§1. The world is everything that is the case, Wittgenstein said, but in subsequent years it became evident to him that it was in fact greater than just this, that it consisted possibly primarily of what cannot ever be the case, that its structure is vernacular, a labyrinth, a manifold, and we cannot even gesture at an abstraction from which it all follows, except, perhaps our form of life.
§2. Another way to put it: the world is abundant in detail. We increase our receptivity to this detail by cultivating our perceptual capacities; by training ourselves to see, and knowing, in some sense, what to look for. The poet sees in a constellation something different from what the astronomer sees, from what the astrologer and anthropologist see.
§2.1. If we are not deliberate about this practice, our perception (and cognition at large) is likely to be captured and reconfigured by systems that perpetuate a status-quo in which we are crude consumers of goods, services, and information.
§3. The world must be seen first to be made: detail, or meaning, is imputed to its features by creative acts, acts of the imagination and of steely logic, physical and cognitive, conducted and interpreted within a community united by a set of interests or norms.
§4. What does it mean to cultivate our perception, to receive the abundant detail of the world? At a first pass: sensory attunement, and concept acquisition or refinement. The two are connected—e.g., we become sensitive for the first time to the sound of an instrument that we learned about from a textbook description—but they can be treated differently for our purpose, which is to study the tools or instruments that we may use in their pursuit.
§4.1. Consider prosthetics, like hearing aids, artificial limbs, spectacles even; these are straightforward augmentations of one's external senses.
§5. If cognition is computation then tools for thought are naturally computational aids; maybe you offload the entire operation onto them, or they make certain sub-computations possible that make the computation (or here, cognition) of something heretofore tiresome easy. In either case, the tool for thought is a tool for computation; we cannot conceive of it as contributing to our perception, nor to our thorough (in the Proustian sense of experiencing for the first time) recollection, because it's not clear that these are computational processes, or if they are, that the biological process (of say, recollection) can utilise external systems more-or-less interchangeably with internal systems (e.g., as long-term storage).
§5.1. Indeed, there is something significant that perceiving and recollecting share; I think Aristotle has more on this.
§5.2. This is why we find that history's great external memory systems are things like Lukasa boards, ornate, or well-decorated memory palaces, Songlines, the mnemosyne, epics and myths; they are not databases, or bureaucratic or administrative records.
§5.3. The connection might lie here: the concepts which we acquire, the sensitivities to features of the world that we develop, these are recorded in a sort of memory.
§6. So, what if seeing and recollecting are not computing? What is synthesis then? This, if anything, appears computational; there are instances of it that can be wholly realised in an artificial substrate—e.g., analogy discovery by looking at formal properties of theories. But: this doesn't mean that synthesis as it occurs in biological minds is necessarily computational, only that we know how to reconstruct aspects of it in a computational medium.