identity diversity & longevity
Issue #1 in a series exploring ideas relevant to the medium-term future
I hope to write brief-ish installments on themes, ideas, and debate topics that could be relevant to our lives ~30 years from now. First up, an exploration on identity. How might access to and frequent usage of technology shape the construct of identity in society? How far into the future can your identity extend?
On the diversity of identity
Should we be allowed to adopt multiple identities — avatars of the true self — in society, to reflect the multitudes that we contain?
I think, personality types will become more crystallised, extreme, and prescriptive; and we will be able to pick and choose which of those types we want to embody in a systematic way, by adopting or cultivating an associated avatar
That is, that the combination of polarization (more extreme views) and language evolution (newer language and terminology to describe extreme views and abstract behavioural nuances) could result in more variations of a finite set of rigid personality-bundles, that can be adopted and embodied through an avatar.
The assumption here is that we will exist increasingly in digital / phygital spaces and forums; existing in digital spaces will 1) allow for more shared experiences and worldviews across populations, not restricted by physical space, and 2) enable us to frictionlessly switch between and embody different outward-facing projections of the self.
“I contain multitudes” - Walt Whitman. What if we could embody, exhibit, and exude each facet?
This is particularly interesting, because it assumes that the self can be quantified — that the multitudes we contain can be broken down into a set of discrete components; that the dynamic nuances of personality can be isolated into strands, and the complexity of the self is no more than their coalescing. A breaking down of wholes into parts.
Our manufactured living environment is full of parts, and lacking wholes. But the self is not manufactured — it is an existing whole, generated from an existing whole. By trying to quantify the self, we have projected our impoverished manufacturing model of the world onto the world and attempted to stuff ourselves inside of it.
On identity continuity & personal growth
Should our past beliefs and views have an expiry date, after which they are no longer attributed to us? How much growth are we afforded in a lifetime? This question becomes increasingly relevant if technology enables us to live even longer lives.
Years pass, and you slowly grow older. The memories you could once call upon to re-experience life’s warmest, fuzziest moments, fade; eroded from their passing through time. But those thoughts, feelings, emotions, songs, experiences, don’t go away. They’re written in your story, abstracted into your psych as intuitions and heuristics quietly nudging you along to each new chapter.
On longevity
Which provokes the question — if life-extension is possible through technological developments, how much investment does it merit? The most extreme version of life-extension is immortality — is this desirable at all?
Debates could centre on the practical considerations surrounding longevity research, such as:
Should we focus on increasing the quality or quantity of available life? How do we ensure that humans are living not just longer, but also better, lives?
How might a successful longevity project affect the availability of resources for the population (could this lead to overpopulation and subsequently a resource shortage)?
Would access to longevity-tech perpetuate inequality? How could life-extending means be made accessible to all populations?
Is there a ceiling to human longevity, or an absolute limit to the length of human life?
Research suggests that if there is a ‘mortality plateau’— a point at which the risk of death starts to level off, rather than continue to increase — then there may not be a theoretical limit to human longevity.
With the advent of meaningful life-extension ability, it is likely that we will also have to wrestle with questions on identity that we may today deem esoteric or purely philosophical, such as:
How long into the future can personal identity persist? How many hundreds of years do you have to live before you are meaningfully transformed by external events so that you are no longer yourself? Is it worth using technology to extend this threshold, or should we cede old memories & psychological traits to the passage of time and allow new experiences to rewrite our identity?
Leading to the larger question — is life-extension to the point of immortality desirable at all? Or would it lead to increased suffering and purposelessness?
Bernard Williams, a famous philosopher, argued that life-extension is undesirable, since a human would eventually run out of goals, plans, or projects, and succumb to the ‘tedium of immortality’.
He believed in the necessity of identity continuity through time for immortality to be desirable. That is, for immortality to be desirable, the present version of you must be able to endorse the desires of a future version of yourself — if the desires that you might have, say 150 years from now, will be so foreign and new that you today cannot endorse them, then an immortal life results in a transformation of the self so great, that it must be undesirable.
Derek Parfit, meanwhile, argued that a lack of identity continuity may not matter — what matters is psychological continuity, that we share continuity or connectedness of memory and other personality traits with a version of ourselves at a different time.
Perhaps, then, to an individual, human immortality may be desirable if we’re able to use scientific advancements to preserve psychological continuity (eg: through memory enhancers or prosthetics) and maintain a degree of “survivability”.
Perhaps, too, our technological innovations will enable us to create a world of abundance that allows for a ubiquitous leisure-class, endless opportunities & intelligent incentives for humans to take on rewarding and fulfilling work, and an evolving landscape of challenging, accessible recreational and intellectual activities, thus quelling the potential tedium that immortality could present.
Thanks for reading! If you have an idea for a theme that could be relevant 30 years from now, drop it in the comments and I’ll try to address it in the next edition :)
(More on Parfit & ideas of the self)
According to Parfit, what matters most is not personal identity continuity through time, but psychological continuity; he believed that a person comprises a set of mental states and various relations, and that this set of mental states has overlapping chains of direct psychological relations, (e.g., memory or personality traits) through time
According to his theory, there is no determinate answer to the question “does a self exist?” No unique entity, such as a self, exists to unify a person's experiences and dispositions over time.
Instead, what is more relevant than questions about the “self” is questions about survival, such as, do we survive ourselves over time?
Parfit says no — we don’t survive ourselves over the course of our biological lives. Memories fade, characteristics change, and ambitions are replaced: as psychological connections wane, we survive less and less over time.
But this realisation isn’t sad; it is profoundly liberating. Because it can help overturn two pervasive and pernicious attitudes inherent to humans: selfishness, and a fear of death.
1) Fear of death: The idea of a distant death coming for us is uncomfortable, because we fear our consciousness ending; Parfit says, the truth is that it has already ended several times. Identity comes in degrees, and we don’t survive ourselves over time anyway.
2) Selfishness: Humans live selfishly, often don’t give charitably, and destroy the planet. This is because it is rational to pursue one’s future self-interest over the well-being of others. Parfit asks, but… what if we don’t survive ourselves over the course of our whole biological lives? Believing this blunts the appeal of selfishness.
Parfit, on his loss of belief in a separate self: “My life seemed like a glass tunnel, through which I was moving faster every year, and at the end of which there was darkness... When I changed my view, the walls of my glass tunnel disappeared. I now live in the open air. There is still a difference between my life and the lives of other people. But the difference is less. Other people are closer. I am less concerned about the rest of my own life, and more concerned about the lives of others.”