Untangling Webs: Extended Cognition

Context: Does a Spider Use Its Web Like You Use Your Smartphone?

On the topic of extended cognition: The notion that a spider’s web may be part of it’s cognitive apparatus reflects more generally on tools and technologies as distributed phenomenological facilitators rather than as disembodied awareness or intelligence. The role of innovative technological mediation in information storage and processing has a strong influence on the kinds of mental tasks that an organism, entity or organisational system is able to subsequently deploy it’s perennially limited resources towards. Sensory outsourcing allows for a certain rational, logical or ordered algorithmic information compression, releasing valuable cognitive-processing power and energy resources for other tasks; including creative responses to complex and dynamic environmental contexts in the serious matters of survival and existential continuity.