Abstract

Both developmental and clinical psychology show that interpersonal relations deeply structure personal identity. In this paper, I aim at investigating whether some important aspects of the self could also be extended to the physical world. Starting from the extended mind paradigm described in Di Francesco and Piredda's target article, I imagine a situation where a person continuously interacts with a second-generation search engine in order to search information in the internet. As the internet user remarks that the outputs of his/her queries are generally satisfying even with fragmentary inputs, he/she progressively tends to use the search engine with fragmentary queries. GO - this is the name of my not-so-imaginary search engine - can understand what the user really intended to ask and find a relevant answer, in the sense of Sperber and Wilson's relevance theory. In my opinion, this thought experiment could represent a case of extended mind more interesting that Otto's notebook discussed by Clark and Chalmers.