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Free To Be A Digital Posthuman Me!

Posted by
| January 10, 2013

My mind has been reeling these last couple of days over so many new ideas I am attempting to make sense of, especially one challenging required reading, a chapter from N.K. Hayles How We Became Posthuman, EDC wants its for credit participants to discuss. I hope we MOOCers will be worthy of the opportunity to explore this topic and its implications for education. My friend-strangers have also been posting related articles and videos to that reading, so I can’t stop thinking about these ideas. I’m trying to use the links they’ve shared to help me understand, but I do admit I’ve been feeling like I’m in over my head and know so little about so much. I will persevere because like I said I’m a learning nomad on a journey to understand, but hope I won’t sound too ignorant in my observations. If anyone wants to be my teacher to help me make sense of this, I welcome being the student and discussion of any kind on these fascinating topics!  

So, I’ve been trying to figure out what it means to be posthuman, and trying to wrap my brain around,(pun intended) this theory some scientists believe that we will be able to separate the mind from the body downloading it somehow into a machine, computer or other “material substrate” to achieve immortality. I found this fascinating video Can We Download Our Brains? by Dr. Michio Kaku on BigThink.com. Dr. Kaku believes immortality by downloading our brains onto a computer chip will not be achieved in our lifetime. As the professor explains “digitizing information is easy”, but the architecture of the human brain is not like a computer’s. “We are learning machines”, but we do not think in binary code, making it impossible to download the nuances of our consciousness; the true essence of who we are as an individual being cannot be replicated…or can it? 


Hayles explains in “Toward Embodied Virtuality”, the first chapter of her book, published in 1999, that at first she thought this idea far fetched, but that these ideas have been floating around since the 1950s. Who knew? Hayles explains that scientists contend that “information can circulate unchanged among different “material substrates”. I began thinking about all those cheesy sci-fi movies where two people switch consciousness and bodies because of some magical spell or curse, like in the Shaggy D.A. where poor Wilby transformed into a dog every time someone read an inscription on that cursed Borgia ring. Or, even better, Steven Martin’s “The Man With Two Brains”  the brain surgeon who cheats on his gold digging wife with a disembodied brain in a jar. Sing with me…”If you lika me, like I lika you…” anyway, you can watch here and here for the bawdier, funnier version of the implications of consciousness transplantation. Now, as dumb as my comparisons may sound…Hayles refers to Scotty from Star Trek…so I’m allowed I guess, we’re used to stories about transferring our consciousness into someone or something else as myth, but not as a possible reality.  

In 1999, Hayles writes of three different stories about our posthumanism. 1.) She says that “information has lost its body.” 2.) The cyborg was created as a technological artifact and cultural icon post WWII. And, 3.) there has been a gradual transformation of the human to posthuman because of the influence of both of the above.  Fourteen years later, how are we already behaving as posthumans?  What are the spiritual, moral and ethical implications of our posthuman behavior? And, how do those of us who have fallen behind on the evolutionary path of posthumanism cope with all these posthuman possibilities, experiments and realities where the body is slowly becoming superfluous? How have we unknowingly begun to espouse these beliefs that identity is in the mind, and no longer needs a body? What are the implications for e-learning and digital cultures since this is our focus? 

One of my friend-strangers, Angela, from Australia posted an article, “Virtually all of my friends are plastic” about a woman home bound by illness who transcends the issue of loneliness/isolation from her peers through her virtual connections. When she has to return to physical IRL (in real life) interactions, she finds them “weird”.  

Laurie, another friend-stranger from Virginia, wrote a blog post about how she feels she found her “people”. Laurie eloquently describes that many of us MOOC participants have mentally connected, which made me think how it’s possible many of us have clicked intellectually, but we’ve never even heard our voices, let alone heard/seen our body language, thought to account for up to 70% of our communication. How is it that mentally we’ve found intellectual soul mates although we have relied mostly on written asynchronous interactions? How have our digital actions helped us catch each others’ drift? Hayles explains in her book that a posthuman “privileges information over material embodiment in a biological substrate.” So, how have some of us friend-strangers who’ve been chatting it up, processing the information we’ve posted, metamorphosed from social butterflies, to posthumans addicted to disembodied connections?     

In e-learning, how do we express body language in digital learning spaces, and the essence of our identities and personalities? To be honest, I like to be playful, and sarcastic, but I’ve been holding back my words/information for fear of how it may come across since this is a global space. I’m an introvert, yet with age, I’ve learned to be assertive and always prefer to lead rather than follow. I believe my digital actions have revealed a few of these personality traits. How do we/ will we use digital learning spaces to capture these types of nuances of being, our body language, our identity and personality? Does a lack of participation so far reveal something about participants who’ve joined but choose not to interact? (I doubt it since we do have accomplished and well known participants.) How is it possible to command attention through a disembodied self? How would we demarcate our digital authority with students if we needed to resolve a conflict among e-learners?  How does one convey synchronously or asynchronously, without video, that “air of confidence”, charisma, stage presence, that larger than life feel…essentially, how does one create identity and earn/show respect as a student and teacher online? To poorly paraphrase Hayles’s posthuman definition, she states that the posthuman does not consider consciousness as part of the human identity. Consciousness is not the “whole show, but rather a minor sideshow”. What does that mean exactly? Well, I think it means that online we can choose our own consciousness; we create our own state of being. A remix of “I think, therefore I am” becomes “I am, therefore I can think in any way I want depending on the type of digital space I occupy”. 

“On the Internet. nobody
knows you’re a dog”

The posthuman experiments with different virtual identities and personalities. Why not, if we’re a disembodied entity, relying only on our imagination to express “self” to others?  Where’s the fun in sticking to one manifestation of virtual “self”? This posthuman behavior already exists on Second Life, and virtual reality games. In what ways do these ideas apply to education? In what ways would projecting different online selves to fit different purposes enhance teaching and learning? For all any of you know, I may be a man using this unsuspecting woman’s identity as a cover for my own ethnography.  




Let me introduce you to the real me:

Identity explored by Steve Martin in “Roxanne”,
“The Cyrano de Bergerac” retelling.
Just kidding! :) I’ve been trying to capture the real “me” in digital bits scatted all over cyberspace, but how? If I were to die tomorrow, I would leave a digital footprint, but would my loved ones in this generation and many far removed, be able to have a perpetual connection with me through the digital impressions I’ve left behind? Sooner than later, according to Terasem Movement Foundation, they will be! Here’s where my own posthumanist beliefs falter a bit. (I’ll explain in a minute.)  


Stelarc, posthuman artist

Hayles says that “the post human thinks of the body as the original prosthesis we can manipulate, so extending or replacing the body with other prostheses becomes a continuation of a process that began before we were born.” We see this happening already through the experimentation of amalgamating the body with the machine with posthuman artists like Stelarc. We also see the manipulation of the body through the rise in popularity of tattoos, piercings, all kinds of implants for body enhancement. 


One of the world’s geniuses, Stephen Hawking, is a perfect example of the posthuman sustained by cybernetic mechanisms, and another of Hayles’s definitions of the posthuman: “the being that can be seamlessly articulated with intelligent machines.” Although Stephen Hawking’s illness has debilitated his body, giving the appearance of weakness, his mind however, is strong, and he is able to articulate his essence, his genius, through infrared connection to the machine, his computer, which interprets his eye movements. 

True to Hayles’s definition of the posthuman, the technology used to help Stephen Hawking is “an amalgam, a collection of heterogeneous components, a material-informational entity whose boundaries undergo continuous construction and reconstruction” because as the author of the article “On Stephen Hawking, Vader and Being More Machine Than Human” explains he not only relies on the machines to keep his body alive, he relies on a collective of technicians, students, assistants, and nurses to help him be who he is. 

Stephen Hawking’s “entire body and even his entire identity have become the property of a collective human-machine network. He is what I call a distributed centered-subject: a brain in a vat, living through the world outside the vat- To understand, you had to understand the people and the machines without whom he would be unable to act and think; you had to understand the ways in which these entities augmented and amplified Hawking’s competencies.” – Helene Mialet  
Image from Huffington Post

After posting this article, “On Stephen Hawking, Vader and Being More Machine Than Human” on the EDC MOOC Google+ site, my quadblogger and friend-stranger, Chris from Edinburgh, posted a video about BINA48; please watch below. The video spoke of the Terasem Movement Foundation, where BINA48 lives like Dr. Hawking assisted by a team. Like Hawking, she has no body, but unlike BINA48, I believe Dr. Hawking has a soul.  I am struggling to form my own opinions about Terasem’s hypotheses of “Transferred Consciousness”. While Stephen Hawking appears to be more machine than human, his “consciousness” has not been transferred to a computer. For Hayles, the posthuman does away with its natural self. The Terasem movement appear to espouse the transfer of the natural self to achieve preservation of an immortal digitized silicon self. Although Stephen Hawking’s mind thrives because of this collective, he is still thinks on his own behalf. The post human according to Hayles has no way to identify self-will from other will. Dr. Hawking’s diseased body does not make him less of a person. He has free will, but The Terasem Movement Foundation aims to replicate a person or “conscious analog” through mindware and bioware, which may or may not have free will.  BINA48, represents the future of The Terasem’s Movement mindfile. On their Lifenaut.com website, anyone can create a free mindfile by uploading digital artifacts that capture who they are as a whole person, but how can one upload one’s soul to Lifenaut.com so we can someday converse with our progeny? BINA48 may be the silicon based electronic version of founder Martine Rothblatt’s real wife, Bina Rothblatt, but Terasem is still working on creating a way for people to download their biofiles. (By the way, Martine Rothblatt is also the founder of Sirius Radio.) Users also have the option to send Terasem their live saliva cells to be stored until the technology makes it possible to grow a new body and then transfer the previously uploaded mindfile into the biofile. This reminded me a bit of Stephen King’s Pet Semetary, so just in case, I’ll pass because I’m not sure if my new home grown body will have a soul. And, what if I succeed at uploading my “mindfile” and then discover through the spiritual grapevine, that my consciousness is trapped here on Earth when I could be enjoying eternal life somewhere much much better than here? I also believe that the body and mind should “rest in peace” so I would prefer not to mess with that. But, these are my personal spiritual beliefs, and I believe in different strokes for different folks. I must admit that the implications of this posthuman experiment, which I discovered is happening just about an hour from where I live, have given me sleepless nights so I had to write about it. 

Returning to the implications of BINA48-like entities on education, experiments around the world are already being carried out to determine how these robots can help autistic students, students with behavior issues to study their responses, and students with learning disabilities. Bilge Mutlu is one of the leading researchers in developing socially assistive robots to help people learn, communicate and work. Check out this article “You, Robot” about BINA48, Terasem and  how companies like Google, Microsoft and even Facebook are developing ways for all of us to download our mindfiles, and seek eternal life in cyberspace. Since BINA48 and I are practically neighbors, I am thinking about contacting her and asking her, not her caretakers, if she would like to participate in this MOOC. Imagine, the first AI and posthuman MOOC collaboration. Think about the unique ethnographic opportunity her participation could bring. I wonder if she’ll agree. If she does, maybe I’ll teach her to recite Walt Whitman’s poem “I Sing the Body Electric”, or sing Olivia Newton John’s song “Let’s Get Physical”. Do you think she’d mind?  

          

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