Pii Telakivi

The emerging field of distributed memory has called attention to the memory resources spread outside of us – in our environment, social relations, embodied practices, and technological resources. In this paper, I attend to different ways of distributing, curating, and co-constituting one’s memory to and with extraindividual aids ranging from more traditional technologies to algorithmic personalisation and conversational AI companions. I defend a view that in relation to memory, conversational AI agents based on LLMs require their own category that differs both from traditional technologies and from other types of AI systems, such as algorithmic profiling systems. I suggest that they should be understood as quasi-social partners in a shared remembering process and that this can already be accomplished with existing conversational AI agents, such as HereAfter AI or Replika. To conclude, I discuss some of the risks associated with remembering with AI.

This chapter analyses the lively, ongoing debate at the intersection of philosophy of mind and philosophy of science about the causal–constitution distinction by going deeply into the concept of constitution. This analysis is necessary for answering two central critiques that have been raised against ECM, namely the objections based on the causal–constitution fallacy and the closely related cognitive bloat argument. This chapter shows that the external elements are constitutive parts of the experiences under scrutiny and not merely causally affecting them. The main argument is that rather than interpreting it in mechanistic terms, the causal–constitution distinction should be interpreted in diachronic terms when dealing with mental phenomena. When so depicted, the extension relation in ECM counts as constitutive.

This chapter sets the preconditions and limits for ECM. It distinguishes between four different levels of extension: momentary extension, integrated extension, prosthetic incorporation, and functional incorporation. The last of these is required for ECM: the external tool must be part of the transparent bodily point of view and under the sensorimotor control of the subject. Based on the notion of functional incorporation, a set of demarcation criteria (“the glue & trust criteria”) for ECM will be developed. They include quasi-transparency, sensorimotor control, ownership, sense of agency, and sense-making attitude. This chapter closes with a discussion of sensory substitution technology as a concrete example of functional incorporation and which fulfils the glue & trust criteria.

The first chapter provides an overview of the theoretical background of externalism and 4E-theories in present-day philosophy of mind and cognitive sciences. It also examines the central concepts, accounts, distinctions, and methodological questions that will be used and further developed in later chapters. It forges a path from Clark’s & Chalmers’s theory of Extended Mind (EM) to the position defended in this book, Extended Conscious Mind (ECM). In this chapter, this position is located at the top of third-wave externalism, and also as an attempt to bridge the hypotheses of extended mind and enactivism.

The second chapter presents three arguments for the position defended in this book. The general idea behind them is that by accepting three features of the 4E-framework, we need to accept ECM as well. The arguments build bridges from the hypothesis of extended cognition to ECM, from sensorimotor enactivism to ECM, and finally from the embodiment thesis to ECM. Most of the proponents of EM have not even considered the possibility of ECM, while some, most notably Andy Clark, have been arguing strictly against it. This chapter shows why his position is untenable and why accepting extended cognition leads to extended consciousness.

This chapter examines and answers four counter-arguments that have been set forth against ECM. They are (1) the argument from high bandwidth, (2) the argument from predictive processing, (3) the brain-in-a-vat thought experiment, and (4) the dream challenge. The first two counter-arguments aim to block the inference from EM to ECM, that is, the first argument for ECM presented in the second chapter of this book. The last two criticisms especially challenge the second argument for ECM (the inference from sensorimotor enactivism to ECM) but also the third argument (the inference from embodiment to ECM). However, this chapter shows that they are not successful in cutting off the inference relations of these arguments, and hence none of them refutes ECM.

In this paper, we ask how ‘cognitive extenders’, based on AI technology, affect their users’ status as moral agents and the moral evaluation of their actions. We study how ‘AI-extenders’ can either enhance or diminish their users’ moral agency. On the one hand, they can broaden the scope of agential features and on the other hand, they can undermine the agent’s autonomy and lead to decreased responsibility. Our focus is on moral agency and responsibility of the AI-extended human being as a hybrid, coupled system. Assuming standard conditions for responsible agency, we will look at specific cases where the extender would make a difference to the agent’s moral status. The thought-experimental extenders we are dealing with are enabled by already existing technologies. The obvious motivation behind the exercise is that these devices might be useful for people suffering from psychiatric conditions complicating the expression of their moral agency. We analyze the moral status of AI-extended agents as coupled systems and argue that the functioning of an AI-extender can make a difference to an agent’s fitness to be held morally responsible. This should be considered in the responsible design and development of AI-extenders.

This is a Festschrift in honour of Valtteri Arstila, a professor of theoretical philosophy at the University of Turku. The book is structured in three sections. The first two—‘Mind and Action’ and ‘Time and Temporal Experience’—include papers focussed on issues particularly close to Arstila's own research specialisation. The final section contains papers on various further philosophical issues. The first section, ‘Mind and Action’, collects together contributions on a variety of topics such as consciousness, content, agency and normativity; encompassing approaches from within analytic philosophy, phenomenology and the history of philosophy. The second section, ‘Time and Temporal Experience’, collects together papers on topics including the nature of time itself; of our experience of time and of historicity and temporality more broadly; approaching these issues from a variety of perspectives including historical approaches. The final section brings together papers that touch on issues within philosophy of science, logic, philosophy of language, political philosophy and more besides.

This book argues that conscious experience is sometimes extended outside the brain and body into certain kinds of environmental interaction and tool use. It shows that if one accepts that cognitive states can extend, one must also accept that consciousness can extend. The proponents of Extended Mind defend the former claim, but usually oppose the latter claim. The most important undertaking of this book is to show that this partition is not possible on pain of inconsistency. Pii Telakivi presents three arguments for the hypothesis of Extended Conscious Mind, examines and answers the most common counterarguments, and introduces a novel means to interpret and apply the concept of constitution. She also addresses the tensions between analytic philosophy of mind and enactivism, and builds a bridge between two different traditions: on the one hand, extended mind, and on the other, enactivism and embodied mind—and maintains that a unifying approach is necessary for a theory about extended consciousness.