Laurence Léveillé | Staff Writer
Adam Birkan | Staff Photographer
Braden Allenby, Lincoln Professor of Engineering and Ethics at Arizona State University, delivers Monday’s morning lecture in the Amphitheater.
People have grown up to believe that self is built within them. But Braden Allenby argues that the Cartesian perspective is wrong.
To Allenby, Lincoln Professor of Engineering and Ethics at Arizona State University, self is the ability to adapt and integrate with the environment as it changes.
In his lecture, titled “Slow Sunset of the Self,” Allenby spoke about the meaning of self in a technological world and how multitasking has allowed younger generations to adapt to it. His Wednesday morning lecture in the Amphitheater was the third of Week Six, themed “Digital Identity.”
The world currently faces a digital divide between those who have access to computers and those who do not. One solution to close the gap has been to provide computers for the underprivileged. But there is another angle to consider.
If Allenby’s son were given a functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, while multitasking and Allenby did the same, the two scans’ outcomes would look different, Allenby said.
“It’s a fundamental difference in the way that brain is wired,” he said.
People’s brains are wired differently if they grow up embedded in social media, which means the cause of the digital divide could be more than a lack of access to technology, Allenby said.
“In fact,” he said, “what we are doing is probably creating different human varietals with an opportunity for discrimination that we have not had since the species began.”
There are people who believe multitasking degrades people’s intellectual capabilities, Allenby said, but it should not be viewed as a good or bad thing.
Access to information has fundamentally changed, he said. Whereas he was able to go to the library to find books from the catalog, today’s society has more information that needs to be processed.
Multitasking became a response to managing the flow of that information, he said. The real question, Allenby said, is whether multitasking is adaptive.
“Does it make them more fit for the environment they’re actually in?” he said. “And the answer to that, I’m afraid, is yes.”
The film “2001: A Space Odyssey” became a core example to Allenby’s lecture. In the film’s first scene, which Allenby described, an ape discovers that a bone can be used as a weapon. Allenby differentiated between the ape that once played with the bones and the one that used it as a weapon.
Though the ape was the same externally, it fundamentally changed internally — the image of self, he said. The same concept applies to technology, as people have had to integrate to it.
“If, in fact, like the ape, you are built to become something different as you are exposed and adapt to new technologies,” he said, “then you are something very different, and your self is something very different.”
Time also has an effect on people’s sense of self. The first system of time was developed because of railroads, Allenby said, but there has been a shift due to the Internet.
People have adapted to receiving information at a faster pace, and the different patterns of information restructure the brain. In turn, Allenby said, sense of self also changes.
“If I think of the self in terms of the Cartesian individual, I begin to get a failure mode, because it just doesn’t map under what’s happening,” he said.
In part, self is an information processing system, Allenby said, and it allows individuals to couple with other systems. It is a way to make sense of the world.
Individuals are built to couple with social and technological environments. When there are periods of rapid change, people must adapt quickly, he said.
But the ability to change is limited.
“There is a limit to how rapidly an individual self can evolve,” Allenby said. “There may be far less limit on how rapidly the socially appropriate self can evolve.”
Because Allenby is unable to multitask like his son and because of limitations, he said he and others like him have become obsolete.
Doctors in places such as Harvard and Stanford universities believe the first person to live to 150 years has already been born in the country, he said.
Allenby said he had asked his students if it would be a good idea for him to live until he is 150 years old — they said it was a wonderful idea.
“It’s a terrible idea,” he said. “I don’t think my self is capable of evolving as rapidly as the technologies evolving.”
In this world, people must continue to adopt new perspectives and adapt to stay in line with technology.
To evolve effectively, Allenby said, younger people must fill positions of authority more quickly than they are currently.
What distinguishes people from everything else, he said, is their ability to couple to changing environments while maintaining the illusion of self.
“I think what makes us truly human is precisely our ability to transcend the human,” Allenby said.
Q&A
Editor’s note: This Q&A has been edited for clarity and length.
Allenby
Photo by Adam Birkan.
Q: I’m wondering about this: I really appreciated your observation about how we’re set up to get rid of things we don’t need, because I’m getting rid of a lot of things like names and other sorts of things. It makes me wonder about that part of self that goes to empathy. I’m particularly curious about whether there has been research that indicates whether this adaptive process to technology and the enormity of information and multitasking makes us more transactional in our relationships and less empathetic. Is there any factual truth in that?
A: Like multitasking, this is an area that you have to be careful of, because what you tend to find is that whatever the researcher’s opinion is, it gets backed up by the research. That’s not to say they’re not trying to do good research. It’s to say that we really haven’t even properly formulated the questions. So, you have to take things with a grain of salt. My answer would be: if empathy requires greater bandwidth, then yes, we are becoming less empathic, but it’s adaptive, and not simply because people don’t want to talk to each other. What I mean by that is, let’s say that I engage in a personal discussion with you. As I do, if it’s face-to-face, we share an enormous amount of information, right? I notice the changes in the face; I notice when there’s a laugh indicating that he thinks I’m a jerk. I get all of this feedback. It’s a very broadband communication. It takes a long time, and it takes a lot of effort, energy and focus. When I’m interacting with somebody on Twitter, in contrast, there’s almost no bandwidth required. I get a little bit of information about them. I do something in return. It’s done in 20 seconds, and I move on. If you live in an environment that is information-dense, inevitably, I think, you will find that more and more of your transactions are of the Twitter kind, as opposed to the deep interaction kind. What that implies to me is not necessarily that one is good or bad. I personally think it’s bad. But, I would, right? That’s because my belief structure reflects the time and period and technologies I’m accustomed to and all that sort of stuff. But I think what it does say is that the evolution toward lower-bandwidth communication is one that’s driven by agility and adaptation to current environments, not necessarily just by the technology — which is, of course, a part of the environment, but by the fact that there’s much more information being managed now than there was before.
Q: This may go to some of the things you talk about this week: what is the mental state of a suicide bomber? Is that self or group?
A: This is not my field. So, let me be a little careful. I think the mental state of a suicide bomber necessarily has to be at least partially group, because what you’re asking an individual to do is to destroy themselves. We have fairly strong inhibitions against that kind of behavior. But, of course, some people still do it. Suicide, even some forms of very risky behavior — suicide bombing — to do that, you have to submerge your individual existence in the values of the group. Now notice: this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. If you couldn’t do that, you wouldn’t have strong churches, perhaps. You wouldn’t have militaries. The group side of the self is a very important side of the self. My impression as an outsider looking at the literature I have is that the group-self is not as well studied or understood as the Cartesian self. But it’s beginning to be appreciated more and more as critical for precisely these kinds of reasons.
Q: Hasn’t the brain or the sense of self changed throughout human history — your point about the apes being a specific example — and if that’s all true, why even worry about it? These questioners go to the Buddhist philosophy that posits there’s no such thing as the self, and in fact, our attachment to this non-existent thing is the source of all suffering. Would you comment on those thoughts?
A: First, let me comment on basically whether or not anything has changed. Second, let me comment on all of Buddhism. With any luck I won’t get to the second part of the question. I think this is an interesting area, because, of course, we have always changed and our technologies have always changed. If you look at the very broad sweep of history, what you find is, at least in terms of economic productivity, there are literally thousands of years where we exist at subsistence level. There’s a few people that manage to pull some surplus off, but by and large, almost everybody exists at subsistence level. Then you see a huge takeoff with the Industrial Revolution — nothing new there. Along with that, you do see changes in self. There was a book that came out many years ago called the Bicameral Mind, which basically argued that the kind of person you were 2,000 years ago was fundamentally different than the kind of person you are now. The self was fundamentally different. That depends on how you measure it and everything else, but I think that’s probably a reasonable way to look at it, because I think being human means that you are tightly coupled into your time, your space, your technologies and your culture. Because of that, I think that it clearly has changed. What is different now, I think — and this is an argument you can take both ways, so I’ll give you the argument and I’ll give you my perspective, but I do not say my perspective is right. The question is: Are we now in a period of change that is so fundamental that it’s different somehow from periods of change that have gone before? I think you can argue that both ways. My personal take is that the combination of change and accelerating change in fundamental technologies: nanotech, biotech, information and communication technologies, robotics — we didn’t even talk about lethal autonomous robots and whether or not they have selves, and who is the self that gets blamed when they go wrong — and cognitive science. Because of the very rapid and accelerating changes in those fields, I think it is arguable that we now face a period where far more the human is a design space than it has ever been in the past. There is at least foreseeable technology that would allow me to design any part of you. Not just genetics. I will be able to redesign your neurosystems. I will be able to redesign the way you think. I will be able to redesign your emotional structure. That’s coming. It’s going to take a while, but that’s clearly coming. That’s different. What it means to be human has always changed — sometimes rapidly, sometimes slowly — but, I can’t think of a period in history where so much of the human has been contingent precisely because it is becoming an engineering space. If you don’t want me to engineer you, you’d better figure out what you don’t want me touching, because I’m going after everything I can get my grubby little engineer paws on. Not me personally, of course, but our society, our culture. You know why? Because the culture that learns how to do that is going to be the culture that grows to dominate future worlds. The Russians know that, the Chinese know that, the Indians know that, we know that. This is not simply a talkfest. This is the bleeding edge of cultural competition in the world today. It’s not something to take lightly.
—Transcribed by Grant Engle
The Chautauquan Daily 
