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.