where does all this me?

The idea of mind and by extension of selfhood that I want to bring forth through the notion of extended self is that of a self that is located neither inside nor outside the brain/body, but is instead constantly enacted in-between brains, bodies and things and thus irreducible to any of these three elements taken in isolation.

Even though the self is by nature grounded and inextricably bound up with the body, it also escapes the natural confines of any single body or brain.

The extended self I am proposing here is not simply a self embodied; it is a self enacted through the act of embodying.

Lambros Malafouris of Cambridge presents “a view of selfhood as an extended and distributed phenomenon that is enacted across the skin barrier”.

Words like ‘me’ and ‘I’ neither fossilize nor do they leave any readily identifiable and universal material trace.

The existence of a transparent phenomenal inner ‘I’ causing the human hand to move and alter the world in full awareness is assumed before and behind even the earliest artefacts recovered in the archaeological record.

But when and how did humans develop the experience that they own their bodies and started to feel as the authors of their actions?