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107 sats \ 2 replies \ @DiedOnTitan 13 May \ on: Thoughts on the exoself mostly_harmless
The vast majority of people exist exclusively within themselves and when they die, they are completely and utterly forgotten. To put it in your terms, they have no exoself. The only people we know of from 100 or 1,000+ years ago are those who have:
- Lived a life worth writing about.
- Wrote something worth reading. And this is a high bar, because the vast majority of writing will not survive the cruel threshing machine of time.
I think that's sort-of true, and is one implication of an exoself of sufficient breadth / magnitude that other people care about it, or that it even incorporates them in some fashion s.t. they become part of each other in important ways.
But there are also much "smaller" variants that are interesting to me. For instance, a friend of mine, the most talented hacker that I know, has turned his house into an extension of himself -- both how the place is designed, how it's decorated, and the million little hacky features where he's built to augment it. To go into his house is to enter a part of his Being. You're very aware of being present in the heart of a respirating meta-organism, part of it.
This guy is pretty amazing and stands a reasonable chance of being remembered in 100 years for other things, but this would still be a beautiful and impressive type of exoself even if that weren't true.
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That sounds fascinating and intriguing. And it adds color to your exoself idea with a very concrete example. A physical extension of a person that made their house an extension of their body or mind.
I was thinking more of a metaphysical extension of one's being captured in art or writing where a person's physical being, which inevitably withers, is replaced by a metaphysical embodiment of their mind which if done well has the potential for immortality. When one thinks of Socrates for example, although he did not write a single word, Plato captured his dialogues in a timeless manner where we have a very good sense of who he was shaped by Plato's writings that survive.
There are more abstract examples, such as Euclid, who gave us Elements, which laid the foundation for mathematics. His writing tells no story with no characters, but the progression of his theorems are so elegantly structured that we get a sense of the greatness of his mind - or exoself.
And of course, Satoshi gave us Bitcoin which has every possibility of surviving for centuries and positioning his exoself among the very greats in history.
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