This is quite a radical thesis, isn't it? Because you're, you're suggesting that thousands of years of history, where the mind has been thought of as enclosed in the skull, or somehow caught up in the soul, which is enclosed in the body, that's all wrong actually. All that time, throughout history, people have been out sourcing information, and their minds have extended far beyond the confines of their skin. Yes,

i think that's right. I suppose that in a way, if there was a sort of illusion or mistake here, it was maybe tied up with the early waves of materialism and physicalism. You know, when it became clear that the brain was really important, i think simultaneously we started to think that maybe the brain was all there was. But i don't think that was ever true to lived human experience. So surely throughout history we've had the feeling that somehow we know more when we're in some sit tions and contexts and others when we're interacting with the right people. I think there is a genuine human sense of not being bounded exactly by what your biological brain could do in a vacuum. Now,

this might just seem like a philosophical quibble about whether we choose to describe the mind in one way or another. These are just two different ways of looking at the same thing. We could describe etting something and retrieving it from a diary purely in those terms, or you could say, actually, i am accessing another part of my mind. It doesn't really matter. Is that accurate? Does it matter?

Think it does matter. There are two ways, i think, to get at the matter. In one ist a sort of more philosophical way, and the other is maybe a more moral or ethical way. So the philosophical way is to think that when we assess some thinkas either being part of our mind or not. We shouldn't prejudice the way that we make that assessment by thinking about the location of the process. So the key move in the original charmer's clerk paper was to suggest what we called principle of parity. And the idea was that you should think about the way that this process is manipulating information tsolve a problem, and then ask yourself, suppose that that manipulation was done in the head. How would you then feel about it? So you could imagine creatures, you know, i called them the bites in one paper. And the bitses were able to do in their head just the kind of stuff that we do use in pen and paper. They could store bit mapped images that they could then retrieve later and get more information back by looking, as it were, at t on bit mapped images. And surely, if there were alien creatures that operated like that, we'd say, well, the bitss a little bit different to us, but it's all their cognition. That's how they think. That's how their minds work. And just because we do it using pen and paper, reading stuff in by eyes and hands, why should that make a difference? That's a philosophical way.