This post is more about philosophy than about pandemic. While the teaser suggests tantalizingly "we are embodied beings and digital communication can feel lacking" the article doesn't really discuss "what will happen to our sense of identity as we interface with others, increasingly, as avatars and not beings in physical space? Will we embrace our disembodiment, or recoil from it?" Instead, we get a (not useless) excursion into Derek Parfit's Reasons and Persons. The problem is, the 'disembodiedness' Parfit talks about is very different from the 'disembodiedness' of using Zoom and Slack and the rest. We're still in our bodies when we use these tools. So none of the sidetrack discussion into 'stream of consciousness' or 'waking with the body of a beetle' is relevant here. None of that has happened or is in danger of happening.
Today: 4 Total: 96 [Direct link] [Share]
