Cyborg: Myth or reality? (original) (raw)

To be a cyborg: towards the dialogue between science and religion

SHS Web of Conferences, 2019

The paper deals with the consequences of technological transformation of the biological nature of human beings. How will our religious and scientific worldview change? What arguments for and against human cyborgization do naturalists and engineers, philosophers and futurologists propose? Answers to these questions can be decisive in determining the future of humanity. The Russian philosophers-cosmists were the first to put their minds to this problem; nowadays, this dialogue is conducted on the border between science and religion. The image of cyborg is a kind of testing ground for discussing philosophical concepts about human nature and interaction of man with the external world, about the limits of historical development and the meaning of human existence.

CHRISTIAN CYBORGS: A PLEA FOR A MODERATE TRANSHUMANISM

Should or shouldn't Christians endorse the transhumanist agenda of changing human nature in ways fitting to one's needs? To answer this question, we first have to be clear on what precisely the thesis of transhumanism entails that we are going to evaluate. Once this point is clarified, I argue that Christians can in principle fully endorse the transhumanist agenda because there is nothing in Christian faith that is in contradiction to it. In fact, given certain plausible moral assumptions, Christians should endorse a moderate enhancement of human nature. I end with a brief case study that analyses the theological implications of the idea of immortal Christian cyborgs. I argue that the existence of Christian cyborgs who know no natural death has no impact on the Christian hope of immortality in the presence of God.

The Cyborg and the Human: Origins, Creatureliness, and Hybridity in Theological Anthropology

2015

Are we cyborgs or humans? This question is at the heart of this investigation, and the implications of it are all around us. In Christian theology, humans are seen as uniquely made in the image of God (imago dei). This has been taken to mean various things, but broadly, it suggests an understanding of humans as somehow discrete from, and elevated above, other creatures in how they resemble God. Cyborgs mark a provocative attempt to challenge such notions, especially in the work of Donna Haraway, whose influential ?Cyborg Manifesto? (1991) elaborated a way of understanding cyborgs as figures for the way we live our lives not as discrete or elevated, but as deeply hybridised and involved in complex ways with technologies, as well as with other beings. Significantly, Haraway uses the cyborg to critique notions of the human rooted in theological anthropology and anthropogeny: the cyborg was not created in Eden. This assertion is the starting point of my investigation of cyborgs and huma...

Being cyborgs: on creating humanity in a created world of technology

Creative Creatures: Values and Ethical Issues in …

The modernist paradigm sees a dualism between mind and world, and, hence, between humans and the objective world. However, recent philosophical and neuroscientific developments are challenging the modernist assumptions. These developments suggest the image that humans are principally cyborgs. This paper gives a small outline of those developments and some philosophical and theological reflections as to their consequences.

Cyborg and Religious? Technonature and Technoculture

Scientia et Fides, 2016

We are all aware that our idea of natural/unnatural has been changing over the centuries. According to Donna Haraway, we must exit the maze of dualisms that has marred the relationships between human and non-human nature for centuries. Cyborg is a figure of speech and asymbol, but preeminently a description of our actual being in contemporary technonature. Her idea has been picked up by artists (e.g. Lynn Randolph, Patricia Piccinini) and philosophers and theologians. The cyborgian organism/ human and the world cannot be articulated in terms of black-and-white, us and them, friend and foe, kin and alien, good and evil etc. Our technonatural creatures require our care and love, curiosity and investigation, and there will always be unexpected consequences.

A Cyborgic Christianity: Transhumanism and the Tacit Dimension

Anyone who carefully pays attention to the arc of western cultural thought and practice since the rise of modernity will discern a progressively intensifying and spreading pursuit of abstractions as the most trusted means of representing the realities of nature and accessing their truths. Modern science's rise out of the so-called " premodern age of Faith " was significantly propelled by epic acts of abstraction from the meaning-laden and quality-saturated medieval cosmos. By bidding farewell to the cozy and reassuring medieval cosmos** and embracing the cold and abstract world picture of an infinite universe, rife with inert atoms in mechanical motion, the West acquired unprecedented capacities of explanation, prediction, and control of the vicissitudes of matter's ceaseless permutations.** The increases in our power to intellectually grasp and materially control nature eventually brought with it stupendous gains in human standards of living for a good portion of Earth's growing population. Yet, in recent decades, it has dawned on many that these improvements in material standards of living came with an unanticipated price: viz., a rather steep and almost unbearable reduction of the existential meaningfulness of life. Interestingly, our contemporary response to this rising awareness of disenchantment is not to question the spirit of abstraction that has dominated the West since the rise of modernity, but rather to push modernity even further in the direction of abstraction and the quantitative. The idea seems to be that by further

The End of the Human: The Cyborg Past and Present

Since the publication in 1985 of Donna Haraway’s influential Cyborg Manifesto the cyborg has been invoked as a key image with which to unlock contemporary Western culture. The cyborg is ‘part-human, part-machine cybernetic organism), hence it straddles both the territories of nature and of culture, the organic and the inorganic. In practical terms, the cyborg condition affects many contemporary individuals: the existence of cochlear implants and defibrillators, immunization and medications to alter psychological states, among other medical and technological innovations, ensure that many humans are no longer entirely ‘natural.’ However, what value is to be accorded to this transformation of humanity is the subject of fierce debate. Fascinatingly, it is not technological capacity that creates the image of the cyborg. Before the West could build complex machines, its mythology was distinguished by the inclusion of beings that were part human, part machine. These beings existed as acts of the creative imagination. This paper will consider: the bronze giant Talos, created by the mythological Greek inventor Daedalus; the Norse goddess Freyja; and the Celtic king god Nuada, all of whom are ‘cyborgs’ in the modern sense, whilst nonetheless being the imaginative products of more ‘primitive’ societies than that of the present.

In the Machine We Trust: Cyborg Body of Philosophy, Religion and Fiction (working paper)

The idea of mind uploading shows that in the philosophical sense, we are still deeply embedded in Cartesian dualisms and Newtonian mechanical ways of thinking. Moreover, this idea neglects our material existence, i.e. our embodied reality, no matter how obsolete or imperfect or unable to cope with exponential technological advancements it may be. In this paper I will attempt to step out of Eurocentric and anthropocentric thought in two ways. Firstly, by introducing the Chinese philosophical concept of Tao - through the etymology of the written character Tao I will comparatively analyze it with the concept of the Machine-God. Secondly, the desire to leave the meat behind emerging from the body-mind split will be criticized through the concept of embodied consciousness. In order for a mind or any other immaterial phenomena to be uploaded into a machine, it first has to be measured, pragmatically proven and materialized. This shows the discrepancy between our mechanical hardware / the inert matter and dynamical wetware / living bodies. The paper will be an attempt to provide a platform for more inclusive, anti-essentialist ways of thinking and debating the complex and intimate relations with our machines and their potential to shape possible posthuman futures.