The question comes down to this: If materialism collapses, what will science look like? Will the people who are interested in science today continue to be so? Will the same people continue to dominate?

One thing for sure: A lot of things will come tumbling out in the wash.

*In my experience, the abortion issue has mostly been Catholic and other grannies vs. abortionists. If, like David Chalmers, you are inclined to take bets, bet on the grannies.

In The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain (public library), Annie Murphy Paul explores the most thrilling frontiers of this growing understanding, fusing a century of scientific studies with millennia of first-hand experience from the lives and letters of great artists, scientists, inventors, and entrepreneurs. Challenging our cultural inheritance of thinking that thinking takes place only inside the brain, she illuminates the myriad ways in which we “use the world to think” — from the sensemaking language of gestures that we acquire as babies long before we can speak concepts to the singular fuel that time in nature provides for the brain’s most powerful associative network.

Paul distills this recalibration of understanding:

Thinking outside the brain means skillfully engaging entities external to our heads — the feelings and movements of our bodies, the physical spaces in which we learn and work, and the minds of the other people around us — drawing them into our own mental processes. By reaching beyond the brain to recruit these “extra-neural” resources, we are able to focus more intently, comprehend more deeply, and create more imaginatively — to entertain ideas that would be literally unthinkable by the brain alone.