Elastic Selves in the Age of Enhancement
Susana Badiola wonders how technology will help us understand our selves.
The technological self?
Assuming of course that, using the technology currently available to them, neuroscientists are not able to rule out entirely at least some capacity on our part to freely choose among the options made available.
Given some measure of autonomy here, “I” is about to enter that brave new world in which the human biological self itself is reconfigured into a kind of memetic self predicated on those qualities that any particular historical or cultural community value the most.
Of course this part…
…we may soon be stronger, healthier, longer-lived, happier, with more acute senses, and capabilities undreamed of by our ancestors…
…is one thing. But it might well become another thing altogether if science is able to reconfigure the mind’s “I” so as to instill characteristics and behaviors more in sync with one political narrative rather than another.
What sort of behaviors should be encouraged if all it takes is tweaking the brain at or around birth?
Then this part:
What might science be able to pin down here more definitively? Whole new ways to grasp the phenomenological “I”? Will a “self within” be discovered? Will there be ways to determine what the optimal self might be? And ways to bring that about in the really and truly brave new world of childhood indoctrination? The “mass me”?
Or, instead, will it be discovered that the mass me is just the wholly determined me spread out among all of Earth’s inhabitants?