Abstract
The extended mind thesis provides influential arguments for discussing what mind and cognition are. The author suggests an analogy between the extended mind thesis and a so-called extended body thesis, with particular respect to new web technologies and web tools connected to health care. If one accepts the three main principles which characterize what extends the mind to make it something cognitive, one might wonder if similar principles are valid for a new vision of the body, which is extended by interactive health web technologies or by everything that may involve a bodily “active iconic representation”. Future developments in this field of research, together with the power of web-social interaction and the use of statistical big data, leads to a new vision of the body in which humans will become “virtual cyborgs”, with the body modified somewhat by the real time flux of elaborated and user-oriented data. In this perspective, boundaries between what cognition is and what is not could change, as well as boundaries between the mind and body could become more blurred.
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Notes
- 1.
For a discussion see Clark (2010).
- 2.
A similar criticism involving the model of niche construction in which cognitive tools are used to scaffold the intelligent action is in Sterelny (2010).
- 3.
There is a fourth “arguable” criterion involving consciousness, but it can be considered more disputable. See Rupert (2004).
- 4.
See Gallagher (2005) for a historical reconstruction of these two notions.
- 5.
See for example the MakeHuman Project at http://www.makehumancommunity.org (retrieved on June 19, 2018).
- 6.
See Ash et al. (2007) for an example of this sort of issues in computerized medicine.
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Bianchini, F. (2020). Virtually Extending the Bodies with (Health) Technologies. In: Bertolaso, M., Sterpetti, F. (eds) A Critical Reflection on Automated Science. Human Perspectives in Health Sciences and Technology, vol 1. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25001-0_11
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