The Liberation That Drones Bring to Our Cognitive Apparatus

Over the last couple of years, everybody’s gotten really excited about drones, flying machines that we can control. I can see that people have come out of the woodwork hobbyists, are emerging in-store. Everybody’s obsessed with drones and of course, the technology has improved exponentially over the last couple of years.

I think today, for the first, time I had a revelation. I finally understood the power of the drone and it took me back to my childhood. You guys remember the first time you got a remote controlled car? There came a moment where you assumed that this remote controlled car was now a part of your mental scaffolding. This was the feeling that you felt with a remote controlled car.

Of course you grow up and you get over silly things like that because fundamentally, it’s a toy. But, I think, what the drone has done is; it has brought back that excitement of controlling an external vehicle and bringing it under conscious control and there’s precedent for this idea from what’s going on in the mind during these moments. It goes back to the work of the cognitive philosophers, David Chalmers and Andy Clark who wrote Natural Born Cyborgs. They wrote the extended mind thesis. They were talking about how the devices such as smart phones have become part of our cognitive scaffolding. They’re beyond the skin back but they’re still tethered to the contents of mind, a feedback loop of brains tools and environment, realizing that minds like ours are made for mating with non-biological props and scaffolding.

You can see them, the invigoration, the freedom, the liberation that the drones bring to our cognitive apparatus, because the drone frees us from gravity. It frees us from the limitations of our weighing bodies on the floor. It frees us into the feeling of flight and so, for the mind especially, when you have the drones that can be connected to the screen where you can see the drones POV, you mind literally mesh with it and eventually the drone starts to feel like a part of your mind, decoupled from your body, radically extending the boundaries of self-hood and of course, this is really a fun experience.

It’s freeing, it’s liberating, and feels like you can fly!

It’s a kin to the childlike historical desire to move beyond our limitations to soar above the heavens. It’s really exciting to witness the Mason Sea of such an industry that is a literalization of human dream that has persisted through millennia.