Matthew Noah Smith (Leeds) has an article at Slate bringing together philosophy of mind and political philosophy to discuss the United States government’s attempts to get Apple to “unlock” the iPhone of a shooting suspect. It’s a great example of public philosophy. Professor Smith lays out the basics of extended cognition in clear but not oversimplified language, going over the Andy Clark-style argument for how smartphones raise “a very deep issue about the permeability of the boundaries of the self.” 

He then notes that we’ve transformed ourselves from “private” to “networked” beings, largely voluntarily.

This mass transformation of the private self to the networked self suggests that even a state-mandated backdoor to all iPhones would not lead to a qualitative shift in our lives. Rather, it would represent a further slide away from the discrete individual and toward the decentralized, networked self.

Still, shouldn’t we be concerned about the state having access to our minds? Professor Smith continues:

Is this problem really less frightening than the already existing corporate access to our minds? After all, states—at least democratic states—are supposed to be embodiments of our most idealistic commitments to the networked, decentralized self. When the properly democratic state acts in our names, we all publicly act together, even if this action does not occur only in our own bodies (if it occurs in our bodies at all). So, the extension of even the nominally democratic state’s reach into our device-expanded mental lives may not be nearly as insidious as the extension of corporations’ reaches into our device-expanded mental lives.