The Posthuman Condition Consciousness beyond the brain pot

The Posthuman Condition Consciousness beyond the brain Robert Pepperell THE POSTHUMAN CONDITION [...]... to these later in the book What is a human? Like the separation between mind and body already discussed, the separation between the body and the world is deeply embedded into our habitual conception of our own existence Further to what has already been suggested, I wish to reinforce the claim that the apparent separation between the human and the environment is invalid in the posthuman era and, therefore,... range of attributes there are varying layers and densities of consciousness that can be more 13 THE POSTHUMAN CONDITION or less successfully distinguished But for the purposes of this discussion we will consider these variations as homogeneous, while tacitly acknowledging the greater complexities of the subject The supreme organ Roland Barthes, in his book Mythologies, speaks of The Brain of Einstein’,... starts to fidget All these apparently ‘mental’ states seem more easily identified by their ‘physical’ attributes It seems the distinction between mental and physical states might be increasingly dubious 19 THE POSTHUMAN CONDITION What is the matter? If it is the case that the long-held separation between brain and body, or between the mental and the physical, is being eroded as the tide of contemporary... modelling the human brain in order to replicate the mind However, as will be discussed later, traditionally this has tended to towards a rather ‘disembodied’ understanding of the mind as a brain- determined’ phenomenon Taking their cue from the ‘situatedness’ of the embodied human brain, a new generation of researchers are building systems that more closely mimic the real behaviour of brains and bodies in the. .. strangely new I have labelled this the posthuman condition , and I hope it will become clear why 1 THE POSTHUMAN CONDITION Posthuman technologies Humans have imagined for a long time that the ability to develop and control technology was one of the defining characteristics of our condition, something that assured us of our superiority over other animals and our unique status in the world Ironically, this... knowledge of everything else in the universe) At the same time we are told that there are “more synapses in the brain than there are stars in the galaxy.” Whatever the accuracy of these compelling facts, it seems we are to be left in no doubt as to the supremacy of this organ over all other objects Dead heads Joseph-Ignace Guillotin (1738-1814), who is often credited with inventing the comparatively rational... better when they are able to take into account information about other minibrains around them and the status of their environment They conclude that intelligent behaviour requires more than just brain processing power: the bodily vehicle and awareness of activity in the surroundings are crucial to good overall performance This seems to imply some deep unity between the active world and the active,... without treating any of them superficially My hope is that this has been, at least partially, achieved If I had to summarise my own feelings about the posthuman condition, I would say we are nearing an awareness of the energy of existence — there is the tangible crackle of a storm in the air iv Introduction to the technological climate of posthumanism The background to this book is the climate of increasingly... being realised through the efforts of researchers at the MIT Touch Lab in the US, and no doubt also through the considerable discomforts of several owl monkeys (Wessberg 2000) The brains of these creatures were wired to remote scanning systems that ‘learned’ to interpret brain activity related to motor tasks such as reaching for food The system was then able to correctly interpret the brain activity and... between the skin and the scent it emits, or between an object perceived and the object itself, is necessarily contingent and arbitrary The general implication is that we can never determine the absolute boundary of the human, either physically or mentally In this sense, nothing can be external to a human because the extent of a human can’t be fixed The consequences as far as the posthuman condition . The Posthuman Condition Consciousness beyond the brain Robert Pepperell THE POSTHUMAN CONDITION