by Rachel Robison-Greene
Aaron, an old friend from high school, was a lurker on social media for fourteen years. He never liked or commented on anyone’s posts. He was never one to share news articles or life updates. He didn’t tag himself in vacation photos or let his friends know how his wife and children were doing. In person, though, it was clear that he always knew what everyone was up to, so we knew he was present online, quietly paying attention to those of us who find it difficult to resist posting what we had for breakfast in the morning. Some time ago, in a chance encounter with a mutual acquaintance, I learned that Aaron had died. Not recently. Four years ago. His family was about as keen on online life as Aaron had been, so when he died, they handled it privately and tastefully.
Though he had been gone for years, I felt I had just lost him. All those years I had wished him a happy birthday, I assumed he felt remembered, even if he wasn’t the type to engage. People tagged him in nostalgic posts from the past. It felt like he was still in my life. It seemed that my relationship with him extended past his relationship with me; I had four years of shallow online friendship that he didn’t have.
Our lives have more parts than they once did. We constantly leave behind digital pieces of ourselves; the virtual equivalent of shedding hair or skin cells. Somewhere out there, there is a MySpace account that proves that I was alive, kicking, and making music in 2004. I have an inbox full of Discord messages that I’ll never read after the app finished serving the singular purpose of keeping me in touch with a group of students for an activity in 2022. I’ve abandoned all of these pieces of me, and I couldn’t collect them if I tried.
Our best theories of personal identity and of the nature of the self were all crafted before the onset of digital strangeness. What it is to be who one is may have fundamentally shifted. So, too, might what it means to live and die.
It’s difficult to overstate the impact of Descartes’ view of what a human being is fundamentally. He thought that he had direct introspective access to who he was in his essence: he was a thinking thing. Though he couldn’t prove via the same method that human beings share that in common, presumably we each, respectively, have access to this thinking essence in our own cases as well.
Other philosophers view the self as having social parts. Care ethicists and writers working in the feminist tradition argue that the abstract rational self of enlightenment tradition is an illusion. In fact, the self is socially situated. We are who we are at least in part as a result of the relationships in which we participate. As Virginia Held puts the point in The Ethics of Care,
The ethics of care…characteristically sees persons as relational and interdependent, morally and epistemologically. Every person starts out as a child dependent on those providing us care, and we remain interdependent with others in thoroughly fundamental ways throughout our lives. That we can think and act as if we were independent depends on a network of social relations making it possible for us to do so. And our relations are part of what constitute our identity.
The Cartesian self survives death only if mind-body dualism is true. Aaron lives on in heaven somewhere if the soul exists and is capable of functioning when uncoupled from the body. If a human being has social parts, what does that mean for survival? Can Aaron’s social parts live on in virtual spaces even when the self that might exist from his first personal perspective is gone?
As the philosopher Patrick Stokes points out in Death and Survival Online, when a person’s brain no longer functions, they no longer exist for themselves. This is because, from a first personal perspective, they don’t meet the basic conditions for survival: anticipation and memory. I could create a chatbot based on Aaron’s scant online interactions and text messages, but Aaron couldn’t and shouldn’t look forward to the interactions of the chatbot as his own interactions. The chatbot could claim to remember things that happened to Aaron in the past, but it wouldn’t really be remembering, it would merely be seeming to remember.
Aaron does not continue to live on for himself, but do his social parts continue to live on for others? Stokes says, “It may be that selves or persons are not unitary…What we are for ourselves and what we are for others might be quite different. “Person” may not pick out one thing or type of thing but rather apply to a cluster of things that tend to go together.”
Ordinarily, the parts of a person that exist for themselves exist in the same person-space as the parts that exist for others. But perhaps modern technology has changed that. When our friends pass away, but we continue to engage with them online, do their social parts live on?
Questions about whether the self is extended complicate the discussion. A handful of philosophers and psychologists since the late 1980s have suggested that that an adequate account of the self would not describe something contained solely within the body, but, rather, something that has additional parts, both social and physical.
If the extended self-thesis is true, then perhaps that feeling I have when I leave my phone behind when I go to work is not irrational, I really have left a part of myself behind. Indeed, my personal cell phone may provide better insight into who I am than my own self reporting. When I describe my character and report my own inner states, I am likely to participate in all kinds of familiar psychological biases—I’ll confirm traits that I admire and ignore those that I don’t. I’ll identify with positive behaviors and explain away the negative. I embrace the elements of myself that cohere with the tribal identities I want to maintain and reject those that don’t. This way, I’ll retain esteem of fellow human beings and remain a member in good standing of the social groups that make me who I am.
My phone, understood as more than just a physical object, won’t engage in self-deception like this. It serves as external memory storage and provides me with reminders to do things I might otherwise forget to do. It tracks my location and keeps a careful eye on what I search for on the internet. It knows what, when, and how frequently I text or e-mail the people in my life. It retains an impression of me that is likely far different from what I would report to others but is also likely considerably more accurate.
We’ve entered a brave new world when it comes to understanding ourselves as persons. Who are we and what are the conditions under which we survive? What is our relationship to both our possessions and to other people? Do we stand in the same relation to our social media accounts and cellphones that we once stood in to our notebooks or journals?
It may be the case that technology has changed the ontology of the self and what it means to survive. Or perhaps, instead, it just provides us with new ways to avoid difficult truths about the fragility of human existence.
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