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Distributed selves: personal identity and extended memory systems

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Abstract

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, I draw on recent empirical work in human-computer interaction, looking at lifelogging technologies in both healthcare and everyday contexts. I argue that personal identity can neither be reduced to psychological structures instantiated by the brain nor by biological structures instantiated by the organism, but should be seen as an environmentally-distributed and relational construct. In other words, the complex web of cognitive relations we develop and maintain with other people and technological artifacts partly determines our self. This view has conceptual, methodological, and normative implications: we should broaden our concepts of the self as to include social and artifactual structures, focus on external memory systems in the (empirical) study of personal identity, and not interfere with people’s distributed minds and selves.

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Notes

  1. The terms “self”, “personhood”, and “personal identity” are used interchangeably throughout this essay.

  2. Sometimes the phrase “4e cognition” is used, which is an acronym for embodied, embedded, extended, and enactive cognition.

  3. I am using the phrases “extended cognition” and “distributed cognition” more or less interchangeably in this paper, as both approaches claim that informational artifacts can be constitutive of a wider cognitive system, but there are differences between the two approaches. See Hutchins (2014) for an analysis of some of these differences in terms of examples, method, and explanatory scope.

  4. A reviewer pointed out that Locke’s original memory criterion focused on consciousness too. In fact, memory was Locke’s way of explaining the notion of temporally extended consciousness; memory makes the idea of a temporally extended consciousness fall within the experience-centered empiricist outlook. Many neo-Lockeans, including Schechtman, include non-occurrent states in their notion of psychological continuity.

  5. There are, of course, other capacities that are important for our practical identity such as our capacity for consciousness and emotions.

  6. If, for example, someone has a stroke or other kind of brain injury and loses part of one’s memory or language capacity, that would surely be a change to the person.

  7. A reviewer pointed out that emphasizing control over the contents of one’s lifelog can be interpreted as claiming that the locus of personhood is still brain-based. My view is that agency and the locus of personhood can be distributed across humans and cognitive artifacts such as SenseCam-generated lifelogs. I think agency is distributed because the SenseCam automatically takes pictures whose content we typically cannot change, but the human agent often has to edit the lifelog. So both components in the larger systems have some form of agency and the equilibrium may shift between the artifactual and biological components, depending on each specific case. Furthermore, in the typical extended mind cases (Clark and Chalmers 1998), agency is largely located in the biological organism. However, in larger distributed cognitive systems, for example Hutchins’ (1995) example of ship navigation, humans may not necessarily be the center and controller of distributed systems. For more discussion on this topic see Hutchins (2014).

  8. This is related to the problem of q-memory as outlined in Parfit (1984).

  9. These are important epistemological issues to further explore. They also tie in with the extended knowledge debate (e.g., Michaelian 2014), which has to do in part with the possibility of assigning credit to agents who rely on external cognitive resources for their epistemic accomplishments, including those are false.

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Neil Levy for helpful advice, Paul Smart and Robert Clowes for discussion on embodiment and the self, and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions.

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  1. Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia

    Richard Heersmink

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Heersmink, R. Distributed selves: personal identity and extended memory systems. Synthese 194, 3135–3151 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-016-1102-4

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