In a previous blog, I introduced a concept of human cognitive functioning (Extended Mind Theory, ‘EMT’) that is theoretically plausible, useful in explaining our day-to-day activity, and ethical insofar as it can supply the foundations for thinking through notions of disability and practical routes to achieving equality. There, I started to indicate precisely why plans for the transformation and governance of our social and physical environment – i.e. social and economic policy – should be updated to reflect this model of human activity.

In this blog, I want to explore how an ‘extended view’ of human minds can also help us engage with contemporary topics such as the place of Big Tech in our lives.

To retread some ground: EMT cuts deep into our sense of self – specifically the boundaries of the self. If our minds are not bound by skin and skull, but are the product of ongoing bodily-environmental-technological feedback loops, then in important ways our selves are not one-to-one commensurate with our individual biological organism and its brain. This open relationship with an ‘outside’ means that EMT has important implications for our environment and technologies themselves (now that parts of this ‘external’ infrastructure are deeply integrated into our cognition).

Let’s take an everyday example from Chalmers:

If someone steals my smartphone, we typically think of this as theft. But if the extended-mind hypothesis is right, it’s more akin to assault. If the phone is part of me, then interfering with the phone is interfering with my person. (2023, p. 301)

Have you ever lost your phone and felt like your memories or some of your capacity to navigate the world have been taken away too? That’s because in a very real sense they have: we are structurally coupled to our phones. Chalmers writes in Reality+ that ‘at some point, our social and legal norms may need to change to acknowledge the extension of our minds’ (2023, p. 301). Extended cognition entails that certain things, and not just our bodies, are reasonably conceived as part of our ‘selves’ – the ‘reciprocal relationship’ that we constantly navigate in the world.

But in the smartphone example there is something else – or some set of actors – that Clark and Chalmers don’t reckon with: the various companies that determine what our phone is – and does – in the first place. Our phones and laptops have for a long time been accurately described as ‘tracking devices’ as much as personal tools (see McChesney’s excellent book from 2013 on this and more). The tech companies of the platform economy are reliant on keeping the data flowing and our digital interfaces as frictionless as possible; this means maintaining a large amount of control over our devices, in terms of information extraction and our navigation of their functionalities. As Jeremy Gilbert and Alex Williams note in their recent book Hegemony Now (2021), the obvious sign that Silicon Valley is one of the most dominant groups globally is the fact that everyone has a smartphone, which many of us consult every few minutes. In EMT language, this means that everyone is cognitively coupled with these phones and thus we have in some sense outsourced functions of our mind with, and into, these devices: notably memory (phone numbers), navigation (Apple’s Maps or Google Maps), communication and so on. We are extending our minds – or key functions of our minds – into parts of the world that are owned, monitored and (in key ways) manipulated, by a set of actors who likely have their own, independent material interests.

Let’s consider a contrast for a moment. If we adopted a non-extended (‘normal’) concept of mind – the traditional liberal notion of an individual subject who is affected at arms-length by external stimuli – then this situation may or may not be troubling: we “choose” to buy into the platform economy for convenience and we have an element of irreducible agency when it comes to how we process information that we are confronted with on our screens, and so on. We might consider the saturation of information that the mind observes to be ‘too much’, or the content to be so relentless that the independent mind can’t help but be affected, but it is still an open question.

But if we accept that this concept of mind is outdated and if we accept that cognitive processes traverse brain, body and our tools, and that we often ‘structurally couple’ with cognitive devices such as calculators, notepads, smartphones and laptops, then such external control and manipulation is a much bigger ethical issue. What does it mean to say that I pay a monthly rent to access part of my (extended) mind – as I do when I sign a two-year contract for a Google phone? Or to say that this part of my mind is also populated with adverts that I see on a daily basis? Should I have a say in how my extended mind is designed, and what functions it should have?

It is all the more urgent that we carry out this kind of (re)thinking of our minds (and their external hardwares) when you consider that the tech industry is no doubt already way ahead of us – conceiving of new ways to embed devices into our day to day mind operations. ‘Wearables’ (bits of data accumulating and transmitting tech that are strapped to parts of our body) are perhaps the most obvious candidate for devices which we could in theory (and in practice) become dependent on as part of our day to day routine. Big tech companies are already, in effect, adopting an extended concept of mind to capture our memories, experiences, habits and communications and translate these into data for profit and for (consumer) behaviour manipulation.

Political philosophy, or topics such as theories of culture, power and global capitalism, are not Chalmers’ and Clark’s specialisms – and they admit this. It is revealing, for example, in the way Chalmers uses Google as an example here:

It is true that if [technological memory] augmentation is taken away, we may remember less with our brains than we did before. Once we have books around, we have less need to commit ideas to our biological memory. Similarly, in the age of Google, there’s no need to remember addresses and phone numbers, so that if Google is taken away we may know less. But something like this is true for almost every technology. Once we came to rely on cars, our capacity for walking or running diminished. Heating technology has made us less practised at withstanding the cold. If someone took away our books, computers, cars, and furnaces, we’d be at a loss. But does this mean that technologies are a bad thing? Books, computers, cars, and furnaces are a central part of our lives, and for the most part, they’ve made us better off, not worse. The same goes for writing and the internet. (2023, p. 300)

He doesn’t acknowledge that while the search engine of Google is a (very common) technology like any other, it is also not the same as roads, heating and books or the internet itself, insofar as it is a private company that continuously benefits financially from our use of it (plus all that such a relationship entails) whilst those other things do not. It is more similar to a private gas company that extracts a rent to provide us heating (although we might not have a meaningful choice as to the provider); in Google’s case it extracts a rent to provide cognitive bandwidth: a quite different – and closer to home – prospect.

Of course, the same argument above applies in our physical navigation of the world. If the physical infrastructure of the town or city – part of our extended bodies and minds – is determined or outright owned by private companies, then it follows that these firms have a controlling lever over how we develop cognitively and physically. 

I want to make it clear that an extended/integrated position on these issues does not entail a resurgent humanism – where we have to draw an (inevitably shaky) line around what we define as ‘authentically’ human, perhaps to ward off technological ‘violations’ of our boundaries. We are, to repeat, natural-born cyborgs: the question is not whether to technologically integrate, but in what ways and to what ends.