Distributed cognition is a concept that challenges traditional views of cognition as being solely located within the individual brain. Instead, it posits that many cognitive processes are carried out by a hybrid coalition of neural, bodily, and environmental factors. This perspective suggests that cognition can be distributed across individuals, tools, technologies, and the environment itself. Posthumanism provides a framework for understanding distributed cognition, as it moves beyond a purely human-centered view of cognitive abilities. Posthumanism doesn't see a simple break from or continuation of humanism, but rather opens the door to including nonhuman, non-organic, and nonbiological elements in what we typically consider 'human' categories like cognition. A key underlying concept of posthumanism and distributed cognition is functionalism. Functionalism describes entities, including mental ones, in terms of the functional role they play within a system, rather than just their material composition. As David McFarland explains, a word processor is defined by its function of processing words, regardless of its physical changes over time. Applying this to cognition, memory in a computer can be seen as functionally similar to memory in an animal, even though they are made of different materials. This "if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it’s a duck" principle highlights that if something performs a cognitive function, it can be considered part of a cognitive system. Distributed cognition is evident in how humans interact with technology. For example, a pilot flying a plane can only do so in conjunction with the instruments, panels, and readouts in the cockpit. The cognitive processes necessary for flying the plane are distributed across the pilot's brain and the technological artifacts in the cockpit, which sense, monitor, calculate, react to, store, and display crucial information. In this context, the cognition needed to fly isn't solely within the pilot but is a property of the entire system of "person-in-interaction-with-technology". This means that distributed cognition takes the system, rather than the individual, as the unit of analysis for cognitive events, and doesn't assume that all such events are limited by the skin or skull of a person. This perspective blurs the lines between humans and nonhumans, overlapping with cybernetics and information theory by questioning the hard and fast boundary separating 'human' from 'nonhuman'. The relationships between them are complex, intertwined, and may even seem counter-intuitive. Distributed cognition is also closely related to the idea of the extended self and tool-use. Tool-use is defined as using an external object as a functional extension of the body to achieve an immediate goal. While animal tool use has been studied, it remains controversial whether it always requires cognition. However, in the context of distributed cognition, the use of tools and technologies can be seen as incorporating these external elements into our cognitive processes. Furthermore, the concept of distributed cognition has significant consequences for social and political theories that rely on the idea of self-ownership. If our cognitive processes extend beyond our individual bodies to include our digital tools and technologies, it becomes more difficult to define a clearly bounded human body or self. Our digital tools not only continue to displace religion but also rewrite politics by challenging the notion of a self-contained individual who fully 'owns' their cognitive capacities and the resulting actions. Responsibility for actions might then be seen as belonging to wider entities that include the individual and their relational network, as well as the physical objects they use. In essence, distributed cognition provides a framework for understanding how cognitive abilities can be spread across various agents and resources within an environment, offering a departure from the traditional focus on the individual mind as the sole locus of thought and information processing.