Symbiont Consciousness: Sociocultural Embodied Augmentation of Humanity

The psychology of consciousness as explained by Vygotsky is the ability of one to focus on the inner state of being. Vygotsky’s proposition of external tools redistributing mental and external processes into internalized acts lacks the concept of embodied mediational tools existing in the current world as computational artifacts extending or augmenting human capabilities. This paper proposes sociocultural embodied augmentation theory (SEAT) as a means to explain the impact of augmenting technologies on Vygotsky’s original notion of “psychological tool,” therefore initiating an inevitable transformation of the sociocultural mind. Hence, a new social mind is posited as an evolving symbiosis between human life and artificial life that extends consciousness: a symbiont consciousness.