December 9, 2018

"Here’s a thought experiment: where do you end? Not your body, but you, the nebulous identity you think of as your 'self.'"

"Does it end at the limits of your physical form? Or does it include your voice, which can now be heard as far as outer space; your personal and behavioral data, which is spread out across the impossibly broad plane known as digital space; and your active online personas, which probably encompass dozens of different social media networks, text message conversations, and email exchanges?"

From "Where is the boundary between your phone and your mind?/As our online existences become less distinct from ‘real life’, experts raise concern about the growing power of big tech" (The Guardian)(worth a click if only for the nice illustration).

12 comments:

R C Belaire said...

Let's assume that at some future point our "self" can be maintained indefinitely on servers somewhere and that in terms of interacting with others, we appear as alive as ever (re: the Turing test). In addition to being self-aware, maybe "we" even come with holograms. What does the concept of an afterlife really mean in that case? What does a religion that includes and afterlife have to offer, i.e., can we be saved if not really dead?

Darrell said...

I have no end. I ask for Blessings to my past, present, and future self everyday. And forgiveness.

rhhardin said...

It may be that the sense of falsification comes from the way I understand the phrase ``have a body.'' It is really a mythological way of saying that I am flesh. But I am not satisfied with this myth, for it implies that I also have something other than a body, call it a soul. Now I have three things to put together: a body, a soul, and me. (So there are four things to be placed: I plus those three.) But I no more have a soul than I have a body. That is what I say here and now. People who say they have a soul sometimes militantly take its possession as a point of pride, for instance William Ernest Henley and G.B.Shaw. Take the phrase ``have a soul'' as a mythological way of saying that I am spirit. If the body individuates flesh and spirit, singles me out, what does the soul do? It binds me to others.

Stanley Cavell _The Claim of Reason_ p.411

rhhardin said...

Digital is matter, and matter has no inwards.

No awareness there, sorry.

Kevin said...

Government is just another word for the things we choose to do together.

For some people, you are the state. And the state is you.

rhhardin said...

In a digital world, there are no literary effects.

JML said...

As I clicked to Althouse, Handel's Messiah just came on...No doubt a great part of him lives on, and the subject of his work lives on as well. Most of us don't have that gift that can produce something that has lived on for decades or centuries. And even what is left of those is just a small part of who they were. Collectively, we may leave a legacy of some sort - individually, we are mostly lost within a few years of our deaths.

Fernandinande said...

I have no end.

LOL, that sounds modest.

I end where The Guardian begins, if not long before.

Yancey Ward said...

The vast majority of people, and pretty much everyone I have ever known will be forgotten 100 years from now. Take someone like Ms. Althouse as an example- she no doubt has written multiple novels-worth of material for her blog alone the last 14 years- and that blog exists in the archived data and will continue to do so long after she is dead absent a societal collapse, and yet she will be a nobody a century from now, and nothing she has written here will read by anyone at that time. Beethovens and Dickens are rare birds.

n.n said...

It depends on what "we" are. The near-frame philosophy, "science", does not offer guidance to discern origin and expression, or sufficiently characterize human evolution outside of a narrow observable, reproducible band from conception to death. Some people believe in God. While other believe in Stork. And others yet have no comment.

Maillard Reactionary said...

What is my boundary? In the bag of guts where I live.

Let's not get too grandiose here, shall we?

stlcdr said...

You end at you. Your online persona isn’t real. Your influence on the world ends at what you actually do. These high thinking elitist have lost oxygen to their brain; they are making the Internet playground more than it really is.