Mind
The Cognitive Aspect
~300,000 years ago — present
What had to happen in the mind before a thing could be made on purpose?
A made tool is a frozen intention: it requires holding a future shape in mind while acting on present matter. Technology is the externalization of memory and imagination — and once knowledge could live in objects and symbols outside the skull, it could outlast the body that held it.
01Exteriorized memory
Bernard Stiegler called this 'epiphylogenesis': evolution that proceeds not through genes but through artifacts. A hand-axe is a memory of how to make a hand-axe, readable by the next generation. With 100,000-year-old ochre crayons at Blombos Cave and notched bones that may count or track, the mind began to store itself outside itself — the precondition for every library, code-base, and model since.
02The symbol and the recipe
Composite tools — a stone point bound to a wooden shaft with resin — demand a recipe: a sequence of steps whose payoff comes only at the end. This is the same cognitive machinery as grammar and as planning. McLuhan saw every medium as an 'extension of man'; the first medium was the tool itself, and the first message was: this can be remembered, taught, and improved.
“To make a tool is to remember the future — to hold a shape that does not yet exist and impose it on what does.”
In short
- A tool stores the knowledge of its own making, teachable across generations.
- Composite tools require recipe-like planning — the same faculty as grammar.
- Stiegler: human evolution runs through artifacts, not only genes.