Tuesday, 20 August 1996
Post No. 7 of 8
by Max More

Paulina, you've raised an important philosophical issue. I've invested years thinking about the nature and limits of personal identity, condensing the results in my PhD dissertation.

I share your attachment to physical and sensory experiences. I delight in the views and vigor of a mountain hike, the pump from working out, the bliss of making love. Far from giving this up, I intend to expand my sensory capabilities. Certainly, our physical senses and abilities (not the particular stuff we're made of) contribute to our identity, but are only part of it. I investigated the contribution of physical form to identity in Chapter 4 of my dissertation. We change as we grow, but we don't think that means we're dying. Why should we fear growing into posthumans where that means augmenting, not diminishing, ourselves?

Even if particular physical sensations - the scent of the ocean air, the balm of serotonin secretion, the pounding of your heart - were crucial to your sense of self, that doesn't mean you're stuck with your current human body. Posthuman bodies could experience all that and more. Even if we become totally postbiological in the distant future, we could still emulate those sensations.

Join Paulina and Max for a live audio debate Friday, 23 August at 11:00 a.m. PDT in Wired Arena.

In altering or choosing your body, you alter only a part of your identity. Paulina, do you believe that people who lose control of their limbs are thereby replaced by someone else? Is Christopher Reeve dead, someone else now speaking from his head? No, the central things remain: values, desires, dispositions, character traits, abilities.

The Xian notion of surviving without any body is indeed nonsense. Nor do I see posthuman life as perfect, conflict free, lacking challenge. I expect greater challenges, more dramatic quests, with increased fortitude to meet them. The puzzles of posthuman identity frequently get discussed in Extropy.