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EXTENDED MEMORY
Robert W. Clowes

1. A new technological ecology of memory?

In the early 1990s, Merlin Donald provided an agenda-setting approach to external memory
when he distinguished between biological memory that resides within the brain, and external
memory that

may reside in a number of different external stores, including visual and electronic
storage systems, as well as culturally transmitted memories that reside in other individ-
uals. The key feature is that it is external to the biological memory of a given person.
(Donald 1991: 308)

Donald argued that it is external memory, not our biological capacities, that is responsible for
all of our complex cultural achievements, and makes us human.
Throughout the 1990s, researchers, prompted by Edwin Hutchins’ analyses of Distributed
Cognition (Hutchins 1995) and Andy Clark’s situated/embodied (Clark 1997) and then
extended mind views (Clark and Chalmers 1998), pointed toward a need for the human
mind to be understood not as an individual biological entity, but instead as inseparable from
and deeply reliant upon a background of cultural activities and material culture. On distrib-
uted, extended, and embedded theories of cognition, our cognitive life is essentially bound
up with culture, other people and especially material culture beyond the biological body.
This perspective raises questions about why and how we develop and recruit any particular
cognitive tools, as well as what the limits and nature of the effects of material culture may be
on the workings of our minds.
These questions are posed with new urgency by the way the twenty-first century confronts
us with a host of new digital media technologies which are rapidly restructuring our cognitive
habits and abilities. This new regime of extended memory technology, dubbed “E-memory”
(Bell and Gemmell 2009; Clowes 2013), is archetypally mediated through an array of ever-
present mobile and wearable devices such as smartphones and tablets. These devices connect
us to cloud technology: the now ubiquitous Internet where massive data warehouses accessed by
wireless Internet technology provide a vast array of highly personalized informational services.

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These services are often anchored to individual profiles which store and provide personalized
information while supporting and tracking our every action.
Which memory functions might this new technology effect? Sellen and Whittaker (2010)
note that E-memory can support and perhaps replicate a variety of human memory func-
tions including the five Rs of recollecting, reminiscing, retrieving, reflecting and remembering
intention. This last, remembering intention, or prospective memory is already widely imple-
mented in a host of gadgetry that prompt and regulate our actions, such as the incorporated
calendar, planning and alarm functions of applications such as Google Calendar or Microsoft
Outlook (see Smart et al. 2017). Such applications often now reside in the cloud and interact
with us through our mobile and wearable devices. They form an ever-present accompaniment
that many of us constantly interact with and rely upon to structure our lives. We can view this
technology as an externalization of existing cognitive functions. But does it also represent a
replacement of existing cognitive functions? Might it degrade our biological and/or autono-
mous abilities? Or is it a new part of ourselves? Might the new regime of technology actually
enhance some of our cognitive abilities?
To tackle these questions, in Section 2, we discuss some of the properties of the new
E-memory systems concentrating on totality, autonomy, social entanglement, and incorporabil-
ity. We discuss ways in which they contrast and complement biological memory. In Section 3,
we introduce Wegner’s framework for analysing how memory is socially distributed amongst
human beings: transactive memory. We discuss how some have used this framework to analyse
human/technological systems, and one controversial claim that the Internet is a “supernormal
stimulus” disrupting normal human memory distribution. Section 4 examines the Extended
Mind (EM) hypothesis which suggests that external resources may count as parts of our minds.
EM offers the theoretical possibility that even if we come to replace many of our biologi-
cal memory capacities with artificial ones, this may not entail that we are thereby cognitively
diminished. It is clear that external memory systems embody different properties from bio-
logical systems. One major difference is that biological memory is highly reconstructive. We
review the discussion over whether such “fine-grained” biological differences are the most use-
ful for developing theories of mind. Section 5 returns to how we should understand ourselves
as agents against the background of cloud technology using this deepened theoretical apparatus.
It attempts to address whether and how our heavy reliance on a new regime of E-memory may
change our biological capacities, our cognitive abilities and nature as agents.
In so doing, we take on important philosophical questions that intersect with the increas-
ing importance of external memory in (especially) individual human lives, namely: Is extended
memory really memory? What is the nature of the interaction between Extended Memory and
Biological Memory? Might our usage of this new regime of memory diminish or even poten-
tially enhance our existing biological memory and our wider cognitive abilities?

2. E-memory, complementarity and practical incorporation

Donald (1991) suggests the deep underlying tendency of extended memory technologies has
been to make it possible to remember that which our unenhanced biological systems would
otherwise forget. The history and pre-history of regimes of external memory technology indi-
cate that they do not tend simply to duplicate our biological memory profiles. On the contrary,
as the archaeological record shows us, we seem to build extended cognitive systems that func-
tion to circumvent some of the fragilities of our native biological systems and innovate beyond
their limitations (Malafouris 2013).

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John Sutton notes that tools are recruited, not because they duplicate biological cognitive
functions, but because they offer something different. Sutton’s complementarity principle
suggests that

In extended cognitive systems, external states and processes need not mimic or repli-
cate the formats, dynamics or functions of inner states and processes. Rather, different
components of the overall (enduring or temporary) system can play quite different
roles and have different properties while coupling in collective and complementary
contributions to flexible thinking and acting.
(Sutton 2010: 194)

External resources will tend to be incorporated when they offer functions that our unenhanced
brains cannot.
E-memory devices afford cognitive properties which are arguably very different from previ-
ous technological regimes (Clowes 2013). A central tendency is toward totality: the possibility,
made available by advances in the capacity and speed of digital media, to record high-fidelity fac-
similes of every event as it happens (Bell and Gemmell 2009). The SenseCam, the pre-eminent
and most widely used research tool to investigate this tendency to date, is a digital camera with
a fisheye lens that can fit into the palm of a hand, or more typically, worn on a chain around a
user’s neck. It can be set to take a picture every couple of seconds or whenever its face recogni-
tion software detects a person approaching its wearer. The SenseCam can be used to capture a
photographic digital record of a day’s event, saving it up to a database or the Internet (Hodges
et al. 2006; Sellen and Whittaker 2010). Pioneers like Gordon Bell have used this and other
technologies to “remember everything” by attempting to create a complete digital record of
their lives. Although such technologies have so far only been used in such extreme ways by
scientists and enthusiasts, the drive toward recording ever more digital traces of our everyday
lives is becoming a mass pursuit. Millions of us carry portable technologies like digital phones
and tablets which make ever more detailed and complete digital records of our lives. As search
technology becomes better at retrieving all this data, the tendency to use it to augment or replace
our biological capabilities becomes ever-greater.
E-memory can also be autonomous in a way no previous extended memory has been. A book
left in a library could reasonably be expected to be the same when you come back to it; perhaps
with underlining added by other readers. Digital memory traces in our current moment are in
a constant process of transformation, mined by apps looking for novel statistical regularities, and
open to myriad forms of annotations and modification. A set of photographs stored on Google
might be recolourized, turned into a video clip or automatically tagged to include the names
or other attributes of those photographed. Returning to a digital photograph in ten years’
time (assuming it is still there) will likely not return the memory trace you stored. Content has
become fluid and malleable in ways that partially mirror, albeit inexactly, the reconstructive
character of biological memory.
E-memory systems are also socially entangled. What we might recall with systems like Facebook
is not merely what we upload, but what others tag, comment upon, or connect to. A digital
memory trace that my Facebook friends interact with will tend to be more available both to
myself and others in the future. Traces that are ignored will tend to continue to be ignored.
The algorithms and interactions of social media parallel some reconstructive aspects of individual
biological memory, but the precise nature of E-memory reconstructions are determined by soft-
ware engineers and social interactions. These are very different from the evolutionary processes

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that shaped our biological memory systems. This raises questions over whether such multiply
reconstructable and labile memory traces should ever be counted on a par with memories cap-
tured by our biological systems.
E-memory devices are at our fingertips and ripe for deployment and incorporation in a host
of cognitive operations. They have become the constant background context of our cogni-
tive and emotional lives. Often it is easier to rely on these resources than our own biological
capacities, and so, how we use our biological memories is also undergoing rapid change. This
ubiquitous readiness for deployment into so many diverse cognitive operations may be consid-
ered a cognitive property in itself: incorporability (Clowes 2013). For some, this tendency to lean
upon the resources of the Internet as a one-size-fits-all solution to all of our cognitive problems
is itself a worrying problem. It is claimed that our tendency to over-rely on these resources is
an unwelcome extension of basic human capacity to form socially distributed memory systems
which is now undermining individual human memory.

3. Transactive memory and its extensions

The notion of transactive memory (TM) “draws deeply on the analogy between the mental
operations of the individual and the processes of the group” (Wegner 1987: 85). Daniel Wegner
(1948–2013) originally used the idea to illustrate the workings of what he called the group mind:

the transactive memory system in a group involves the operation of the memory systems
of the individuals and processes of communication that occur within the group.
Transactive memory therefore is not traceable to any of the individuals alone, nor can
it be found somewhere “between” individuals. Rather, it is a property of a group.
(Wegner 1987: 85)

The TM approach holds that this social distribution is a fundamental property of human memory.
TM systems rely upon this cognitive division of labour. In order to function, someone either
formally or informally becomes considered the expert on any particular memory domain and is
then relied upon in order to store and recall the information at a future time. In his 1987 arti-
cle, Wegner looks at several sorts of TM systems, from intimate couples, through relationships
between a professor and a student, to organizations such as a firm where a TM system needs to
be explicitly developed.
A paradigm case is collaborative recall in older couples (Harris et al. 2011), where memory
is retrieved through a discursive interaction between the couple. Within such relationships,
one partner might become the specialist in remembering birthdays and important occasions,
the other in which bills have been paid. One advantage of such collaborative recall is that it can
actually help aid failing memory in older couples (Johansson et al. 2005). Apart from the actual
division of labour of storing memory, there must be a system of meta-memory where mem-
bers of the group can find the person who has responsibility for remembering any particular
domain of information. In dyads, this is likely not very difficult, but such meta-memory might
be quite complex in itself for moderately complex organizations. First, it requires individuals
to be experts on a given domain of memory, and second, it requires other individuals to be
able to find the right expert.
TM and collaborative recall can be contrasted with more mainstream experimental psy-
chology, which has focused on core internal biological and especially neural processes of the
individual, which still, often uncritically see social (and technological) influences on memory
as “inherently disrupting or distorting” (Harris et  al. 2010). Hitherto, much experimental

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psychology tended to create ad hoc TM systems for laboratory-based experiments. (Individuals

do indeed appear to perform worse on a host of memory tasks such remembering lists of
words when asked to collaborate with strangers in laboratory conditions.) Much empirical
memory research continues to be primarily individualistic in orientation (Michaelian and
Sutton 2013). Work on collaborative recall and other examples of TM in more naturalistic
settings, however, show that intimate groups can demonstrate powerful memory-enhancing
effects (Harris et al. 2011).
Some of Wegner’s colleagues have been applying the idea of TM to our use of Internet
and computer technology. From early on, Wegner (1987) had defined memory in the func-
tional terms of information processing, in a rough-grained manner. Memory just is, on this
“received view” the encoding, storage, and retrieval of information. On this conceptualiza-
tion, Internet technology itself can be seen as a transactive memory partner (Ward 2013). Our
everyday experience of technologies like Google Search tends to cause us to factor them into
our cognitive activities in ways that are analogous to the way we treat partners in transactive
memory systems. The problem is that the Internet, when considered as a memory system, has
its own properties – as we have seen – which are very different from the memory systems of
individual persons.
One worry is that we may quickly come to just rely on the Internet – as a sort of universal
expert – to encode memories for us, and thereby not bother ourselves. Indeed, evidence from
experiments reported by Sparrow and colleagues (2011) implies that we are already doing just
that. When subjects believe that they will later be able to access a computer file, they tend to
forget that file’s contents, but remember how to access it. This work does indeed fit nicely
into the TM paradigm where members of a transactive memory system will tend to remember
only how to access information when a handy expert can be relied on to remember the actual
detail for them. This lends weight to the hypothesis that we might treat the Internet itself as a
transactive memory partner. Familiar Internet search engines might quickly become considered
universal experts on all matters allowing us to forget almost everything. As Sparrow and col-
leagues put it: “Because search engines are continually available to us, we may often be in a
state of not feeling we need to encode the information internally. When we need it we will
look it up” (2011: 777).
Ward describes the Internet as a supernormal stimulus, figuratively analogous to junk food,
that operates by “highjacking pre-existing cognitive tendencies and creating novel outcomes”.
Moreover, the Internet “seems to outperform all other external storage devices, potentially
leading people to offload responsibility for the vast majority of information to this single digital
resource” (Ward 2013: 341). Ward claims that an effect of these systems is that we develop a
heightened and over-inflated Cognitive Self Esteem (CSE). That is, we tend to believe that
information that we can rapidly locate through search systems is really our own knowledge,
something we personally know. Moreover, Ward’s experiments find that we tend to view
knowledge that is available to us on the Internet as our own, even when we are offline. For
Ward and Wegner, this is a straightforward cognitive error (Wegner and Ward 2013).

4. Is E-memory really memory?

Might some highly skilled Internet search experts be correct that, in some circumstances, the
Internet is best treated as a part of their cognitive and memory systems? It is worth considering
the possibility that treating knowledge and indeed memories that we can rapidly, effectively,
and reliably access from Google may not be a mistake at all, but rather a metacognitive adjust-
ment to new epistemic conditions.

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According to the hypothesis of the extended mind (EM), processes that take place outside of
an agent’s body can still count as part of her mind providing that: (1) the agent can constantly
access the resource; (2) the information supplied by the resource is directly available; (3) infor-
mation retrieved is automatically endorsed; and (4) such information has at some time in the past
been endorsed by the agent. These conditions have since come to be known as trust and glue.1
On the EM view, it is the nature of the agent’s use of, and functional coupling to, an artefact
that determines whether the agent’s mind is extended. Clark and Chalmers’s original (1998)
paper proposed a thought experiment involving Otto and Inga both heading to New York’s
Museum of Modern Art (the MOMA). Inga decides to go to the museum and, thanks to her
normally functioning memory, arrives without difficulty. Otto, who has Alzheimer’s disease,
has difficulty remembering where he is going and how to get there. However, he has a note-
book which stands in for his failing biological memory and which he consults whenever need
arises. Otto uses his notebook to arrive at the MOMA in ways that strongly parallel Inga’s use of
her biological memory. Clark and Chalmers ask us to consider that, in virtue of Otto’s constant
reliance upon, trust and ready use of his notebook, it should count as part of his mind.
There have been many objections (and a few proposed extensions) to the trust-and-glue cri-
teria over the years, including some with special regard to memory (e.g. Rupert 2004). A central
objection hinges on the (re)constructive nature of biological memory. Michaelian (2012a) has
pointed out that the Otto thought experiment is highly unrealistic and uses a container model
of memory, where memories are understood as distinct and compartmentalized items. Empirical
research suggests that human memory traces are nothing like such discrete stable items (Schacter
and Addis 2007). Events that Inga recollects from the past do not access some pristine memory
trace. Rather, her brain reconstructs an event reflecting her current interests and situation.
Recollection is thus better pictured as an interaction between the memory traces carried by
Inga’s brain and her current cognitive goings on, intentions, environmental situation, and emo-
tional states. Human recollection is better envisaged, less like an archivist accessing a pristine
set of images from a video library, and much more like the piecing together of an hypothesis,
based upon the best available evidence. The memory traces recorded in Otto’s notebook seem
not to meet this reconstructive model. They are apparently the same, independent of context.
(Although, insofar as Otto is responsive to environmental contingencies the reasons and context
for accessing the notebook will indeed be contextually driven.) If memory is a container, it is a
leaky container where we lose boxes, mix things up, and construct new contents as the current
situation dictates.
Moreover, Michaelian argues that the trust-and-glue conditions may present an unrealistic
and distorting picture of what memory is. Michaelian concedes that the constancy criterion is not
problematic, as we do indeed have access to our internal biological memory everywhere. But
the other criteria are problematic indeed. Biological memories are not always directly available
because “little information is rendered permanently unavailable once stored, (and) much stored
information is inaccessible to the agent at any given point in time” (2012a: 1156). Biological
memory is much more situational than the EM picture credits.
Endorsement is problematic on several grounds, because, Michaelian contends, storage is not
a consequence of endorsement at all, but of depth of processing which in turn is determined
by several factors including “an assessment of the relevance or significance of incoming infor-
mation” (2012a: 1157). Equally, whether retrieved memory traces are endorsed depends on
metacognitive processes with endorsement being only one possible outcome. Endorsement
of biological memory traces is not automatic. We only selectively endorse recollections based
on a variety of metacognitive strategies. (We shall return to this point shortly.) Given that even
biological memory does not apparently meet the trust-and-glue conditions, the EM hypothesis,

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Michaelian argues, is a poor guide for deciding whether extended memory is real memory. He
contends therefore that the standard trust-and-glue conditions give us no reason to think of
extended memory as real memory.
Clark and other advocates of EM contend that such objections turn on an overly restrictive
notion of what memory is. EM in fact comports with the received view of memory, which has
it that “memory is any state or process that results from the sequential stages of encoding, stor-
age, and retrieval” (Klein 2015: 1). (We have already seen how Wegner endorsed this view.)
Critics, they believe, focus on overly fine-grained functional properties of memory, whereas the
coarse-grained view is of more value for accommodating the complexity of the real world and
developing research (Clark 2008).
One argument against requiring the fine-grained functional profile of memory is that it
appears to rule out any memory system that works moderately differently from human biologi-
cal memory. Animals, aliens (should we ever meet any), and subjects with cognitive deficits
or non-standard cognitive equipment all seem to be potentially ruled out from having real
memory. This may turn out to be particularly problematic for theoretically grasping the effects
of increasingly exotic forms of apparently extended memory we are currently inventing. On the
fine-grained view, agents post-cognitive enhancement may appear not to have memory systems
at all. Such “external memory systems” – for reasons we have seen – tend to have a functional
profile that complements rather than duplicates biological memory. If, as Donald argues, such
memory extension is the specifically human form of memory, then we are in danger of (ironi-
cally) ruling our specifically human memory from our investigations.
Even if one accepts the importance of a more fine-grained approach to equivalence classes of
human memory, there are a number of ways of responding to this challenge. One possibility is
to concede that extended memory is not real memory, while still claiming that it is nevertheless a
genuine cognitive system. Extended memory systems might only meet the rough-grained func-
tional profile of internal systems, but they should nevertheless count as bona fide cognitive systems
because we use them to do cognitive work. Clark (2010) has argued that the active and constructive
nature of biological memory means that it is difficult to differentiate between memory and reason-
ing systems.2 But if biological memory is so tightly tied into other organic systems that it cannot
easily be disentangled, it might also be so entangled with a host of extended systems. As cognitive
systems become increasingly heterogeneous, we will need to press the coarse-grained view into
service to accommodate human memory as it exists in naturalistic settings. It may become more
difficult to maintain the theoretical purity of bio-memory. This continues to be a rather unresolved
argument, with proponents of the extended mind view arguing the coarse-grained allows for more
open-ended research, whereas its opponents (Adams and Aizawa 2009; Rupert 2009; Weiskopf
2008) argue that it thereby doesn’t do justice to the unities of biological memory.
Another type of response is to weaken the trust-and-glue conditions or otherwise redraft
them to respect bio-memory as science finds it. One way of developing this response is to refor-
mulate the EM view to take account of recent findings on meta-memory and epistemic feelings
(Arango-Muñoz 2014). Work on epistemic feelings suggests that human agents do not simply
endorse any memory trace that comes to mind, but carefully balance a variety of metacogni-
tive abilities to decide whether they should trust their own memories. Metacognitive feelings
include the tip of the tongue sensation, the feeling of error (Mazzoni et al. 2010), and perhaps
most importantly for our discussion, the feeling of truth (Reber and Unkelbach 2010).
As Duncan Pritchard has pointed out, one reason that the original Otto thought experi-
ment seemed convincing was precisely because of what was assumed but not explicitly stated:
that is, Otto’s ongoing abilities to check on his interaction with his notebook. Otto is “gradu-
ally becoming aware that his memory is fading” (Pritchard 2010: 144) and uses his notebook

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precisely to try to deal with his failing biological faculties. In addition, Otto is a careful note-
book user and one who is careful to maintain epistemic hygiene in terms of what is entered
into the notebook. If Otto’s beliefs are to be understood as extending to his notebook, this
is in part because of Otto’s ongoing good practices and epistemic virtues. Otto’s abilities to
police and control his own mental states and memories, can be understood as metacognitive,
and Otto’s manipulation of his notebook can be viewed as a sort of metacognitive activity.
Otto’s epistemic feelings and (non-standard) meta-memory more generally can play an ongo-
ing role in deciding just what should be recalled and what stored.
This leads to a dilemma for the EM theorist. As Clark notes: “Ordinary biological memory,
for the most part, functions in a kind of automatic, subterranean way. It is not an object for us,
we do not encounter it perceptually. Rather, it helps constitute the cognitive beings we are”
(Clark 2015b: 3762). At least on the original conception of EM, for a technology to be a good
candidate for the mind it should be used in an unreflective and automatic way, i.e. be transpar-
ent in use. As Clark reflects, the Pritchard interpretation is

adding something Clark and Chalmers rather deliberately left out. They are making
the notebook strategy an object of Otto’s mental focus. The reason we left that out is,
of course, because it works subtly against the extended mind claim itself. For this is not
the role played by ordinary biological memory.
(Clark 2015b: 3762)

And yet in order to meet the sorts of epistemic conditions that Pritchard discusses, some meta-
cognitive agent activity appears to be needed. The worry here is that if we consciously encoun-
ter external resources in order to assess them, they appear less like the generally unconsciously
encountered part of our biological cognitive apparatus.
If the metacognitive picture of memory is correct, then it may just be the case that memory
technologies, and cognitive technologies more generally, do not need to meet the transparency
conditions originally assumed by Clark and Chalmers. Epistemic feelings might provide means
for checking memory sources in a subterranean manner, without them becoming an explicitly
perceptual part of the mental focus rather than a subject of mental focus themselves. But this
implies that we need at least reasonably good metacognitive abilities to continually assess the
contributions of external devices as well as the contributions of our cognitive systems. The con-
sideration of epistemic feelings allows us to note that these do not need be utterly unconscious.
The tip of the tongue sensation is not unconscious.
Arango-Muñoz (2013) argues that our use of epistemic feelings and other metacognitive
abilities might contribute toward our abilities to make virtuous usage of extended technologies.
One interesting aspect of metacognitive abilities is that at least some of them appear to work on
external sources of information as much as internal ones. Thus, epistemic feelings may provide
a way into integrating external resources. What is needed for our epistemic feelings to do the
correct epistemic checking is that the new technologies of E-memory in some sense wear their
epistemic virtues on their sleeves, or otherwise provide cues that our epistemic feelings can track.
Our epistemic capacities will need to keep pace with our technologies.
Clark’s Principal of Ecological Assembly (PEA) suggests that the “canny cognizer” may
simply put together the best set of resources for solving any particular cognitive problem, inde-
pendently of whether they be internal biological systems or external technological ones. There
is a need to show how the PEA is solved practically and how the mind meets the so-called
endorsement and selection problems (Arango-Muñoz 2013; Michaelian 2012b). The endorsement

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problem refers to how the mind chooses – consciously or unconsciously – whether to endorse
the information coming from the selected resources, whether internal or external. This selection
problem addresses which cognitive resources are used. Given any particular cognitive task, an
agent may solve it in one of a number of ways. Multiplication may be achieved by recollecting
one’s time tables, or by using paper or pencil. A memory trace may be accessed by asking one-
self a question or using Google search. Each way of solving a problem requires a different mix
of internal and external processes, which may or may not be considered cognitive, considering
the particular theoretical resources on offer. Epistemic feelings may play a central role in these
processes, but there is much work to be done to show exactly how this is accomplished.

5. Cognitive enhancement and interpreting the mind

A final line of response to objections to the extended mind is to notice that Otto’s notebook
is not the be all and end all of extended memory. Contemporary and future E-memory tech-
nologies may already have a significantly more biological function profile. Contemporary
technologies, because e.g. of their somewhat reconstructive character, may just be much better
at meeting the original conditions of extended memory than the fictional case of Otto’s note-
book. The Cloud Technology resources we discussed at the beginning of this chapter may be
in several relevant ways more closely resemble the fine-grained functional profile of biological
memory (Clowes 2015).
The human brain is already practically factoring in the presence of E-memory systems
(Sparrow et al. 2011) and is at the centre of current controversies over the cognitive effects of
the Internet. The effects are broadly in line with Clark’s PEA. We have seen how many of us
now attribute knowledge that is stored on the Internet as our own. On Ward’s view, Internet
applications tend to hijack humans’ natural tendencies to distribute memory among groups. The
idea that we thereby possess knowledge that we can merely quickly access is a straightforward
mistake. Moreover, there is danger that as we come to increasingly rely upon such resources,
our onboard biological cognitive capacities may become diminished.
If the EM hypothesis is correct, these self-attributions might just be recognizing the new
epistemic conditions as realities (Clowes 2015). Perhaps Ward’s subjects have just adapted to the
new ecological conditions of Cloud Tech where the cognitive resources of the Internet, highly
tailored to their own needs, are constantly available through their iPhones and tablets. The
nature of what it is practicable to consider their own knowledge has just changed. Temporarily
being disconnected from the Internet does not change what they usually know.
Epistemic feelings, as we have seen, might aid us in incorporating resources that are not
biological parts of ourselves. While we may not be able to guarantee that our epistemic feelings
can indeed give us good cues to the epistemic status of a technology, it is important to consider
how our metacognitive abilities and the epistemic readability of technology might intersect. It
may be possible to build technologies that are designed to signal their epistemic status in ways
that make them more readable to us. Whether they can be trusted, whether the information
they purport to present has been evaluated by a relevant epistemic community, whether it has
been recently edited, are questions in part of design and use.
Achieving extended epistemic virtue requires a good practical grasp upon, and accurate epis-
temic estimation of, the new tech. A problem of our present moment is that we have not developed
good social and intellectual resources, and indeed norms and laws, to make the epistemic status of
Internet resources reliably readable. The current tendency is toward technologies, like Facebook’s
Edgerank algorithm, which while transparent in use, are cognitively opaque (Clowes 2013: 116).

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Technologies can structure memory, of course, even if they are not actually parts of our minds.
The view that this external structuring is primarily the best way of understanding the role of
material culture is often developed in terms of scaffolding (Sterelny 2010). This idea was implicit
in Donald’s thoughts on memory, and much earlier work on the cognitive role of tools concen-
trated precisely on the way that tools and the development of material culture helped develop
our peculiarly human cognitive abilities (Gregory 1981; Vygotsky 1978). It may be better to
conceptualize what we “remember” with Google, not as part of anyone’s mind, but as a sort of
cognitive commons upon which we can all draw (Clowes 2015; Dror and Harnad 2008). Systems
like Wikipedia and Google are readily recruited to such models and in many cases this theoreti-
cal model may be more economical than parts of those systems considered as proper parts of us.
Cognitive integration may be best located on a continuum (Heersmink 2012; Sutton et al.
2010), between deeply integrated systems which can be viewed as proper parts of an agent, and
those that should be considered as a kind of cognitive scaffolding or part of a cognitive com-
mons. Although there is a spectrum here, it is worth remembering that locating things on one
side or other of the divide has real consequences. Where a technology can be considered to
form a part of an agent’s identity, its removal or the prohibition of its use might seem like an
attack on that agent (Heersmink 2015). When such interpretations seem reasonable, we are on
the EM end of the spectrum.
If we view E-memory as neither real memory, nor cognitive, then the selection and endorse-
ment problems seem to arise in just the same way, but with new added ethical force. Any
practical choice between the biological and extended systems, now also requires choosing to
select between ‘genuine’ and ‘pseudo’ cognitive resources. Good epistemic hygiene may help
guide us in not over-relying on machines to carry out our memory functions where it might
diminish us in the process.
Against this, hybrid-agents may make more sense according to our folk psychological norms
when interpreted in an extended light. The canons of folk psychology may better predict and
explain an agent’s activities when her extended belief set is incorporated in the interpretation
base.3 Otto is more easily predictable and explicable when we postulate the contents of his
notebook are really beliefs. Explaining his museum-finding abilities become more complex if
we say that Otto knows very little but consults his notebook. It is easier and more economical,
and more in tune with the canons of folk psychology, just to say that Otto knows how to arrive
at the MOMA.
Where E-memory is deeply integrated as part of an agent’s sense of self and even identity,
our attempts to interpret, predict, and interact with such apparently hybrid agents might just
require us to practically consider an agent’s extended resources as part of the basis of our folk-
psychological ascriptions. Interpreting E-memory as real memory, then, seems to help in much
predictive and explanatory work when making sense of such agents. On these grounds we
may need a revised version of the EM – taking account of epistemic feelings – to produce the
best overall account of the use and integration of E-memory. E-memory may not appear to be
memory from certain fine-grained vantage points, but it can still be really cognitive and really
constitutive of the agent’s identity. But if this is so, we must take seriously the idea that the
human mind is currently undergoing profound, perhaps unprecedented, changes as we incorpo-
rate a diverse set of digital media into our cognitive arsenal (Clowes 2012). This may itself imply
limitations upon, and the need for revisions to, our current folk psychology. We need to spend
more intellectual energy to understand the shape and the ethical and epistemic implications of
these new kinds of minds.

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Notes
1 It is notable that at least some transactive memory systems readily meet the trust-and-glue conditions.
2 Also see Clark’s latest book (2015a) on how memory and other cognitive functions such as imagination,
may, at a neural level be closely bound together.
3 Although see problems around the lack of integration of beliefs suggested in Weiskopf (2008).

Related topics
•• Habit memory
•• Memory traces
•• Memory and personal identity

Further reading
Clowes, R. W. (2015). Thinking in the cloud: The cognitive incorporation of cloud-based technology.
Philosophy and Technology 28(2): 261–96.
Michaelian, K. and Sutton, J. (2013). Distributed cognition and memory research: History and current
directions. Review of Philosophy and Psychology 4(1): 1–24.
Malafouris, L. (2013). How Things Shape the Mind: A Theory of Material Engagement. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.

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