I ♥ Google

I didn’t understand something in Andy Clark’s forthcoming paper on Memento and the Extended Mind. The background is that Clark is talking about what conditions an external (to the brain) system must satisfy before we count them as part of our mind.

bq. (2) That any information thus retrieved be more-or-less automatically endorsed. It should not usually be subject to critical scrutiny (unlike the opinions of other people, for example). It should be deemed about as trustworthy as something retrieved clearly from biological memory.

bq. …Mobile access to Google would not [count -] it would fail condition (2).

Does Clark really not more-or-less automatically endorse what he finds on Google? This kind of radical scepticism seems plausible in principle, but it must be very hard to go about ordinary business that way.

Slightly more seriously, mobile access to Google is just about the coolest thing ever invented. I can’t use the old cliche here because it really is better than sliced bread. There’s just nothing quite like having semi-reliable information on any topic you can think of just at your fingertips.