Extended mind and artifactual autobiographical memory

Abstract

Correspondence Richard Heersmink, Department of Politics, Media and Philosophy, La Trobe University, Plenty Rd, Kingsbury Dr. Bundoora, Melbourne, VIC 3086, Australia. Email: r.heersmink@latrobe.edu.au In this paper, I describe how artifacts and autobiographical memory are integrated into new systemic wholes, allowing us to remember our personal past in a more reliable and detailed manner. After discussing some empirical work on lifelogging technology, I elaborate on the dimension of autobiographical dependency, which is the degree to which we depend on an object to be able to remember a personal experience. When this dependency is strong, we integrate information in the embodied brain and in an object to reconstruct an autobiographical memory. In such cases, autobiographical memory is extended or distributed.