Abstract
This chapter sketches and explicates the thorny debate on personal identity. Here is where I present the main thesis of the book, namely the Externalist Account of the personal identity problem and the Extended Self View. Basically put, the view says that one’s autobiographical memory or consciousness is neither necessary nor sufficient in accounting for one’s own identity; instead it is external factors, such as testimony of one’s mother, that testifies to one’s own identity, though these factors do not constitute any necessary and sufficient conditions either. In other words, identity cannot be fully secured, but can only be accounted for pragmatically. The chapter provides a detailed and extended argument for the view. Furthermore, I discuss the important role that Clark’s and Chalmers’ Extended Mind Thesis plays in my argument. The idea is that, as the mind can be extended outside of the body, it can certainly extend to the cyberreality of the online world; hence the online and offline selves are extensions of each other.
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Hongladarom, S. (2016). The Extended Self View. In: The Online Self. Philosophy of Engineering and Technology, vol 25. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-39075-8_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-39075-8_3
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