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Extended mind and cognitive enhancement: moral aspects of cognitive artifacts

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Abstract

This article connects philosophical debates about cognitive enhancement and situated cognition. It does so by focusing on moral aspects of enhancing our cognitive abilities with the aid of external artifacts. Such artifacts have important moral dimensions that are addressed neither by the cognitive enhancement debate nor situated cognition theory. In order to fill this gap in the literature, three moral aspects of cognitive artifacts are singled out: their consequences for brains, cognition, and culture; their moral status; and their relation to personal identity.

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Notes

  1. Notable exceptions are Donald Norman (1993, Ch. 10) and Andy Clark (2003, Ch. 7).

  2. This view is sometimes also referred to as 4E cognition, putting emphasis on the embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended nature of cognition. See Haugeland (1998), Kiverstein and Clark’s (2009) special issue of Topoi, Menary’s (2010a) special issue of this journal, or Ward and Stapleton (2012).

  3. This paper is not the place for an argument about the conditions of cognitive extension, but for discussion see (Sutton 2006; Menary 2010b; Sterelny 2010).

  4. Somewhat ironically, if Plato did not wrote down Socrates’ worries, we would most likely not know about it today.

  5. These are by no means the only properties relevant for our moral status. For an overview, see Jaworska and Tannenbaum (2013).

  6. But see Lynne Rudder Baker (2009) for a critical discussion of extended personhood.

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the Collective Cognition Team, particularly John Sutton, at the Centre for Cognition and its Disorders at Macquarie University for funding to write this paper. I also wish to thank Sadjad Soltanzadeh, Regina Fabry, and two anonymous reviewers for helpful feedback on an earlier version of this paper. This paper was presented at the 2015 Australasian Association of Philosophy conference held in Sydney. I like to thank the audience for their questions and feedback.

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  1. Department of Philosophy, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia

    Richard Heersmink

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Heersmink, R. Extended mind and cognitive enhancement: moral aspects of cognitive artifacts. Phenom Cogn Sci 16, 17–32 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-015-9448-5

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