CONCEPT
The Diminished Self
The Augustinian-Lockean thesis that identity is constituted by memory — and the consequence that progressive externalization is a progressive thinning of selfhood itself.
Augustine entered his own memory in Book X of the
Confessions and found there not a storehouse but a self. Memory, for the tradition he founded, is not a record of identity but the medium in which identity is constructed. Locke formalized the intuition: personal identity consists in the continuity of
consciousness, and consciousness is fundamentally a matter of memory.
Eric Kandel's Nobel-winning research on
memory consolidation confirmed what philosophy had proposed: memory involves the literal synthesis of new proteins and the physical restructuring of synaptic connections. The person who has internalized a body of knowledge is, at the level of cellular structure, a different person from the one who has not. The knowledge is not in her. It is her. When knowledge migrates to the machine, the neural restructuring internalization would have produced does not occur. The person who uses AI without internalizing what it provides remains who she was before the knowledge was available — augmented in capability, unaltered in cognitive structure. She can do more. She has not become