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Summary The notion of an extended self has recently gained attention in the literature. When theorists claim the self is extended, they mean that objects and structures in the environment can become part of the material supervenience base of the self. This means that the self is not a purely biological affair but is realised by human embodied brains interacting with environmental structures. There are different versions of the extended self in the recent literature. Most of these take inspiration from the extended mind to argue for an extended self. 
Introductions

Heersmink, R. (2020). Varieties of the extended self. Consciousness&Cognition, 85, 103001.

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  1. Group Minds and Natural Kinds.Robert D. Rupert - forthcoming - Avant: Trends in Interdisciplinary Studies.
    The claim is frequently made that structured collections of individuals who are themselves subjects of mental and cognitive states – such collections as courts, countries, and corporations – can be, and often are, subjects of mental or cognitive states. And, to be clear, advocates for this so-called group-minds hypothesis intend their view to be interpreted literally, not metaphorically. The existing critical literature casts substantial doubt on this view, at least on the assumption that groups are claimed to instantiate the same (...)
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  2. Why the Self Does Not Extend.Keith Raymond Harris - 2022 - Erkenntnis 87 (6):2645-2659.
    The defensibility of the extended mind thesis (EMT) is often thought to hinge on the possibility of extended selves. I argue that the self cannot extend and consider the ramifications of this finding, especially for EMT. After an overview of EMT and the supposed cruciality of the extended self to the defensibility of the former thesis, I outline several lines of argument in support of the possibility of extended selves. Each line of argument appeals to a different account of diachronic (...)
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  3. Preserving narrative identity for dementia patients: Embodiment, active environments, and distributed memory.Richard Heersmink - 2022 - Neuroethics 15 (8):1-16.
    One goal of this paper is to argue that autobiographical memories are extended and distributed across embodied brains and environmental resources. This is important because such distributed memories play a constitutive role in our narrative identity. So, some of the building blocks of our narrative identity are not brain-bound but extended and distributed. Recognising the distributed nature of memory and narrative identity, invites us to find treatments and strategies focusing on the environment in which dementia patients are situated. A second (...)
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  4. Distributed Cognition, Neuroprostheses and their Implications to Non-Physicalist Theories of Mind.Jean Gové - 2021 - Forum Philosophicum: International Journal for Philosophy 26 (1):123-142.
    This paper investigates the notion of ‘distributed cognition’—the idea that entities external to one’s organic brain participate in one’s overall cognitive functioning—and the challenges it poses to the notion of personhood. Related to this is also a consideration of the ever-increasing ways in which neuroprostheses replace and functionally replicate organic parts of the brain. However, the literature surrounding such issues has tended to take an almost exclusively physicalist approach. The common assumption is that, given that non-physicalist theories (chiefly, dualism, and (...)
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  5. Materialised Identities: Cultural Identity, Collective Memory, and Artifacts.Richard Heersmink - 2021 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology:1-17.
    This essay outlines one way to conceptualise the relation between cultural identity, collective memory, and artifacts. It starts by characterising the notion of cultural identity as our membership to cultural groups and briefly explores the relation between cultural and narrative identity (section 2). Next, it presents how human memory is conceptualised on an individual and collective level (section 3) and then distinguishes between small-scale and large-scale collective memory (section 4). Having described cultural identity and collective memory, it argues that cultural (...)
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  6. Group minds as extended minds.Keith Raymond Harris - 2020 - Philosophical Explorations 23 (3):1-17.
    Despite clear overlap between the study of extended minds and the study of group minds, these research programs have largely been carried out independently. Moreover, whereas proponents of the extended mind thesis straightforwardly advocate the view that there are, literally, extended mental states, proponents of the group mind thesis tend to be more circumspect. Even those who advocate for some version of the thesis that groups are the subjects of mental states often concede that this thesis is true only in (...)
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  7. Extended mind and artifactual autobiographical memory.Richard Heersmink - 2020 - Mind and Language 36:1-15.
    In this paper, I describe how artifacts and autobiographical memory are integrated into new systemic wholes, allowing us to remember our personal past in a more reliable and detailed manner. After discussing some empirical work on lifelogging technology, I elaborate on the dimension of autobiographical dependency, which is the degree to which we depend on an object to be able to remember a personal experience. When this dependency is strong, we integrate information in the embodied brain and in an object (...)
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  8. Varieties of the extended self.Richard Heersmink - 2020 - Consciousness and Cognition 85:103001.
    This article provides an overview and analysis of recent work on the extended self, demonstrating that the boundaries of selves are fluid, shifting across biological, artifactual, and sociocultural structures. First, it distinguishes the notions of minimal self, person, and narrative self. Second, it surveys how philosophers, psychologists, and cognitive scientists argue that embodiment, cognition, emotion, consciousness, and moral character traits can be extended and what that implies for the boundaries of selves. It also reviews and responds to various criticisms and (...)
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  9. Narrative niche construction: Memory ecologies and distributed narrative identities.Richard Heersmink - 2020 - Biology and Philosophy 35 (5):1-23.
    Memories of our personal past are the building blocks of our narrative identity. So, when we depend on objects and other people to remember and construct our personal past, our narrative identity is distributed across our embodied brains and an ecology of environmental resources. This paper uses a cognitive niche construction approach to conceptualise how we engineer our memory ecology and construct our distributed narrative identities. It does so by identifying three types of niche construction processes that govern how we (...)
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  10. Extended mind, functionalism and personal identity.Miljana Milojevic - 2020 - Synthese 197 (5):2143-2170.
    In this paper, I address one recent objection to Andy Clark and David Chalmers’s functionalist argument for the extended mind thesis. This objection is posed by Kengo Miyazono, who claims that they unjustifiably identify the original cognitive subject with the hybrid one in order to reach their conclusion about the mind extension. His attack consists of three steps: distinguishing hybrid from traditional cognitive subjects based on the systems reply originally directed at Searle’s Chinese room argument; pointing out that the conclusion (...)
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  11. Sobre a identidade pessoal estendida e o status de pessoas dos ciborgues naturais: Uma análise a partir do caso extremo dos portadores de Alzheimer.Ronaldo de Oliveira Ramos - 2020 - Dissertation, Universidade Federal de Mato Grosso (Ufmt)
    Based on questions about herself, the character Motoko, in the film Ghost in the Shell, wonders about her continuity over time and her human condition and as a person. Similarly, it is possible to entertain some scenarios in which the addition of elements external to the body produces a similar tension with respect to human persons. One of these scenarios is that of natural cyborgs, as understood by Andy Clark. Based on the notion of natural cyborgs, through the coupling of (...)
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  12. ¿Hasta dónde llega el esquema corporal? Esquema corporal extendido.Gerónimo Rangel - 2020 - Anuario Humanitas 1 (47):103-133.
    This work aims to uphold that a subject‘s body schema can be extended beyond their physical body, that is, that external artifacts, such as tools, can be a part of the said body schema. To support this thesis a new definition of ―body schema‖ is proposed, one that starts by pointing out that body schema as a sub-personal sensorimotor is a necessary condition, albeit not a sufficient one, besides pursuing to include environmental interactions as a sufficient condition. Together, these elements (...)
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  13. Whose (Extended) Mind Is It, Anyway?Keith Harris - 2019 - Erkenntnis 86 (6):1599-1613.
    Presentations of the extended mind thesis are often ambiguous between two versions of that thesis. According to the first, the extension of mind consists in the supervenience base of human individuals’ mental states extending beyond the skull and into artifacts in the outside world. According to a second interpretation, human individuals sometimes participate in broader cognitive systems that are themselves the subjects of extended mental states. This ambiguity, I suggest, contributes to several of the most serious criticisms of the extended (...)
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  14. The best memories: Identity, narrative, and objects.Richard Heersmink & Christopher Jade McCarroll - 2019 - In Timothy Shanahan & Paul Smart (eds.), Blade Runner 2049: A Philosophical Exploration. Routledge. pp. 87-107.
    Memory is everywhere in Blade Runner 2049. From the dead tree that serves as a memorial and a site of remembrance (“Who keeps a dead tree?”), to the ‘flashbulb’ memories individuals hold about the moment of the ‘blackout’, when all the electronic stores of data were irretrievably erased (“everyone remembers where they were at the blackout”). Indeed, the data wiped out in the blackout itself involves a loss of memory (“all our memory bearings from the time, they were all damaged (...)
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  15. Thinking with things: An embodied enactive account of mind–technology interaction.Anco Peeters - 2019 - Dissertation, University of Wollongong
    Technological artefacts have, in recent years, invited increasingly intimate ways of interaction. But surprisingly little attention has been devoted to how such interactions, like with wearable devices or household robots, shape our minds, cognitive capacities, and moral character. In this thesis, I develop an embodied, enactive account of mind--technology interaction that takes the reciprocal influence of artefacts on minds seriously. First, I examine how recent developments in philosophy of technology can inform the phenomenology of mind--technology interaction as seen through an (...)
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  16. The Pre-reflective Situational Self.Robert W. Clowes & Klaus Gärtner - 2018 - Topoi 39 (3):623-637.
    It is often held that to have a conscious experience presupposes having some form of implicit self-awareness. The most dominant phenomenological view usually claims that we essentially perceive experiences as our own. This is the so called “mineness” character, or dimension of experience. According to this view, mineness is not only essential to conscious experience, it also grounds the idea that pre-reflective self-awareness constitutes a minimal self. In this paper, we show that there are reasons to doubt this constituting role (...)
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  17. The narrative self, distributed memory, and evocative objects.Richard Heersmink - 2018 - Philosophical Studies 175 (8):1829-1849.
    In this article, I outline various ways in which artifacts are interwoven with autobiographical memory systems and conceptualize what this implies for the self. I first sketch the narrative approach to the self, arguing that who we are as persons is essentially our (unfolding) life story, which, in turn, determines our present beliefs and desires, but also directs our future goals and actions. I then argue that our autobiographical memory is partly anchored in our embodied interactions with an ecology of (...)
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  18. The narrative self, distributed memory, and evocative objects.Richard Heersmink - 2018 - Philosophical Studies 175 (8):1829-1849.
    In this article, I outline various ways in which artifacts are interwoven with autobiographical memory systems and conceptualize what this implies for the self. I first sketch the narrative approach to the self, arguing that who we are as persons is essentially our life story, which, in turn, determines our present beliefs and desires, but also directs our future goals and actions. I then argue that our autobiographical memory is partly anchored in our embodied interactions with an ecology of artifacts (...)
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  19. Agency and Embodiment: Groups, Human–Machine Interactions, and Virtual Realities.Johannes Himmelreich - 2018 - Ratio 31 (2):197-213.
    This paper develops a taxonomy of kinds of actions that can be seen in group agency, human–machine interactions, and virtual realities. These kinds of actions are special in that they are not embodied in the ordinary sense. I begin by analysing the notion of embodiment into three separate assumptions that together comprise what I call the Embodiment View. Although this view may find support in paradigmatic cases of agency, I suggest that each of its assumptions can be relaxed. With each (...)
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  20. Distributed selves: Personal identity and extended memory systems.Richard Heersmink - 2017 - Synthese 194 (8):3135–3151.
    This paper explores the implications of extended and distributed cognition theory for our notions of personal identity. On an extended and distributed approach to cognition, external information is under certain conditions constitutive of memory. On a narrative approach to personal identity, autobiographical memory is constitutive of our diachronic self. In this paper, I bring these two approaches together and argue that external information can be constitutive of one’s autobiographical memory and thus also of one’s diachronic self. To develop this claim, (...)
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  21. Sharing the blame: Implications of the hypothesis of extended cognition for personal identity and ethics.Jessica Swallow - 2013 - Dissertation, University of Exeter
    The hypothesis of extended cognition supposes that internal and external vehicles of cognition should be understood as being on a cognitive par; I propose that this requires that these vehicles should be treated as being on an ethical par. Further, I propose that the hypothesis entails extended personal identity, which enables us to make claims about the possibility of distributed and extended moral responsibility.
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  22. Locked-in Syndrome and BCI - Towards an Enactive Approach to the Self.Miriam Kyselo - 2011 - Neuroethics 6 (3):579-591.
    It has been argued that Extended Cognition (EXT), a recently much discussed framework in the philosophy of cognition, would serve as the theoretical basis to account for the impact of Brain Computer Interfaces (BCI) on the self and life of patients with Locked-in Syndrome (LIS). In this paper I will argue that this claim is unsubstantiated, EXT is not the appropriate theoretical background for understanding the role of BCI in LIS. I will critically assess what a theory of the extended (...)
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  23. Extended cognition, personal responsibility, and relational autonomy.Mason Cash - 2010 - Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 9 (4):645-671.
    The Hypothesis of Extended Cognition (HEC)—that many cognitive processes are carried out by a hybrid coalition of neural, bodily and environmental factors—entails that the intentional states that are reasons for action might best be ascribed to wider entities of which individual persons are only parts. I look at different kinds of extended cognition and agency, exploring their consequences for concerns about the moral agency and personal responsibility of such extended entities. Can extended entities be moral agents and bear responsibility for (...)
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  24. Content externalism and the epistemic conception of the self.Brie Gertler - 2007 - Philosophical Issues 17 (1):37-56.
    Our fundamental conception of the self seems to be, broadly speaking, epistemic: selves are things that have thoughts, undergo experiences, and possess reasons for action and belief. In this paper, I evaluate the consequences of this epistemic conception for the widespread view that properties like thinking that arthritis is painful are relational features of the self.
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