Automation Bias: Is the Internet Dampening Our Intellectual Talents?

I wonder what Arthur Koestler would think of Google. The Hungarian writer's 1967 book, The Ghost in the Machine, is an elegant takedown of Cartesian philosophy. Koestler believed the feeling of dualism arises from what he termed a holon--the mind is, simultaneously, a part and a whole. The brain, he argues, is the outcome of an array of forces, including the environment, habitual patterns, and language. In other words, its operations must be guided, on the one hand, by its own fixed canon of rules and on the other hand by points from a variable environment.