Bostrom, "Why I Want to be a Posthuman When I Grow Up," 8 Personal Identity

by Corry Shores
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As posthumans, will we become more of who we now are? Or will we be more than who we now are?

Nick Bostrom

"Why I Want to be a Posthuman When I Grow Up"

VIII. Personal Identity

It still could be that it is not better for some given person to take-up a posthuman lifestyle, even if that lifestyle is proven better for some other person.

It could be that in order to become posthuman, we might have to cease being who we are now. If what makes us who we are involves some of our limitations, then maybe we would not be better sacrificing them to become posthuman.

Bostrom counters that becoming posthuman does not mean taking up completely different personality traits. Rather it enhances the skills and capacities we already have. So we can preserve our personal identity even in transition to posthumanity.

In fact, life-span enhancements would serve to preserve our personal identities, not risk them.

Walter Glannon's argument is essentially that after 200 years of life, we lose touch with our past. And, we currently do not project a sense of our future that far. So when we get to 200, we will not be ourselves in the way we will be ourselves at the normal dying age of around 100.

Bostrom counters that certainly we may have 200 year long projects and anticipations for our lives. We need only see it as possible, and extend our current plans.

Furthermore, if Glennon is right, then what about the fact that we cannot remember much from our early childhood? According to Glennon, we should not age to a point where we forget our past. But all of us do so in the first parts of our development from infancy to young adulthood.

Bostom offers a number of considerations to allow us to see how personal identity would be preserved in a transition to posthumanity:

a) we add new capacities, and we do not eliminate old ones

b) the changes are gradual

c) the subject chooses the changes

d) new capacities do not inhibit the old ones from being employed

e) we retain all our memories

f) we retain our relationships and social connections

g) the transition fits into one's life-narrative.

When someone migrates to a new country, they often adapt culturally. Their personality might change radically. But we do not say that it threatens their personal identity. Posthuman transitions would be no different then.

In fact, the changes from childhood to adult are just as drastic as from human to posthuman.

Certainly it makes more sense to see personal identity as having some fluidity. So a posthuman enhancement would fit into this conventional sense of selfhood.

Those who are religious might already believe in a radical transformation of selfhood that is no more drastic a transformation as becoming posthuman.

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Nick Bostrom. "Why I Want to be a Posthuman When I Grow Up." Forthcoming in Medical Enhancement and Posthumanity, eds. Bert Gordijn and Ruth Chadwick (Springer), 2007.

PDF available at:

http://www.nickbostrom.com/posthuman.pdf