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One more thought from me-->then I'll get out of the way so you guys can talk.

For my other interesting class this semester, on Gender and Technology, I've been reading a 2003 book by Andy Clark called Natural-Born Cyborgs; it asks us to recognize how much of our "self" is embedded in our environment (think how lost you feel when your watch, or cell phone, or computer fails....). Clark's (very evolutionary) argument (which leans heavily on our friend Daniel Dennett, among others) is not to valorize the body, or the physical brain "contained" within its boundaries, or to but acknowledge instead how much of what we do--in particualr, how much of the information we call up--we do via extensions beyond our "biological skin-bag."

Along the way, Clark evokes another "excellent exploratory text," Donald Merlin's The Making of the Modern Mind, which, he reports,

usefully distinguishes two ways of using speech and language. They are the mythic, and the theoretic. Mythic uses focus on storytelling and narrative. The Greeks, however, are said to have begun the process of using the written word for a new and more transformative purpose. They began to use writing to record ongoing processes of thought and theory-building. Instead of just recording and passing on whole theories and cosmologies, text began to be used to record half-finished arguments and as a means of soliciting new evidence for and against emerging ideas. Ideas could then be refined, completed, or rejected by the work of many hands separated in space and time...The tools of text thus allow us, at multiple scales, to create new stable objects for critical activity.

I'd love to think about this idea some more with you all: the huge transformation that came about when our thoughts and ideas became objects of our own critical attention, making our own thoughts into stable objects for scrutiny. We began to think about our own thoughts...