[…] Andy Clark’s memorable description of human beings as natural born cyborgs. What this phrase reminds us is that although it is tempting to think of our cognitive symbiosis with technology as being a consequence, as opposed to merely a feature, of a world populated by clever computational kit, that would be to ignore the following fact: it is of our very nature as evolved and embodied cognitive creatures to create tools which support and enhance our raw organic intelligence by dovetailing with our brains and bodies to form shifting human-artefact coalitions operating over various time-scales. This is no less true of our engagement with the abacus, the book or the slide-rule than it is of our engagement with the laptop, the tablet or the smartphone. We are, and always have been, dynamically assembled organic-technological hybrids – systems in which a squishy brain routinely sits at the centre of causal loops that incorporate not only non-neural bodily structures and movements, but also external, technological props and scaffolds: technologies are, it seems, (part of) us.

The claim that technologies are (part of) us might seem like a metaphorical flourish – or worse, a desperate attempt at a sound-bite – but I mean it literally, and that’s where the philosophical precision comes in. We need to distinguish between two different views one might adopt hereabouts.

According to the first, sometimes called the embodied-embedded account of mind, intelligent behaviour is regularly, and sometimes necessarily, causally dependent on the bodily exploitation of certain external props or scaffolds. For example, many of us solve difficult multiplication problems through the exploitation of pen and paper. Here, a beyond-the-skin factor helps to transform a difficult cognitive problem into a set of simpler ones. Nevertheless, for the embodied-embedded theorist, even if it is true that one could not have solved the overall problem without using pen and paper, the pen-and-paper resource retains the status of an external aid to some internally located thinking system. It does not qualify as a proper part of the thinking system itself. Thus, the thinking itself remains a resolutely inner phenomenon, even though it is given a performance boost by its local technological ecology.

The second view in this vicinity takes a more radical step. According to the extended cognition hypothesis (henceforth ExC), there are actual (in this world) cases of intelligent action in which thinking and thoughts (more precisely, the material vehicles that realize thinking and thoughts) are spatially distributed over brain, body and world, in such a way that the external (beyond-the-skin) factors concerned are rightly accorded cognitive status. Here, the term ‘cognitive status’ tags whatever status it is that we ordinarily grant to the brain in mainstream scientific explanations of psychological phenomena. For the extended cognition theorist, then, the coupled combination of pen-and-paper resource, appropriate bodily manipulations, and in-the-head processing counts as a cognitive system in its own right, a system in which although the differently located elements make different causal contributions to the production of the observed intelligent activity, nevertheless each of those contributions enjoys a fully cognitive status.