Environ-minds. The Twofold Dimension of Human Cultural Evolution

This article aims to propose a new look on the distinction between mind, environment and culture. While the first of these has mostly been understood as an interior and individual dimension of experience both by common sense and modern philosophy, an evolutionary and ecological standpoint could help us rethink the practices, information and technologies forming the niches of Homo sapiens societies both as the ecological horizon of our actions and as collective and shared minds possessing an external and partially detached existence. Every human being participates in these collective ‘exteriorities’, extends his body through tools, organizes his behaviour with respect to others and absorbs the social context of his technologies, languages, institutions, values in a partial and unique standpoint, that is an individual ‘interiority’.

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