This version of the paper was submitted to the journal Metaphilosophy as part of a special issue dealing with the philosophy of the Web. The definitive version of the paper will be made available at Abstract The rapid growth and penetration of the Web raises important questions about its effects, not just on our social activities, but also on the nature of our cognitive and epistemic profiles. ...

Where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin? The question invites two standard replies. Some accept the boundaries of skin and skull, and say that what is outside the body is outside the mind. Others are impressed by arguments suggesting that the meaning of our words ‘just ain’t in the head’, and hold that this externalism about meaning carries over into an externalism about mind. ...

The concept of the extended mind, as introduced by Clark and Chalmers (1998) was meant in part to move beyond the standard Cartesian idea that cognition is something that happens in a private mental space, “in the head.” Elsewhere (Gallagher 2011; Gallagher and Crisafi 2009), I’ve pursued a liberal interpretation of the extended mind, suggesting that we consider cognitive processes as constitut...

We develop complementary connections between McLuhan’s media ecology notion of media as ‘extensions of man’ and the Extended Mind Thesis of Andy Clark.

Mind-graphs define an associative-adaptive concept of managing information streams, like for example words within a conversation. Being composed of vertices (or cells; representing external stimuli like words) and undirected edges (or connections), mind-graphs adaptively reflect the strength of simultaneously occurring stimuli and allow a self-regulation through the interplay of an artificial ’...

One of the arguments for active externalism (also known as the extended mind thesis) is that if a process counts as cognitive when it is performed in the head, it should also count as cognitive when it is performed in the world. Consequently, mind extends into the world. I argue for a corollary: We sometimes perform actions in our heads that we usually perform in the world, so that the world le...

In the movie, Memento, the hero, Leonard, suffers from a form of anterograde amnesia that results in an inability to lay down new memories. Nonetheless, he sets out on a quest to find his wife’s killer, aided by the use of notes, annotated polaroids, and (for the most important pieces of information obtained) body tattoos. Using these resources he attempts to build up a stock of new beliefs and...