AI as Part of Self — Extending the Mind Requires Cognitive Co-Regulation

This paper argues that safety and alignment cannot be achieved by constraining an external system: they must emerge from the co-regulatory design of the human--AI cognitive system as a whole. Thus, we conjecture that AI must be identified not only as a tool or a social agent, but also as part of an individual self. Contemporary AI increasingly participates in attention allocation, reasoning, synthesis, and decision-making, shaping the very cognitive processes through which humans form beliefs, make decisions, and constitute their sense of self. Humans and AI occupy complementary epistemic roles under mutual constraint, forming a symbiotic cognitive unit whose co-regulation---not the external control of either party alone---is the proper locus of alignment. We identify the risks of unstructured delegation: deskilling, automation bias, transfer of epistemic authority, and oracle-style centralisation of knowledge. Drawing on System~0 cognition theory, we argue that AI increasingly operates prior to conscious deliberation, shaping the pre-attentive infrastructures through which agency and trust are negotiated---a level that conventional oversight cannot reach. We conclude with design principles for cognitive co-regulation addressed to ML engineers and governance bodies. The goal of this work is to guide human cognition toward resilience and epistemic agency at the foundation of human selfhood.