Walk down a London street looking at your smartphone and you risk losing it. Thousands are snatched from pedestrians’ hands each year. This is a crime that takes two seconds to commit, but leaves the victim dazed, devastated, and angry. Over 200 a day are stolen across the UK, but our capital is the hotspot for what is often organised crime. Illegal e-bikes, some of which can achieve 70 miles per hour, help thieves make a quick getaway.
But an ordinary bicycle suffices – as I learned to my cost several years ago when a cyclist came up behind me on the pavement in Bloomsbury and plucked my phone from my hand. I was left staring at my empty palm as he sped off holding the handlebars with one hand, scrolling through my open handset with the other.
Last week the home secretary, Yvette Cooper, announced new police powers and a serious crackdown on this menace. She also asked tech companies to improve security measures. This, along with increased commitment to neighbourhood policing, and plain-clothes operations in high-risk areas, may have some effect.
But these are difficult crimes to prevent. Even when individuals track where their phones have ended up, it’s almost impossible to get speedy intervention from the police. They don’t have the resources. And many of these handsets end up being shipped as far away as China, to be recycled for valuable parts.
Cooper described these as “damaging” crimes. But what makes them so damaging? Is it the inconvenience of losing a device that can be worth £1,500? The fear that criminals will use data to commit fraud or blackmail? The loss of privacy? The hassle of having to set up everything from scratch on a new phone? These all make this crime seem very personal. But could there be something more to it than this?
That’s a radical hypothesis that the philosophers Andy Clark and David Chalmers have put forward.
More than 25 years ago they wrote an article called The Extended Mind, which opened with the question, “Where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin?” Conventional wisdom equates the mind with the living brain, or the brain plus body. So the limits of the mind are usually thought of as the skull and the skin. But Clark and Chalmers were interested in what they called an “active externalism”, the way that parts of our environment become functionally equivalent to parts of the brain. Non-biological tools and devices can, they argued, be literally parts of our minds.
They asked us to imagine Otto, who suffers from Alzheimers, trying to find his way to a museum in New York. He carries a notebook with detailed directions. The functional role of the notebook is much the same as his memory for directions would have been had he not been suffering from the disease. They argued that that makes it a part of his mind. It performs the same role as his brain-based memories would have done.
Chalmers and Clark contrast Otto with Inga, whose memory of directions is intact – she uses her brain-based memories in the way that Otto combines his brain-based memories with his recorded directions in the notebook. The two are functionally equivalent, so, Chalmers and Clark argue, it is only a prejudice that stops us seeing the notebook as part of Otto’s mind.
That’s a challenging idea, with far-reaching consequences. Not just any tool that we use would have the status of being part of the mind on this theory – it has to be ready to hand and sufficiently coupled to us to serve as an active part of us. But still, that can include a lot that most of us don’t usually think of as being part of us. This can even include other people, when for example, in a couple, one person remembers events that happened to both of them that the other has forgotten.
In his recent book Reality+, Chalmers revealed that the philosopher Ned Block teased him that the main thesis of that 1998 article about the extended mind was false when published, but has since become true because of the way phones have evolved.
Smartphones are the most plausible candidates for being parts of our extended minds – a more persuasive example than paper notebooks ever were. On this view, phone crime is more than just the theft of valuable property that causes inconvenience. As Chalmers has argued, if the extended mind hypothesis is correct, phone crime is “more akin to assault”.
