Some time ago, I was wondering whether cyber consciousness can account for a full person. In my opinion, our sensory experience and ability to act on it are very (/completely?) biological. Everyone is a person of their present time, culture and environment by virtue of this feedback system. This runs deeper than just an object and a background. Someone’s identity and personhood extend a bit to their surrounding reality as it does the other way around. This is akin to how a dam is an extension of a beaver and a web is an extension of a spider. To make a web is written in what makes a spider a spider. Surely the extension part of this Self can be dynamic, but this ability to fluctuate together with the world is essential to what makes a person a person, I think.
In a world where I can’t imagine being separated from this kind of reality as I know it, I do define my ‘self’ in a narrower term: I’m a function, a specific equation with some fixed constants but also ever slightly changing variables. I can have different inputs to make different outputs, but the function will stay more than less.. me. Now a body is important because all conscious and subconscious processes to modify the equation are bodily functions, they all happen in, through, and because of having a body!
Anyways, in the case of cyber consciousness, there’s no biological body to sense the environment. And what even is the environment? Is there even a barrier between a person and the environment in a completely virtual world? There should be, right? Otherwise, there will be no environment to respond to because, without a barrier, everything’s just going to be one single entity. To be honest, I’m not versed in cyber reality, but what constitutes ‘consciousness’ in the cyber sense might probably be the equation + the memories. Without a body to make these 2 components alive, these cyber people would just be a chatGPTized screen capture of the past. In order to live in the future, or through whatever time for that matter, I need to experience and sense them in real time.
So today (cocoklogi time 🐣), I was thinking of the word remember. It’s interesting how there’s a ‘member’ there. Thinking about it in a sense of the present as an extension of a person, things we forget are our reality that has been dismembered from us. Now to re-member, is to reconnect with these extensions that were severed and left in the past until just now, till we finally remember them. Now they’re back again as members of our collective personhood. Bcs what’s a person without their memories, right? (A new person, I guess?).
Recollect is also a delightful word. It makes a nice picture of us collecting and carrying memories as we live, dropping them constantly because we’re inherently clumsy, and always trying to pick them up because, because we’re memories collectors!
P.S. I think I’ll start putting up my twitter musings here because it’s really hard to access them ever again without tags or any form of thread organizations, which I never applied. And speaking as a memories collector, what a shame it is to lose them all.
