Introduction Over the last quarter of the twentieth century, an orthodoxy of sorts had gelled in the philosophy of mind around a kind of psychological externalism, the idea that some mental states individuate sensitively to extra-cranial factors. More recently, two trends of thought have departed from this young orthodoxy in opposite directions. On the one hand, a cluster of ideas captured in s...

I introduce the seven papers in this special issue, by Andy Clark, Jérôme Dokic, Richard Menary, Jenann Ismael, Sue Campbell, Doris McIlwain, and Mark Rowlands. This paper explains the motivation for an alliance between the sciences of memory and the extended mind hypothesis. It examines in turn the role of worldly, social, and internalized forms of scaffolding to memory and cognition, and also...

We argue that the significance of the spatial boundary in autopoiesis has been overstated. It has the important task of distinguishing a living system as a unity in space but should not be seen as playing the additional role of delimiting the processes that make up the autopoietic system. We demonstrate the relevance of this to a current debate about the compatibility of the extended mind hypot...

Organisms across species use the strategy of generating structures in their environment to lower cognitive complexity. Examples include pheromones, markers, color codes, etc. We provide a model of how such structures originate, and present a simulation where organisms with only reactive behavior learn, within their lifetime, to add such structures to their world to lower cognitive load. This im...

theory of mind Becomes efficient at theory of mind and has abstract theory of an extended self, thus cantheory of an extended self, thus can now imagine the futurechoice situation for the extended self of another