Part VI: Transcendence

The Digital Transition: Externalizing Cognition

The Digital Transition—the late 20th–early 21st century transformation in which human cognition becomes increasingly distributed across computational systems—has reshaped consciousness in ways both expansive and corrosive:

Extended world models: Access to vast information stores
Compressed attention spans: Fragmented integration
Created new social scales: Global instantaneous connection
Enabled new superorganisms: Platforms as emergent agents
Challenged self-model coherence: Multiple online identities, constant comparison

Warning

The digital transition has expanded some affect dimensions while contracting others. Integration ( $\intinfo$ ) is threatened by fragmentation. Effective rank ( $\reff$ ) is both expanded (more options) and collapsed (algorithm-driven narrowing). Self-model salience ( $\selfsal$ ) is often pathologically elevated through social media dynamics.

The digital transition is also the most rapid $\iota$ -raising event in human history. Every experience mediated by a screen is an experience with participatory cues stripped: no body to read, no breath to feel, no shared physical space to co-inhabit. Digital mediation interposes a high- $\iota$ interface between persons, between persons and information, between persons and their own memories (now stored as data rather than lived recollection). The result is a population whose default perceptual configuration is higher- $\iota$ than any previous generation’s—not because they chose mechanism but because the medium chose it for them.