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- First, the posthuman view privileges informational pattern over
material instantiation, so that embodiment in a biological substrate is
seen as an accident of history rather than an inevitability of life.
Second, the posthuman view considers consciousness, regarded as the seat
of human identity in the Western tradition long before Descartes thought
he was a mind thinking, as an epiphenomenon, as an evolutionary upstart
trying to claim that it is the whole show when in actuality it is only a
minor sideshow. Third, the posthuman view thinks of the body as the
original prosthesis we all learn to manipulate, so that extending or
replacing the body with other prostheses becomes a continuation of a
process that began before we were born. Fourth, and most important, by
these and other means, the posthuman view configures human being so that
it can be seamlessly articulated with intelligent machines. In the
posthuman, there are no essential differences or absolute demarcations
between bodily existence and computer simulation, cybernetic mechanism
and biological organism, robot teleology and human goals.
N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in
Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics, Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1999, pp. 2-3.
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- Rodney Brooks discusses the future of this merger of (nanoscale)
robotic technology with biotechnology:
- We are on a path to changing our genome in profound ways. Not simple
improvements toward ideal humans as is often feared. In reality, we will
have the power to manipulate our own bodies in the way we currently
manipulate the design of machines. We will have the keys to our own
existence. There is no need to worry about mere robots taking over from
us. We will be taking over from ourselves with manipulatable body plans
and capabilities easily able to match that of any robot.
Rodney Brooks, Flesh and Machines, p. 236.
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- An object of technological determinism?
- Or….
- Hybrid entity constructed through networks materially real, socially
regulated, and discursively constructed?
- Body an interpretive frame, historically, contingently constructed along
with our machines and the world they inhabit
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- How can we get the “body” back in?
- Discursive bodies vs embodiment
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- Ability to tell stories:
- Frog, Where Are You—24 page picture book
- Children and adults are asked to represent the (pictorially presented)
characters linguistically, and relate them in terms of their actions
across time and space in the form of a cohesive/coherent narrative.
- References did not necessarily "originate" from the pictures:
Narrators of the picture story - often - chose to override a pictorially
presented facial expression of one of the characters with a reference to
the "opposite" emotion. For instance, a boy, whose face was
obviously expressing anger, and who was linguistically referred to as angry
when the picture was presented as a single, isolated picture, was
referred to as happy (by the same subject three minutes later) when
referring to this picture in the narrating activity of establishing the Frog,
Where Are You? story
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- The normal mind is not beautifully unified, but rather a problematically
yoked-together bundle of partly autonomous systems. All parts of the
mind are not equally accessible to each other at all times. These
modules or systems sometimes have internal communication problems which
they solve by various ingenious and devious routes. If this is true (and
I think it is), it may provide us with an answer to a most puzzling
question about conscious thought: what good is it?
- No one has ever seen a self.
- "For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself,
I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or
cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can
catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe
anything but the perception.... If anyone, upon serious and unprejudiced
reflection, thinks he has a different notion of himself, I must confess
I can reason no longer with him. All I can allow him is, that he may be
in the right as well as I, and that we are essentially different in this
particular. He may, perhaps, perceive something simple and continued,
which he calls himself; though I am certain there is no such principle
in me."
- David Hume, Treatise on Human Nature, I, IV, sec. 6.
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