Registration - It's Free, Join Now

A Crowd of One: The Future of Individual Identity

How do I know you are who you say you are? Why should I trust you? Where do we get our identities, our sense of who we are? What happens when our identities become digital? If we examine the historical origins of identity we can understand how our idea of ourselves is being influenced by technology and our modern world. We can look at principles of evolutionary biology to show how and why we evolved some of our unique capacities: trust, empathy, honor, virtue, leadership, reciprocity, and collaboration, and we can use the advances in neuroscience to debunk some of our strongest held beliefs about individualism and self-interest. Understanding what science tells us about identity can help us navigate a world that is continuously transforming itself, with implications for everything from understanding terrorist groups to social networking sites like MySpace and virtual worlds like Second Life.