Extending the Extended Mind

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.

Pii Telakivi is a post-doctoral researcher in Practical Philosophy at the University of Helsinki and was a Fulbright Finland Junior Scholar in the Department of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research focus lies on extended, embodied cognition and consciousness, and at the intersections between philosophy of mind, artificial intelligence and psychiatry.