The egocentric/allocentric conversion refers to the process that nervous systems use to convert our egocentric sensory information into allocentric constructs useful for making predictions about external behavior (aka, enabling coordinated social behavior). On a really high level, imagine a pack of wolves hunting. They only perceive the world from their own reference frame, but need to make group level predictions about each other and the object of their attention.
Nervous systems accomplish this task by essentially stripping out “the self” (in humans, this happens on the dorsal side of the hippocampal region), and “imagining” themselves as an object, which can then be manipulated around a place map relative to other objects.
Other brain regions apply the necessary context, the “self” is reconstructed (in humans, this occurs in the Deep Cerebellar Nuclei), and the perception stream is rebound with context on the ventral side of the hippocampus.
One of the really amazing things about technology is that it allows humans to perform this egocentric/allocentric conversion without doing the prior conversion. We will be able to see the world through other eyes, hear from other ears, and from that perspective directly instead of imagining it.
Thinking about this in terms of virtual reality (or even many augmented reality applications), we are introducing a wholly “unnatural” and kind of unprecedented sharing of sensory information much closer to the collective perception of bacteria than vertebrates.
Will technology reach the point were the egocentric construct is essentially superfluous?
My brain instantly jumps to “singularity” concepts, which unfortunately usually get advanced as “a single self” instead of “all selves”. It’s an artifact of our perception, a group of cells must “believe” it’s one organism to coordinate, a group of organisms must coordinate to believe it’s one “social unit”, a group of social units coordinate and so on down the line.
If technology unbinds us from the illusion of a single coherent organism and instead opens imparts the “many discrete units, coordinating” concept or “Super Sociality” how drastically will that effect our behavior and our sense of self?