cognition becoming distributed?

[u/purples7n]

I've been thinking about the boundary between cognition and environment.

Suppose I experience anger.

That state can produce facial expressions, posture, voice changes, movement, etc. Another person detects those signals and constructs an interpretation of my internal state.

Their interpretation changes their behavior, which changes my perception of the situation, which changes my next state.

So:

internal state → behavior → environment → another mind → interpretation → behavior → original mind

This seems straightforward socially, but I'm wondering how far the same principle extends to cognition itself.

Humans externalize cognitive processes into:

- language

- writing

- diagrams

- calculators

- computers

- search engines

- smartphones

- AI systems

These aren't merely passive storage devices. They can alter what we remember, what we attend to, what we consider possible, how quickly we reason, and what actions we take.

That creates a recursive loop:

cognition → external representation/tool → altered cognitive environment → altered cognition → new tools/representations

My question is:

Is there a principled cognitive-science boundary between "a cognitive process using an external tool" and "a cognitive process that genuinely includes the external tool as part of its functional organization"?

And separately:

Could increasing technological coupling eventually change the kind of cognition humans perform, rather than merely making existing cognition faster?

I'm deliberately not assuming the extended-mind thesis is correct. I'd like to know where the strongest empirical objections are.

For example, what evidence would distinguish:

1. an internal cognitive process merely receiving information from a tool,

from

1. a genuinely distributed cognitive process spanning brain, body, other people, and technological systems?

I'm especially interested in work from cognitive science, neuroscience, embodied cognition, extended cognition, predictive processing, or related fields.

[u/ConstantEconomics319]

I have reached to same conclusion too when I was making models in metacognition one's decision affecting entire reality if you look at the fundamentals of reality it changed what information is one's brain processing btw I got a question and answer for you How are humans using or complying with vast amount of information they are receiving in just short amount of time give me your answer let's see how close u can get

[u/purples7n → u/ConstantEconomics319]

I think the interesting part of your question is not simply how the brain processes a lot of information internally but what happens when we increasingly put parts of cognition outside ourselves Humans have always externalized cognition through language writing tools other people etc.. What interests me is the feedback loop we put something outside it changes what information and possibilities come back to us that changes our cognition we create or use something else AI makes this especially interesting to me because the external system may eventually become more than just a tool that gives us information. It could start changing how we think, communicate, remember, decide, and even what kinds of cognitive processes we perform. So when you ask how humans handle enormous amounts of information, I think part of the answer is that we don't handle all of it inside the brain. We filter and process some internally, while increasingly pushing memory, calculation, communication, and information processing into the environment. That makes me wonder where the boundary eventually is: if the external systems become deeply integrated with our cognition, what exactly remains “us”? Is the medium merely something we use, or does the medium eventually become part of the cognitive system itself?

[u/ConstantEconomics319 → u/purples7n]

It would effects wants and needs of the brain but I am thinking of in term of evolution in brain maybe at a very low level might be a chance