thought about Clark/Chalmers extended mind hypothesis and displaced people

The first day when LSU reopened after the break for Hurricane Katrina I remember asking the students in my Intro to Philosophy class how many of them had their homes destroyed, and over 1/3 of them raised their hands. Over half of the homes in Baton Rouge had displaced people living with them and LSU's basketball arena was for a couple of weeks the largest triage unit in history on American soil.

One of the things that really surprised me after the initial weeks of horror was just how traumatizing it is to people to lose the externalizations of their memories. These are people who made it out with their families but lost not only their homes but also their computers, photo albums, childhood toys, family hand-me-downs, and all of the various tools and instruments with which they construct their lives (people take both cooking and music very seriously down here; and a lot of the men have rooms referred to as "shops" where they do various and sundry mechanical things).

I think that knowing people who have been through this has made me (and John Protevi as well, for that matter) see some of the deeper wisdom in Chalmers and Clark's "extended mind" hypothesis. According to the hypothesis, the mind extends beyond the brain and into all of the scaffolding in the world that the brain and body recruit in completing problem solving tasks. Pencil and paper are paradigmatic here, but all of the washed away stuff from the previous paragraph counts too. At some place Clark even sets up a thought experiment where he can argue that destruction of the property of someone with early stage Alzheimers should count as an assault on their person. This I think is the only hypothesis that does justice to the trauma a person goes through when they completely lose their home and everything in it. All the externalized bits of they and their families' minds were washed away.

This is partly why it is so important with the current crises that the Army Corps has been able to open the Morganza Spillway slowly enough so that the displaced people are able to bring much of their stuff with them, as in this news story:

The big hope is that they can keep just opening the Spillway up a little bit more each day after having given the people in the area plenty of time to take at least some of their stuff with them.

Me and Emily's good friend in the state Department of Agriculture has been worked ragged this week trying to help people move their livestock and also researching the extent to which the opening of the spillway will allow wild animals to move in time. He said that he thinks that they will be able to do it slowly enough so that the black bears will be able to get out of the way, but that a lot of wild turkeys are going to get caught because their nests somehow make them not mobile at this time of the year. I think this is the first time in my life I've ever seen somebody tear up over wild turkeys before. . . [We actually usually deep fry them down here (it's delicious, but if you are thinking of attempting to deep fry your next Thanksgiving entre, please read THIS, because the turkey will literally explode if you do it wrong).] Anyhow, for some reason it seems right to me that the wild turkeys at least have somebody crying for them, even though that's all we seem to be able to do. I know that probably doesn't make any sense.

Our friend in the Department of Agriculture has been up and down the Atchafalaya this last week and a half and also to the Spillway itself and he thinks that ultimately about 25,000 people will be displaced. But he's really hopeful that no person will drown from this batch of flooding, and he also hopes that everybody displaced will be able to bring some of their stuff with them this time.