Learning Who We Are From The Tools We Use

In Google’s kinship with the mind, a group at Berkley is quoted:

“Our ap­proach in­di­cates how one can ob­tain nov­el mod­els of hu­man mem­o­ry by stu­dying the prop­er­ties of suc­cess­ful in­forma­t­ion-retrieval sys­tems, such as In­ter­net search en­gines,” the group wrote in the stu­dy, pub­lished in this mon­th’s is­sue of the re­search jour­nal Psy­cho­log­i­cal Sci­ence. The study al­so sug­gests brain sci­ence might help de­sign bet­ter search en­gines and data-retrieval sys­tems, they added. “These prob­lems are ac­tively be­ing ex­plored in com­put­er sci­ence,” they wrote, but “one might be equally likely to find good so­lu­tions by stu­dying the mind.”

I agree with studying our tools to understand better who we are, and I agree with studying ourselves to make better tools. However, I do not understand how the statement that 'the tools we made work very much in the same manner we think' is anything of worth - we made it, and we cannot make something of the mind that isn't like us in some way.

If I write a piece of software and then have someone say, 'Wow, it works like you seem to think', they would get beaten severely with a brow. But our tools say much about us. A hammer shows some of how we not only are manifested in a physical sense - it demonstrates that there is an intuitive understanding of leverage and that applying force to a smaller surface area allows it to concentrate the force in one area. When you start to consider why screws are used instead of nails, you learn more - imagine a world where computers were put together by hammers. We go further. Imagine a world where we create components to do our math - should we be surprised that the math used is the same as our own?

Should we be surprised if the indexing of data is done similar to the way we... already do it? And is that process the best?

We make what we know, and we know ourselves to some extent - so we make things that have human characteristics so that we can use them - something that will be coming up in a book review I've been sitting on.

We think what we are, but we are not defined by what we think. We create what we think. To expand the bubble of our own abilities, we have to look both inward and outward... and it worries me that we seem to have separate groups doing this. Maybe our tools have something to teach bureaucrats - and maybe that should be the lesson that educational institutions should be trying to implement in processes of their own studies.