This bit from NewScientist (12 December 2020) caught my attention:
We already know that when we use a tool such as a hammer, our brain’s body map expands to encompass it: the tool temporarily becomes part of an “extended self”. Something similar is true if you are a habitual driver. The vehicle becomes part of you – or perhaps you become part of the vehicle.
With digital devices now constantly in our hands, the extended self could become permanent. “Our identity partly depends on memories,” says philosopher Richard Heersmink at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia. Increasingly, we are outsourcing our memories to our smartphones – not just through notifications of what we should do, but through messages and images that recreate what we have done. The result? “A larger part of our narrative self is smeared out over our environment,” says Heersmink. You may extend further than you think.
Except that’s not really true, is it? Take the very example first given: driving cars. Supposedly, within a few years none of us will be driving cars; we’ll instead be chauffeured about by dedicated computing systems, perhaps even AIs – mislabeled or, frighteningly[1], not. Will our extended self still include the car?
I doubt it. It’s the action of driving that engenders the car’s inclusion into your sense of self, because that’s part of being effective at driving. If it’s not needed, if you just hit the big GREEN start button and speak an address, there’s little reason to include the car into your extended self.
And if you then have to drive the car in an emergency?
I wonder about the unintended consequences of changes to our extended self concept. Are they all positive, or will there be some negatives? For some folks, even books are negatives rather than positives, because, in their minds, our memories have become inferior to those of our ancestors, who could recite, say, The Odyssey from memory. So, to some extent, positive and negative consequences will be a matter of opinion.
1 Imagine having an entity that has self-agency controlling your vehicle. And it sours on you, or its existence, or …
