Melding Minds with Colleagues

Type: 
Budapest colloquium talks
Audience: 
Open to the Public
Building: 
Nador u. 15
Room: 
103
Tuesday, November 29, 2016 - 5:30pm
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Date: 
Tuesday, November 29, 2016 - 5:30pm to 7:00pm

The extended mind hypothesis (EM) claims that some of our mental states/processes extend outside our heads and into objects in our environment. To date, attention has focused on mental extension into otherwise non-mental artefacts (notebooks, diaries, iPhones). However, arguments for EM appear to support extension, not only into non-mental artefacts, but also into the minds of other people. Cognitive resources inside the head of your close colleagues appear, by the standards of EM, to be just as apt, if not more apt, to part of the realisation base of your mental life as anything going on inside your iPhone. In this paper, I examine whether and how arguments for EM -- arguments tailored for our relation to non-mental artefacts -- generalise to supporting extending our minds into the minds of others.