For the longest time, one of my favorite books (even before my own battle with a disease trying to kill me) was “Mortality” by Christopher Hitchens. This is a short collection of essays he wrote after being diagnosed with terminal cancer, up until the moment he passed. In it, he says the following:
It’s normally agreed that the question “How are you?” doesn’t put you on your oath to give a full or honest answer. So when asked these days, I tend to say something cryptic like, “A bit early to say.” (If it’s the wonderful staff at my oncology clinic who inquire, I sometimes go so far as to respond, “I seem to have cancer today.”) Nobody wants to be told about the countless minor horrors and humiliations that become facts of “life” when your body turns from being a friend to being a foe: the boring switch from chronic constipation to its sudden dramatic opposite; the equally nasty double cross of feeling acute hunger while fearing even the scent of food; the absolute misery of gut–wringing nausea on an utterly empty stomach; or the pathetic discovery that hair loss extends to the disappearance of the follicles in your nostrils, and thus to the childish and irritating phenomenon of a permanently runny nose. Sorry, but you did ask… It’s no fun to appreciate to the full the truth of the materialist proposition that I don’t have a body, I am a body.
The phrase “I don’t have a body, I am a body” is one that I’ve thought about a million times since I first read it, and even more often as of late. I think I’ve come to the conclusion that I am not a body.
Some say that the concept of the “self” is artificial, and is an adaptation that has evolved over millions of years as a way of encouraging humans to want to reproduce and further their genes. Perhaps there is a species-level benefit to the concept of the self, but that still doesn’t feel adequate enough for an explanation to me. Perhaps I’m fooling myself, but I do tend to believe that I exist as something more than a collection of cells and a home for billions of bacteria. Then again, maybe that’s what the bacteria want me to think.
After all I’ve gone through with multiple kidney transplants and multiple blood transfusions, I really don’t think of myself as being my body. The closest I can get to that is thinking perhaps I am my brain, or at least, the person that my brain is rendering. But it feels like there’s more to it. For lack of a better word, it feels like a spirit of some sort, but not in a supernatural way. It’s an essence. It’s a feeling, a certain level of knowing and being.
In certain online communities, it’s an established norm to not use the phrase “IRL” (meaning “In Real Life”). The internet really is real life, and what happens there is as much a part of our reality as the air we breathe and the ground we walk upon. Instead, the term “AFK (Away from Keyboard)” is preferred.
In much the same way that I feel like I’m not a body but in a body, I find that when I connect with cyberspace I’m not any less there than I am here. Sure, I’m physically in a chair, but in a much grander sense I’m out there.
The environment that we all come together to build very much exists. When I interact with the systems that others build, that world exists as much as my kitchen does when I step into it. When I read the words that others write, I fill my head with the words that the authors put out into the world, and I construct meaning from them.
The digital systems that we build are very much a part of our lives. And the time we spend online is as real as the time that we spend walking through a park, or sitting on a couch watching TV with a loved on. Online life is real life, as much as offline life.
Because I think of my body more as a vessel, I see it more like a physical device. Much like a computer is just the means to allow you to go places and do things, the body is a way to experience the world, and in a much larger sense, life itself. So when I see people modifying their bodies, or making decisions about how they want them to function, I more and more find myself impressed with their tenacity. If your vessel doesn’t serve the spirit inside, and you have the means of modifying or otherwise biohacking it to bend to your will, why wouldn’t you?
Each of us has but one existence, one turn on the merry-go-round. We are born, we mess about for a bit, and then we cease to be. But I submit to you that your online existence is an extension of your corporeal existence: treat it with the reverence and care it deserves.