A Temporary change in style

Since I’m not going to be writing any blogs for a while thought I might just post some interesting and thought provoking quotes from Philosophy and COG publications I come across in my studies. Here are a couple to start:

"Experience with drawing and using Venn diagrams allows us to train a neural network which subsequently allows us to manipulate imagined Venn diagrams in our heads. . . there is no reason to suppose that such training results in the installation of a different kind of computational device. It is the same old process of pattern-completion in high-dimensional representational spaces, but applied to the special domain of a specific kind of external representation.’’
~ Andy Clark (1997)

“The role of public language and text in human cognition is not limited to the preservation and communication of ideas. Instead, these external resources make available concepts, strategies and learning trajectories which are simply not available to individual, un-augmented brains.”
~ Andy Clark (1998)

"External stores such as written language cause individual memory strategies to move towards heavy reliance on such stores. As a result these stores play an indispensable role in remembering processes, and thus these stores become proper parts of cognitive processes of remembering."
~ Mark Rowland (1999)

“If the cultural inheritance of an environment-modifying human activity persists for enough generations to generate a stable selection pressure, it will be able to co-direct human genetic evolution.”
~ Kevin Laland (1999)