The “network self” philosophical framework—sometimes called “4E cognition”—posits that a person is a combination of different types of cognition, not just a box made of biological matter that generates consciousness, and not just an ethereal, intangible material that happens to interact with physical substrates in some difficult-to-define way.
Within this framework, “4E” stands for embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended; all of which are mental processes that help humans create representations of reality that inform our sense of self, others, the world, and the relationships between all of these things.
Embodied processes are those that take place within our personal biomes, which are ecosystems full of creatures that we perceive distinguishing “our” bodies as something separate from those of others, and from our environments.
Embedded processes are those that exist within our physical environments: the weather, a chair, and a bumblebee flying around a nearby flower (and the flower itself) are all processes that are embedded within our non-self, physical space.
Enacted processes are neurological—in the sense that they’re thoughts we have, generated or orchestrated in some way by our brains and other body parts—but they’re also things that we do; our actions enabled and guided by those thoughts.
And extended processes are those that allow us, through a variety of means, to amplify or change our cognition through the use of external aids; paper and a pencil, for instance, or a slide-rule (or calculator) can massively increase our mathematical capabilities, and language, the written word, and tools that allow us to write those words and reference them again in the future (books, computer software, the internet) can amplify those capabilities even further.
Through this lens, the “self” is a cumulative network of ever-changing relationships and perceptions of relationships. We’re not a single, stable thing: we’re a fluctuating portfolio of processes that themselves are shaped by countless internal and external variables which, in turn, are shaped by their own collection of the same.
The many labels we wear, then, are part of our social environment’s software, and those processes influence our internal processes (how we think about ourselves), which in turn can influence how we behave and what actions we take (which, in turn, influence those environments).
This cognitive framework is similar in some ways to the broader-based “extended mind thesis,” which posits that we’re not limited to our physicals selves, but are instead deconstructed cognitive entities that think with our brains, our bodies, our tools, and even our societies and civilizations: we are legion, even if we perceive ourselves to be limited to a single, biological body.
This concept gets a bit more specific, though, in proposing that the interaction between all of these types of cognition is, itself, yet one more factor in determining what sorts of higher-level cognition occurs, the outcome of that cognition, and how all the pieces fit together to create a sense of thinking, self, and consciousness.
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