A paper investigating the ways that modernity has bought about bodily and social change via technological 'progress' (original) (raw)
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Dissolving Nature: How Descartes Made Us Posthuman
Techne: Research in Philosophy and Technology, 2012
This paper is a historical inquiry into the philosophical fault-line that leads from mechanicism to posthumanism. I focus on a central aspect of posthumanism: the erosion of the distinction between organism and machine, nature and art, and the biological and engineering sciences. I claim that shift can be placed in the seventeenth century, in Descartes’ biology. Although Descartes is known primarily as the philosopher of the cogito, the mythical cradle of rational humanism, I argue that the dawn of the modern human was also the place of its undoing. The Cartesian fusion of the natural and the technological opened the door to distinctly posthuman understandings of the living body, its relation to technological extensions, and the possibility of its drastic alteration. Descartes’ scientific writings are a kind of laboratory, rehearsing the theoretical and practical amalgamation of machines and organisms in at least two senses: (a) the prosthetic and instrumental enhancement of the body, its technological production, extension and mediation; and (b) the functional integration of machines and organisms in medical, industrial, military, and other contexts. Cartesian mechanicism demanded a reconceptualization of bodily boundaries, organismic unity, natural finality, causation, and bio/technological instrumentality-all of which Descartes boldly attempted to theorize in terms of the wondrous technologies of his day. As the living vanished into the immanent plane of the machine, nature could no longer be taken as a clear source of normative frameworks, and the category of ‘nature’ became nearly impossible to define. Also, Descartes’ radical proposal obscured the possibility of thinking the human as ontologically unique, or as having an ideal unity, despite its privileged relationship to the immaterial (the soul-body union). In what follows, we will examine the posthuman ramifications of these aspects.
Extended Mind, Anthropogenesis, and Posthumanist vs. Transhumanist Futures (Syllabus)
To many people, it seems natural to conceive of the mind as a kind of ‘sandwich’ (Hurley) with cognition as the inner filling, wedged between action and perception. According to this model, mental states and activities are intimately tied to what’s going on inside the head, but only indirectly related to our bodies, our interactions with other people, and the world around us. In this course, we consider a loosely knit family of alternative approaches which study human agency and cognition as embodied, embedded, extended, and enacted (‘4E’) phenomena. In particular, we take as our focal point the ‘extended mind’ thesis, which asserts that our minds are ‘hybrid’ entities that emerge from the dynamic interplay between brains, bodies, and environmental resources such as symbols, tools, artifacts, cultural practices, norms, group structures, and social institutions. In the first part of the course, we take our cue from Clark’s (2008) flagship presentation of the ‘extended mind’ thesis. By comparing Clark’s thesis with related developments, we explore its implications for understanding human cognition, affect, knowledge, rationality, and education. In the second part of the course, we examine Malafouris’s (2013) cross-disciplinary framework (‘material engagement theory’) for studying the human predisposition to reconfigure our bodies and minds by means of artifacts, tools, and material culture. Importantly, technologies are not simply ‘neutral instruments’ that facilitate our existence, but actively give shape to what we do, how we experience the world, and how we live our lives. To analyze the moral significance of technology, we take as our starting point Verbeek’s (2011) ‘post-phenomenological’ approach to moral agency as a property of human-technology associations rather than, as traditionally conceived, an exclusively human affair. In the third and last part of the course, we reflect on emergent scientific, technological, socio-economic, and political developments that (further) blur the boundaries between the traditional category of the human and its various ‘others,’ such as animals and machines, and that seem to be on a path to take us beyond human beings as we currently know them. Coming to terms with the potential displacement of ‘humanity’ as the shared reference point of our identity presents a formidable challenge. In our course, we contrast two strikingly different projections of what it means to be ‘human’ into the future: the ‘post-humanist’ framework outlined by Braidotti (2013), versus the ‘trans-humanist’ project advocated by Fuller (2010).
People consider themselves intuitively as a separate and intact identity. They can agree on the existence of the community's social bonds. After all, as Aristotle, the legendary Greek philosopher, said, “Man is by nature a social animal.” But the idea that they are not in full control of their body & mind, and that some part of them is shared by all others in the community, is too much to swallow. However, is it possible to rely on intuition? Intuition is an unreliable crutch to bear the weight of proof regarding the nature of our own self. We assume by intuition that our skin separates us from the others, thus make us a stand alone entity. But is it really? The illusion of consciousness brings us to thinking that we are strongly differentiated from others. This is not the case!
Post-Humanism Humanity beyond the Realm of Humanism
Leonardo Da Vinci has provided the classical definition of Humanism in the form of ‘ideal’ Vitruvian Man and there has been numerous efforts into making it work in a universal context, to make an ideal definition to represent all of the Humanity in one point. This effort has lit a fire of dispute among the scholars and has given birth to different opinionated sub-divisions in context of critique, analysis and further discoveries. Humanism has travelled from Eurocentric, imperialistic concept with massive opposition and critique on individualism, superiority over ‘others’ in a path of Anti-Humanism and finally we are standing with the concept of Post-Humanism where the scholars are trying to find another way to reach the definition in an ‘Affirmative” way. From Rosi Braidotti’s text “Post-Human: Life beyond the Self”, we see that to reach a proper definition of Humanism, it is so far has been proved that none of the classical concepts are enough to build the definition of Humanism. Rather, in different contexts, we have to go back to some dissected ideologies and build our argument over their ashes while the previously contradicted ideologies are rising as Phoenix over and over again. Coming from the Anti-Humanist background, Braidotti is convinced that the classical definition of Humanism is not satisfactory and her years of experience along with her ethical, political and scholarly efforts in Anti-Humanism, she has reached a point where she is more convinced to Post-Humanism from a critical point of view. Posthumanism deal not only with the concept of ‘Self’, but also it takes into account the ‘Other’. Where the ‘Other’ does not belong to the boundary of species. In this point, the identity of species enters the argument. This text will shed light on this point with the help from Donna Haraway’s text “When Species Meet”. The discussion will follow the journey Humanism took to evolve throughout the passage of thoughts, time and history while trying to figure out a way to define identity of the actors involved. A brief discussion on ‘Identity’ will be a part of this paper. Moreover, how our perception of the world and how the elements define our communication with other species are also discussed briefly.
The Problem of Dualism: The Self as a Cultural Exaptation
IAFOR Journal of Ethics, Religion and Philosophy, 2017
Human mind has undergone a complex evolution throughout the history of our genus, Homo. The brain structures and processes that make this mental activity possible have been the result of a series of evolutionary patterns not only biological but also cultural, so it is possible to assume that consciousness did not emerge with the same characteristics in our predecessors. One of the most distinctive features that reflects the conscious image of the archaic man is the absence of a dualistic interpretation of reality. This apparition stem from our analytical mind as an exaptation, commonly assigned to the activity of the left hemisphere which is attributed to play a greater role in linguistic activity. This paper introduces the idea that, along with other abilities such as linguistic predisposition, spatial perception and pattern recognition, human beings are also born with an innate tendency to interpret and represent the surrounding world in antithetical terms, that is, in antinomies. The idea of Self as an exaptation arises from the cultural development of our species closely influenced by the ripening of our cognitive structures and the evolution of human natural language. This illusory perception of Self also conditions scientific activity, giving birth to a new form of knowledge that attributes a new value judgment to man and life.
Living life in contemporary times, everyone experiences the power of influence of new technologies. These technologies mediate our forms of life, work and leisure, social contacts and communication, forms of our mobility in an urban environment, forms of our self-identification. The changing human condition we experience nowadays is the subject of investigation by posthumanism, which is an interdisciplinary field of theoretical reflection on the posthuman. Margolis' definition of the human self embraces both the human and the posthuman, still allowing for theorization on the specific characteristics of each of them. This fact not only resolves the problem of defining posthuman, but also serves to overcome the crisis of the Humanities.