Does Your Computer Know You Better Than You Do?

• In Event: Innovations in Methods and Theory

Abstract

What does it mean to “know yourself” today? French thinker Christian Fauré suggested that progress in neurosciences redefined the marketing of new technologies in order to respond to what seems a general and popular concern: getting direct access to our brain. According to Fauré, connected bracelets such as the Apple Watch, capable to calculate heart rate and blood pressure, can be thought as the reactualisation of Foucault’s understanding of the ethical principle “know yourself”.

Drawing on a philosophical background, the paper combines the work of Michel Foucault and Bernard Stiegler. It will be argued that if new technologies know how we function and can anticipate what we need, they fail to acknowledge us as desiring beings.
Knowing yourself, in the Foucauldian sense, is less a question of extracting data from your body, than an activity turned towards the cultivation of desire, curiosity and productivity. Agreeing with Foucault, Stiegler’s key idea is that human beings constitute and trans-form themselves through technical supports, so that self-knowledge is inevitably mediated by technologies.
The main implication is that in being designed to get closer to our brain, new technologies encourages us to think ourselves as a neuronal activity. However, for Stiegler, the human is more than its synapses, it is a being capable to surpass and sublimate its instincts. Human’s indeterminacy is what should be preserved for it is precisely what makes us human.
The paper wants to think the differences between brain and mind, needs and desire, in relation to the concept of personhood.

Author

• AMELIE ANGIE LAURA BERGER SORARUFF, University of Dundee