive cognitive artifact. With my calculator in hand, I can do every type of mathematics problem conceivable, but doing the problems by this means brings about no amplification of my brain's representational abilities for math. If I become dependent on my calculator, then to take it away is to diminish my mathematical ability.
The electronic calculator, of course, has a vastly older predecessor, the abacus. This ancient and very efficient calculation tool HAS been shown to encode representational mathematical ability in the brain. Users of the abacus over an extended period come to have an abacus model in the brain, so that a point is reached where the physical device is no longer needed. One is still performing abacus math, but with the speed of the brain based model. At this point, you can take the abacus away and have no loss to the subject's ability to calculate.