Left behind

Anyone else noticed how many more iPads there are now on campus than last semester? Before Christmas, anyone with an iPad was basically in our class, but now this new age of the tablet seems to be flourishing and the fad is catching on. Seeing this evolution of technology firsthand on our campus is made me think of how far we have come with implementing this device. I feel like these new iPad users know just as much, if not more, about using the iPad than some of us do. I think over half of us in this class don't know, or don't want to know, how to use the new update of multi-tasking and folders that apple implemented I believe over two months ago.

This reading just got me thinking about how the way we are learning and the way we are interacting with each other is evolving and happening now as we participate in this class. The world is littered with social media. I was amazed and kind of disturbed at the same time when I needed a bible for my religion class, downloaded it for free on here, and proceeded to learn that I can either tweet or post on Facebook bible verses if I want to. Even Jesus is media friendly.

I just feel like even we can get left behind in this new age of technology at loyola, even though essentially we started it all. crazy to think that all it took was one semester.

Scribe Notes on Hayles

Jan 13: Katherine Hayles

"Beam me up, Scotty"

-What does it mean to be "posthuman"?  
Maria: Is the term "posthuman" not a problem, or at least an ironic term?  Can you have life after human?  
Schaberg: Hayles separates the term "Homo Sapiens" from "human" in the sense that one should be able to understand posthuman life. (Location: 397-411, ~69%)
Schaberg: Hayles explains at the end of the book that the book's title should be taken both ironically and seriously.
         Amelie and Schwartz: Can we embody posthuman life (biological subscript) if we are not human? 
Bell: For example, a computer: is it possible for the computer to embody a human thought process?  We always prefer something: as humans, we enjoy the embodiment of stories in book (paperback or hardcover) form in preference to the iPad, etc. 
           ***Schaberg: ESSENTIALLY, ideology defines the embodiment.***
         Terra: Hayles explains that not only is embodiment accidental but so is our thought process.  
Animals who think?  Humans "think" that we think so that we, as such, define ourselves as HUMAN; animals "think" as well, but we ultimately consider ourselves superior.  But by defining as such, does that mean that animals are also human? 
Bell: Being posthuman decentralizes everything. 
          Schaberg: The idea of posthuman has always existed because the concept of "human" is always altering, shifting, changing into something else. 
           Can you be born posthuman? 
           Terra: The posthuman view configures human being so that it can be seamlessly configured.  Location 277: "ground of being" (look down below)^
           *******Schwartz: Posthuman, at it's foundation, is the feedback loop.
Hayles: "In the posthuman there are no essential differences or absolute demarcations between bodily existence and computer simulation, cybernetic mechanism and biological organism, robot teleology and human goals" (Location: 270 ~38%)

-Is body the ground of being?
          Amelie: Or rather memories?  Memories are the illusion of continuity.  They always create who you are now.  But bodies disintegrate and change.  
          Location 240: whatever is on the disk is contained.
                 Hayles talks about how you can be posthuman without biologically being a Homo Sapien...but then, doesn't that mean everyone can be posthuman...so animals? Etc. 
                     Bell: Military men, for example, are dressed in uniform.  So when that happens, you have stripes, etc., that make you something other than you are.  If so, when you take the uniform off, are you still what you are when you have the uniform on? 
          Schaberg: Posthuman is embodied in the mind and not in the body, according to Hayles.  Some things (ex. Anorexia, cougars) make the body a fashion accessory.  

-And as a side note, something that I found very interesting from Hayles: "If 'human essence is freedom from the wills of others,' the posthuman is 'post' not because it is necessarily unfree but because there is no a priority way to identify a self-will that can be clearly distinguished from an other-will" (Location: 234-247 ~41%)

Computer Awareness and Replication

A story from NPR that discuss a couple of things Hayles touches upon.

http://www.npr.org/2011/01/11/132840775/The-Singularity-Humanitys-Last-Invention

Here are the endnotes from How We Became Posthuman

The notes from Hayles.

Amelie's Take on How We Became Posthuman

This is solidifying into a bit of a rant in my head, so I'll try to keep it short:

Let me start off by stating the obvious: consciousness is confusing, and anyone who says that they understand it is probably lying to you. The relationship between the body, the brain, and the mind is, well, confusing. I can't think of a better word for it.

So until we actually download someone's consciousness onto a floppy disk, we won't actually know whether or not it can be done, IMHO (we probably wouldn't use a floppy disk, but that's kind of irrelevant). In my opinion, we won't actually know even after we've done it. Why?

Well. I'm assuming everyone knows that all of our cells, with the exception of some of our core brain cells, are in the process of being continually replaced. And those of us who have read Julia Kristeva, or just thought about the matter extensively, will have realized that the boundaries which define our "selves" are constantly changing to suit our needs. Kristeva: "What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite." Kristeva gives as examples things like vomit, spit and dung, which are part of one but which one expels and then denies. Skin which has been shed, a corpse, all of these things encourage us to see ourselves as patterns of information, rather than a material being. Our status as a material being is suspect because we are constantly taking in and expelling material. This material is taken in and expelled not at random, but according to patterns and codes. So it makes perfect sense to me that modern humans would interpret the self as information, a pattern, a "program"--everything else stopped making sense once we understood biology.

I can only understand myself as a continuous process. This is not merely a modern thought--Buddhism has taught that the self is a process, and therefore a sort of program, for millennia. Admittedly the idea is more prevalent now that computers have provided evidence that something can have a distinct identity without having what we would usually consider to be a material form. Admittedly, we experience programs through material objects, but that might be because we are human and therefore can only experience information through materials which appeal to our senses. It isn't insane to think that that this information might be able to exist in a disembodied form, and we are incapable of perceiving it as such.

According to Miguel de Unamuno, "That which determines a man, that which makes him one man, one and not another, the man he is and not the man he is not, is a principle of unity and a principle of continuity... Without entering upon a discussion--an unprofitable discussion--as to whether I am or am not he who I was twenty years ago, it appears to me to be indisputable that he who I am to-day derives, by a continuous series of states of consciousness, from him who was in my body twenty years ago. Memory is the basis of individual personality, just as tradition is the basis of the collective personality of a people. We live in memory and by memory..."

The identity doesn't rest, for Unamuno of for myself, in any specific set of cells. It rests in the principle of continuity, as made manifest by memory. Unamuno also makes the point that what a man is one year might be considered different from what he is twenty years hence. So the question is not, as Hayles seems to imply, whether or not one's consciousness would be transformed were it to be transferred to a floppy disk or similar technology. It would undoubtedly be transformed, just as it would be transformed were it to read a book or take the dog for a walk. The question is, could the continuity of experience somehow be preserved during a transfer. This is not a question I think anyone is capable of answering.

I have a recurring nightmare in which I view a society where it is customary for one to transfer one's consciousness to a robotic body at a moment of one's choosing. The humans in this society step into a elaborate machine and their biologically embodied selves die with blissful smiles on their faces, for they know that their consciousness is, as they breath their last, being transferred into a robot, and that they shall continue to live. And to all outward appearances this is entirely correct--the robot will open its eyes and commence to behave exactly as the person did during the last minutes of their life. In my dream this does not help the person, the true person, whose consciousness has been entirely extinguished even though their personality continues to act in the world. And in hundreds they step into the machine, killing themselves, and the world is full of robotic clones, philosophical zombies who act without truly perceiving anything, and no one ever knows the difference.

I'm not sure whether or not this would actually happen; it sounds ghastly enough for me to almost believe it, but until the nature of consciousness is discovered to a greater degree than it has been at the present time I cannot possibly be sure. My current understanding of consciousness leads me to believe that it would not happen, and that if the principle of continuity were carried over into every other form the consciousness would retain itself, if that phrasing makes any sense.

All in all, I was disappointed with the way this issue was covered in our reading. I don't believe it's possible to explore this issue without first recognizing the science behind the current understanding of consciousness--that very little of our "self" is actually permanent. And writing off this understanding of consciousness as newfangled intellectual propaganda is denying a tradition dating back to Buddha and Heraclitus which holds exactly the same tenet. I look forward to discussing this issue in more depth tomorrow morning.

Scribing

So I'm not entirely sure how to edit/add to Cait's Scribe Calendar post, but I would like to take January 27th.

So we aren't the only ones out there...

I remember Dr. Schaberg asking the class on one of the first days whether or not we knew of any other schools working with the iPad. Welp - here ya go! I think its pretty interesting. I wonder if we are fetishizing the book are we also applying a fleeting "novelty" to the e-reader that won't/ can't last?

NY TIMES

Math That Moves: Schools Embrace the iPad

(click to get the full story)

Except:

ROSLYN HEIGHTS, N.Y. — As students returned to class this week, some were carrying brand-new Apple iPads in their backpacks, given not by their parents but by their schools.

A growing number of schools across the nation are embracing the iPad as the latest tool to teach Kafka in multimedia, history through “Jeopardy”-like games and math with step-by-step animation of complex problems.

As part of a pilot program, Roslyn High School on Long Island handed out 47 iPads on Dec. 20 to the students and teachers in two humanities classes. The school district hopes to provide iPads eventually to all 1,100 of its students.

The iPads cost $750 apiece, and they are to be used in class and at home during the school year to replace textbooks, allow students to correspond with teachers and turn in papers and homework assignments, and preserve a record of student work in digital portfolios.

“It allows us to extend the classroom beyond these four walls,” said Larry Reiff, an English teacher at Roslyn who now posts all his course materials online.

Technological fads have come and gone in schools, and other experiments meant to rev up the educational experience for children raised on video games and YouTube have had mixed results. Educators, for instance, are still divided over whether initiatives to give every student a laptop have made a difference academically...

Leave Twain Alone

What do you guys think?

(Heres the direct link.)

Jan. 4, 2011

Version of "Huckleberry Finn" to Remove "N" Word

Mark Twain Scholar Creates New Version to Try and Make the Book More Accessible for Grade Schools

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• 

  The American author Samuel Clemens, a.k.a. Mark Twain, photographed c. 1900-1910. (Library of Congress)

• STORIES
• Dead 100 Years, Mark Twain Lets Loose
• Mark Twain's Autobiography, Finally Released

(CBS) Mark Twain defined a classic as "a book which people praise and don't read." And for years, the "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" has fit that category, removed from school reading lists across the country for the use of the "n" word.

Publishers Weekly reports that Twain Scholar Alan Gribben has partnered with NewSouth Books to release a version of "Huckleberry Finn" that replaces the "n" word with "slave." It also removes the word "injun."

The idea of a politically-correct version came to Gribben, 69, when he would give public readings of the work and would sub in the word "slave." The slur appears in the book 219 times.

"This is not an effort to render Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn colorblind," Gribben told Publishers Weekly. "Race matters in these books. It's a matter of how you express that in the 21st century."

Gibben is the head of the English department at Auburn University in Montgomery, Ala., and said he knows the version will create controversy.

"I'm hoping that people will welcome this new option, but I suspect that textual purists will be horrified," he told Publisher's Weekly.

©MMXI, CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved.

The Morning Show 12/19/2010

Thank God my mom cares abut my schooling.

She's been listening to me all semester about the now famous "iPad class." She recorded this clip cause she figured I'd like it and I just re-found it on the internet for you guys. I am so excited about it because it shows just how much attention publishing companies, marketing, and book sales are receiving. We aren't the only ones talking about this!

CBS NEWS: JUDGING BOOKS BY THEIR COVERS