Elastic Selves in the Age of Enhancement
Susana Badiola wonders how technology will help us understand our selves.
Why? Because grappling with “I” in one context can be quite different from another context.
Consider:
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There’s the “I” that goes about the business of living from day to day in the either/or world. Hundreds of things that we do [alone or with others] that are entirely in sync with that which is as close as we have been able to come to “objective reality”. In fact, the main obstacles to pinning this self down revolve around sheer speculation — sim worlds, solipsism, dream worlds, matrix perspectives.
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There’s the “I” that goes about the business of living from day to day in the is/ought world. Still hundreds of things that we can agree are “true objectively” for all of us. But these things trigger relationships that trigger behaviors that are judged far, far more subjectively. The “I” that I root in dasein.
*There’s the “I” all the way out at the end of the metaphysical limb — going back to the understanding of existence itself. Or in resolving the debate about “free will”.
- There’s the “I” that, for some, is in a relationship with one or another God. I and Thou.
But that, it turns out, just gets us started…
The biological “I”, The neourological and chemical “I”, the historical “I”, the cultural “I”, the sociological “I”, the psychological and emotional “I”. And on and on.
On the other hand, don’t get them started, right?
And what does this ultimately revolve around? The fact that we relate to our “self” differently in different sets of circumstances. Somehow the “I” in my head is intertwined with all that exist out in any particular world. But there are so many different [and at times entirely unique] possible permutations “out there” given interactions awash in contingency, chance and change, that trying to pin down an understanding of all the variables that combine to create an “I” at any particular time, in any particular place can only be at best a more or less sophisticated guess. While, for many of us, it is more like a WAG.
And yet how could one speak of an “essential self” or the “real me” without the capacity to reduce all of these factors down to the one true reality?