The Human Body - Data Made Flesh Essay Example for Free

The military personnel Body Data make Flesh EssayThe title of this essay derives from the words uttered by the protagonist, Henry Case, in William Gibsons novel Neuromancer (1984). This metaphor, which equates the humanityity race bole as mere data turned into flesh encompasses the theory that in an age of increasing focus on knowledge technologies and the ways in which people interface with them, the landmark distinguishing an individual from their surroundings be precipitates blurred, if non shattered entirely. As University of Chicagos William Fulton attests, we exist simply as information systems that hap spell to inhabit the material instantiation of our bodies, (Theories of Media, 2007). However, one cannot enter discussion ab surface the above return with forbidden first alluding to the particular school of thought which harbours critical theory of this ilk. Exponents of this style of dictum would usually come under the banner of Posthumanists. The line itself, P osthumanism, is steeped in hyperbole in that it automobileries with it an ominous sense of foreboding in contemporary culture, where in that respect is a strong case for the premise that society is becoming less human, as we retreat behind the veil of technology.To draw upon the direct translation of post as after(prenominal) would infer the meaning, after-human which in some respects gives us a cle atomic number 18r understanding of the concept, as it tends to deal with the cuttingfangled development of the integration of technology and biology and the human body. It is basically a notion that we, as world ar becoming increasingly embedded in technology and the technological environment that, in a sense, the paradigm of the natural human being has shifted in meaning.Juxtaposed with this is the idea that as public be more and more subsumed in technology, technology is becoming more and more human with advances in light and Artificial Intelligence (AI). Fukuyama advanced th e concept of Posthumanism as a negative case that of anti-humanism or absence of humanism. He bemoans the transgression of crucial moral boundaries that hand over eroded the ethical distinctions between therapy and technological enhancement (Our Posthuman Future 2002).Gordijn Chadwick describe a posthuman as a being that has at least one posthuman cognitive content i.e. a general cardinal message greatly exceeding the maximum attain sufficient by some(prenominal) current human being without recourse to new technological means (Why I Want to be a Posthuman when I Grow Up, 2006). Mc Luhan did not use the exact word hardly he predicted a future that dovetails succinctly with posthuman theories surrounding cybernetics when he foretells a society whereby to paraphrase Hayles theory of reflexivity (1999) that which has been used to generate a system is do to set out part of the system it generates.McLuhan alluded to the cybernetic chess opening of human beings interfacing an d entangling with machines on a neurological and functional level. Just as binoculars atomic number 18 an propagation of the eye and clothes are an extension of the skin, then information technologies become McLuhans extension of the mind. In this respect, the term post-humanism has only really worked itself into contemporary critical discourse in the humanities and social sciences since the mid 1990s, everyplace a decade after Mc Luhans death.However, it may be traced back to the Macy conferences on cybernetics from 1946 to 1953 and the wile of systems theory (What is Posthumanism? , Wolfe, 2010). At these conferences they converged on a new theoretical model for biological, mechanical and dialogueal processes that aloof the human and Homo sapiens from each particular privileged position in relation to matters of meaning, information and cognition. The term cybernetics had been coined by Wiener in the 1940s to denote the entire field of control and communication theory, whet her in the machine or in the animal.Even at this early stage of technology there was a definitive study underway into the correlation of information between machines and living creatures. In the sixties this theory was change into the concept of reflexivity alluded to above. Systems re-entangle with themselves, and become referential to themselves blurring the traditionally accepted borders imposed on the world between subject and object, object and environment, or in other words between the total and the natural and the technological and the cultural, a principal tenet of modern posthumanist thought.In current popular use, Fulton describes cybernetics as most often associated specifically with the development of schmaltzy intelligence, virtual technology and cyberspace. He attests, cybernetics in the scene of technology is only a limited part of a greater full-page, which deals with the study of information systems and the media in which they exist, both inorganic and organic . Further and further extension of the idea leads to a model of the world in which media serve as a series of irrelevant substrates through which pure information freely flows.This mail service ties in with many of Mc Luhans ideas about media in society but most particularly with his ideas about the extension of the mind, extending human beings central nervous systems into electromagnetic technology, a topic, I willing count on later in the essay. There is much critical opinion to support Gibsons notion of humans as information systems just exchangeable a machine or electronic computer.Clark (Natural-born Cyborgs, 2001) believes that it is by virtue of our inalienable ability to merge with external resources to perform even the most rudimentary of calculations that we are designed to head hand in hand with technology in a posthuman future. He offers the example of how we utilise pen and paper to work out moderately complex mathematics, storing the immediate results outside the brain and then reiterate the pattern until the larger problem is solved.It is because our brains, more than any other animal on the planet, are fix to seek and consummate such intimate relations with non-biological resources that we end up capable of abstract thought. we are natural-born cyborgs forever ready to merge our mental activities with operations of pen and paper and electronics. (Clark, Natural-born Cyborgs, 2001) Wiener asserted that we have to become technophiles to operate in a technological world (1954). He noted that because we have modified our environments so radically it is now necessary to modify ourselves in order to exist in this new environment.Furthermore, he equated the now routine breakdown and repair of the human body with that of replacing a awry(p) part in a machine. With contemporary advances in technology allowing us to alter or gross(a) many undesirable parts or areas of our bodies with a specifically manufactured replacement it begs the quest ions, what does it mean to be human and what does it mean to be a machine in the twenty-first century? If corneal implants are part of us, why not contact lenses? If contacts, why not eyeglasses? If eyeglasses, why not alter telescope?If a telescope, why not the computer interfaced with it? (Hayles, Designs on the Body Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics and the Play of Metaphor, History of Human Sciences, Vol, 3 No 2) Mc Luhans adjunct to this concept is if a telescope can be the extension of the eye, then information technologies can become extensions of the mind. He stated that after extending or translating our central nervous system into the electromagnetic technology, it is but a further stage to transfer our consciousness to the computer world as well.The Internet clearly serves as the next step in this process of extension. By consorting all computers as part of a pervasive, global network of information, man is not only able to extend his nervous system to interface with technol ogy, but is able to use that mediation to directly connect with the nervous systems of other human beings, also tapped into the network. Present day studies are also showing humans capacities to monitor their bodies in the resembling way that one might monitor a car for potential faults.With one report (The Quantified Self Counting Every Moment, 2012 ) attesting that more people are victimisation smartphone and tablet applications to monitor their health in an social movement to sustain a healthy life-style but also, in many instances, as a substitute for the much more expensive trip to the doctor. As populations age and health-care costs increase, there is likely to be a greater emphasis on monitoring, legal profession and maintaining wellness in future, with patients taking a more active role an approach sometimes called wellness 2.0 (The Quantified Self Counting Every Moment, 2012 ).Allied to this is the plethora of people who are undergoing voluntary surgical procedures in order to modify particular parts of their body for a number of different reasons, in the same way someone might change the wheels on their car or update the driver in their personal computer. Converse to the problem of humans becoming more like machines is the question also elevated of machines becoming more like humans.If human individuation has been reduced to an information system that happens to inhabit the body as medium, whats to say that another information system inhabiting a computer, or the Internet, couldnt be perceived as being equally as human? In a recent article (Mind vs. Machine, The Atlantic, 2011) Brian Christian describes an one-year contest between the worlds most advanced artificial-intelligence programs and ordinary people.The contest, known as the Turing Test(, endeavours to take place out whether a computer can act more human than a person and Christian discovers that the march of technology is not just changing how we live, it is raising new questions a bout what it means to be human. He realises that convincing the judges that you are human is about more than simply showing up and being yourself. It is something that has to be worked at. This notion has certain resonance for society as a whole.With this in mind, I recall a report (Makwana Irwin-Brown, Were the Kids in Austerity, 2012) I came across some months ago which stated that 57% of 7-15 year olds in the UK find it easier to talk with friends online than in person, 56% find it easier to talk by SMS than in person. These figures represented for me a sea change in the emphasis on natural human interaction, and in what it means to be a natural human in todays society. Perhaps, we are envisaging a new beginning for society one where children feel more comfortable interacting with technology than they do with their fellow human beings.To understand why our human sense of self is inextricably linked with computers, its important to realise that computers used to be human. From the mid-18th century onward, computers, many of them women, were on the payrolls of corporations, engineering firms, and universities, performing calculations and numeric analysis. In the mid-20th century, as the digital computer developed, it was said to be like a computer. In the 21st century, it is the human mathematical whiz who is like a computer (Christian, Mind vs. Machine, The Atlantic, 2011 ).In a peculiar but significant turn of events, humans are said to be like something that used to be like us. By this reasoning, one could assume that the modern-day computer is so-called because it is intended to carry out any operations which could be done by a human computer. During the same period that gave leaven to the human computer, there too, was much debate amongst philosophers surrounding the idea of what it was to be human. French philosopher Julian Offray de la Mettire (1747) suggested that human beings are only complex animal-machines.This suggestion was, in no doubt, in spired by Descartes uttering in the 16th century that the body was essentially like a machine, pointing out that the only thing not reducible to mechanism is the human mind. Furthermore, the notion of man as a machine or machine-like was something that resonated during the industrial revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries. Ferguson describes the perception of the plight of the factory worker in these times some(prenominal) mechanical acts require no intellectual capacity.They succeed best under a total downsizing of sentiment and reason..Manufacturers, accordingly, prosper most where the mind is least consulted, and where the workshop may, without any great effort of the imagination, be considered an engine, the parts of which are men. (Ferguson, An Essay on History of Civil Society, 1767) The question of human identity being reduced to an information system that happens to inhabit the body as medium has been a unprompted force for the study of artificial intelligence, and ha s manifested repeatedly. As Christian puts it some people consider the future of artificial intelligence as a kind of heavenRallying behind an idea called The Singularity, people like Ray Kurzweil (in The Singularity Is Near) and his cohort of believers envision a moment when we make smarter-than-us machines, which make machines smarter than themselves, and so on, and the whole thing accelerates exponentially toward a massive ultra-intelligence that we can barely fathom. Such a time will arrive in which humans can upload their consciousness onto the Internet and get assumedif not bodily, than at least mentallyinto an eternal, imperishable afterlife in the world of electricity (Christian, Mind vs. Machine, The Atlantic, 2011 ).Others imagine the future of computing as a kind of hell, an almost Terminator style apocalypse. Machines black out the sun, level our cities and enable an atmosphere that destroys all living things. There is no doubt that technology has become an integral pa rt of human lives and will only become increasingly so. We have already made the first step into the realm of the posthuman or the cyborg, common examples include the athlete Oscar Pistorious who has prosthetic blades for legs, anyone who has undergone a shake change, or anyone who has modified their bodies with artificial implants for cosmetic reasons.I do not believe there is any going back but I feel technology and humans certainly have the capacity to complement each other and work side by side as we look to the future. It dust to be seen if this synergy will come to pass but there certainly is the capacity for it. And as the human race faces up to some of the toughest questions that have been put to us heretofore I would cautiously back us to prevail To paraphrase Wiener, humans can continue to modify themselves to keep up with the modifications of the environment they find themselves in.