The process of articulating a thought rarely begins from nothing. You scroll through drafts, reread old notes, try a phrase, delete it, revise. The idea sharpens through the work. But where was it—before the edits, before the page? Was it waiting in your head, or did it emerge through the process itself?This course examines thinking as always and irreducibly artificial—not “fake,” but shaped by artifacts, techniques, and social structures. These external forms support thought, but how do they help constitute it? Embodied and embedded approaches to mind have long challenged the assumption that thinking originates inside the subject. Building on these, we’ll ask how thought emerges through its material, social, and technological conditions.We begin with the “inside-first” conception of mind associated with Descartes, treated as a methodological ideal of clarity and control. From there we move to embodied and enactive views that locate mindedness not in the head, but in skill, environment, and collective practice. When do these frameworks explain thinking—judgment, reasoning, error, revision—rather than merely redescribe intelligent behavior? In the final stretch, we examine how media, institutions, and contemporary AI systems act as cognitive environments that reorganize attention, authority, responsibility, and the conditions of thought. The point isn’t to decide whether AI has a mind, but to reflect on what its rise reveals about how we understand thinking itself.
- Kursleiter*in: Scott Jonathan Cowan