won’t be getting up off the floor. All right?”
“Yeah, yeah . . .”
The lift ting ed for the ground floor. The doors opened, I gave Jayden a final look, then stepped out. There was no one around. I quickly crossed over to the stairwell and started heading up the stairs.
I didn’t want to think about what I’d just done. Was it right? Was it wrong? How the hell had I done it? No . . . I couldn’t let myself think about it. Not yet, anyway. I just had to concentrate on climbing the stairs, getting my skin back to normal, and getting back home.
I didn’t consciously know how to get my skin back to normal, but by the time I’d reached the third floor, I could already feel it cooling down, and although there were no mirrors around to check my face, I could see that my hands looked like my hands again.
I thought about taking the lift the rest of the way, but I didn’t know if Jayden would still be in there or not, and I didn’t really want to see him again, so I just carried on up the stairs.
In the stairwell on the twentieth floor, three guys were slumped against the wall, puffing away on crack pipes. They were all about nineteen or twenty, and they were all totally wasted.
I had to step over them to get past.
“Excuse me,” I said. “I just need to —”
“Hey, fuck,” one of them slurred at me, reaching out a grimy hand. “Gimme your —”
I flicked at his hand, my head turning on the electric, and I gave him just enough of a shock to surprise him, maybe just sting him a little. He jerked his hand away, cursing sharply, and at the same time he dropped his pipe from the other hand. While he scrabbled around on the ground, desperately looking for his pipe — and simultaneously waggling his shocked fingers in the air — I stepped past him and climbed the last three flights to the twenty-third floor.
No matter how weird and scary this iPhone-in-the-brain stuff was — and, believe me, it was incredibly weird and scary — there was no doubt that it had its advantages. I just had to hope that the more I thought about it, the more I tried to rationalize it, the less weird and scary it would become.
Fat chance.
The iPhone has already taken over some of the central functions of my brain. It has replaced part of my memory, storing numbers and addresses that I once would have taxed my brain with. It harbors my desires . . . Friends joke that I should get the iPhone implanted into my brain. But . . . all this would do is speed up the processing and free up my hands. The iPhone is part of my mind already . . . the world is not serving as a mere instrument for the mind. Rather, the relevant parts of the world have become parts of my mind. My iPhone is not my tool, or at least it is not wholly my tool. Parts of it have become parts of me.
David Chalmers
Foreword to Supersizing the Mind (2008) by Andy Clark
I spent the rest of that night lying on my bed in my room, with my eyes closed, looking inside my head. It was a relatively quiet night (Crow Town is never completely silent), and I was so used to the distant sounds of the street down below anyway — the raised voices, the muffled music, the revving engines and screeching tires of (probably stolen) cars — it was all just a nothing-noise to me. The flat was fairly peaceful, too — just the soft tap-tapping of Gram in her room, and the occasional whispered curse. I could smell the faint drift of cigar smoke from her room, and it was easy to imagine her hunched over her laptop, tapping away like crazy, with a small cigar smoking away in her mouth, the ash occasionally dropping onto her clothes, burning little holes in her shirt, her trousers . . . that’s what she’d be cursing about.
Anyway, it was quiet enough for me to just lie there in the darkness and try to make sense of the weird and scary cyber-world that was growing inside my head.
It was all too much for me at first. What I knew, what I sensed, what I had
“Yeah, yeah . . .”
The lift ting ed for the ground floor. The doors opened, I gave Jayden a final look, then stepped out. There was no one around. I quickly crossed over to the stairwell and started heading up the stairs.
I didn’t want to think about what I’d just done. Was it right? Was it wrong? How the hell had I done it? No . . . I couldn’t let myself think about it. Not yet, anyway. I just had to concentrate on climbing the stairs, getting my skin back to normal, and getting back home.
I didn’t consciously know how to get my skin back to normal, but by the time I’d reached the third floor, I could already feel it cooling down, and although there were no mirrors around to check my face, I could see that my hands looked like my hands again.
I thought about taking the lift the rest of the way, but I didn’t know if Jayden would still be in there or not, and I didn’t really want to see him again, so I just carried on up the stairs.
In the stairwell on the twentieth floor, three guys were slumped against the wall, puffing away on crack pipes. They were all about nineteen or twenty, and they were all totally wasted.
I had to step over them to get past.
“Excuse me,” I said. “I just need to —”
“Hey, fuck,” one of them slurred at me, reaching out a grimy hand. “Gimme your —”
I flicked at his hand, my head turning on the electric, and I gave him just enough of a shock to surprise him, maybe just sting him a little. He jerked his hand away, cursing sharply, and at the same time he dropped his pipe from the other hand. While he scrabbled around on the ground, desperately looking for his pipe — and simultaneously waggling his shocked fingers in the air — I stepped past him and climbed the last three flights to the twenty-third floor.
No matter how weird and scary this iPhone-in-the-brain stuff was — and, believe me, it was incredibly weird and scary — there was no doubt that it had its advantages. I just had to hope that the more I thought about it, the more I tried to rationalize it, the less weird and scary it would become.
Fat chance.
The iPhone has already taken over some of the central functions of my brain. It has replaced part of my memory, storing numbers and addresses that I once would have taxed my brain with. It harbors my desires . . . Friends joke that I should get the iPhone implanted into my brain. But . . . all this would do is speed up the processing and free up my hands. The iPhone is part of my mind already . . . the world is not serving as a mere instrument for the mind. Rather, the relevant parts of the world have become parts of my mind. My iPhone is not my tool, or at least it is not wholly my tool. Parts of it have become parts of me.
David Chalmers
Foreword to Supersizing the Mind (2008) by Andy Clark
I spent the rest of that night lying on my bed in my room, with my eyes closed, looking inside my head. It was a relatively quiet night (Crow Town is never completely silent), and I was so used to the distant sounds of the street down below anyway — the raised voices, the muffled music, the revving engines and screeching tires of (probably stolen) cars — it was all just a nothing-noise to me. The flat was fairly peaceful, too — just the soft tap-tapping of Gram in her room, and the occasional whispered curse. I could smell the faint drift of cigar smoke from her room, and it was easy to imagine her hunched over her laptop, tapping away like crazy, with a small cigar smoking away in her mouth, the ash occasionally dropping onto her clothes, burning little holes in her shirt, her trousers . . . that’s what she’d be cursing about.
Anyway, it was quiet enough for me to just lie there in the darkness and try to make sense of the weird and scary cyber-world that was growing inside my head.
It was all too much for me at first. What I knew, what I sensed, what I had
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