|
November 13, 2006
In a posthuman world, where there is the merging of human and machine (cyborgs) and the rise of artificial intelligence, this kind of awesome romantic understanding of a sublime nature looks decidely old fashioned.
Ansel Adams, Winter Storm
In the world of biotechnology where the corporeal and ontological boundaries between human and non-human nature have been eroded posthuman means :
a scepticism about life being inevitably dependent on “embodiment in a biological substrate”; a readiness to see consciousness as an “epiphenomenon” and a “minor sideshow” in determining “human identity”; a willingness to regard the body as an “original prosthesis” whose principle can be extended; faith in the promise of “seamless” articulations with “intelligent machines.” There is, as a variation, the focus on the “cybernatural” and the “postnatural,” pointing towards “the possibility of forms of vitality which do not find their support in the organic processes of matter . . . but rather in the arena of the artificial,” such that “the cybernatural designates any practice which uses the space of the virtual screen as a space of ‘second nature’ through a conflation of information with vitality.”
We are cyber sapiens--a creature part digital and part biological---embedded in networks. As Donna Harraway says "Technology is not neutral. We're inside of what we make, and it's inside of us. We're living in a world of connections - and it matters which ones get made and unmade."
|
