The Buffered and Porous Self

In A Secular Age (2007), Taylor traces how the modern Western self came to understand itself as buffered — maintaining firm boundaries between inside and outside, experiencing meaning as something the self generates rather than something the world impresses upon it. The pre-modern self, by contrast, was porous: open to spirits, cosmic forces, meanings embedded in the natural and social order that could act upon the self from outside its boundaries. The buffered self is the self of modern individualism, sovereign author of its own meanings. The AI collaboration produces a new kind of porosity — permeability to an intelligence that is not the self's own but that shapes what the self thinks, says, and comes to believe.