Posthuman Blues

When you're piloting a car from one location to another, you cease to be "you" in the normal sense. You become an extension of the vehicle, a meat-based nerve center for two tons of metal, glass and plastic. The concentration demanded by driving forfeits thinking the sort of thoughts that make you an individual, if only briefly.





So the driving experience is rather like teleportation; you get in the car, casually surrender your normal self-hood in exchange for speed and convenience, and (barring a crash) emerge at your destination, where you can "rematerialize." The "person" driving the car wasn't you: it was a subsystem, a drone summoned genie-like from the brain for a specific purpose.

I think the entirety of a normal day can be viewed as a succession of somewhat exclusive subsystems. The "you" on lunch break is a distinctly different entity than the "you" surfing the Web at 2:00 in the morning or the "you" dining out with friends. Maybe the notion of a central, indomitable Self is so much quaint wishful thinking. It seems more likely that we're composites, each transitory "disposable" self vying for supremacy in much the same way that the genes in an individual's own body compete for expression.