Technology

A device may help introduce bodily experience to conscious awareness when it reflects a state a person cannot yet feel. The article says technology is expected to improve rapidly and continuously. The article contrasts expectations of technological improvement with expectations of bodily decline. Technology’s value depends on whether it reconnects a person with self-perception or replaces it with avoidance. The article argues that tethering humans to technology and science could allow self-improvement to match scientific advancement. Technology is treated as ambivalent because it can either disconnect people from themselves or reconnect them with bodily awareness. Social media, passive media, and compulsive phone use are discussed as avoidance of being alone with oneself. Biofeedback technologies such as heart rate variability training are presented as potentially useful mirrors.