probabilityfields

http://www.slate.com/id/2142987/

These people bring up interesting points about our relationship to technology; I’ve never studied much of trans- or post-humanism, but here’s where I have to object:

Transhumanism, apparently, is too parochial. It’s too focused on humans, too narrow for the “mindfiles,” “mindware,” and “virtuality” into which we’re going to upload ourselves. According to the speaker—picture Willie Nelson with a shave—our identities can be broken down into units called bemes, in the same way that culture can be broken down into memes. These, in turn, can be “bemed up” and preserved in media outside our bodies. As examples, she suggested your smile, how lasagna tastes to you, and your memory of your first bike ride. The idea of extracting such plainly body-dependent things is ridiculous. But her basic point is right: Bemes, not genes, are what capture and preserve our essence.

Uh…okay, so maybe bemes are the basic building blocks which our mind uses to make up a celebrity identity, but a real identity is an emergent property of all these things. In other words, the sum is greater than its parts. Sure, you can upload Willie Nelson’s beard, Texas accent, and laid-back attitude and maybe I’ll have a conversation with it, but it’s not the real thing. Who of us gets to see Willie when he’s all alone? when he’s taking a dump? Is that a beme? Identity emerges out of an indefinite series of flows, moments that can only be described as ‘nows’ as they pass, not discrete packets of data. Screw bemes.