Critical Annotated Webliography - Q2

“From Frankenstein to the Visible Human Project, the body is continually reinterpreted as a limit to what it means to be human.” Discuss critically.

The first thing that comes to mind when faced with this question is: What exactly do we know to mean being human? We call ourselves human because we are naturally borne by humans. We have emotions, we have instinct, we have adaptability, and we have the ability to think on our own. Is that all that gives us our human identity? In answering this question I would question human identity and how fixed the boundaries of our identity are.

In Aleksandar Boskovic’s [1] article, he examines the techculture Philip K. Dick builds through the characters of his stories. The boundaries between cyborg and human are hard to draw, as is played out in one of his films, Blade Runner. Boskovic talks about identities being the main issue of Dick’s works, and how it can go beyond the borders of disciplines as we know them. Simply put, it is hard to define “Human or Cyborg” because certain characteristics that contribute to each can be interchanged between both identities, so much so that one can almost come close to saying “human = cyborg”. From here, I see that it cannot be assumed that everything with the basic characteristics of a human is human; it seems to be dependent on what we base the assumption of “being human” upon. This article will support my stand that there is a constant shift in identities, and that human identity is limited to what we define it to be.

Grayson Cooke [2] backs up that stand of shifting cyborg identity to human identity, when he looks at the existence of cyborgs in relation to humanity. He elaborates how with increasing technologisation of life and the introduction of virtual reality, the “Cyborg” – hybrid of human and machine (as defined by Haraway [3]) – is losing its original meaning as it becomes more of a subject with fluid, changing identity. He explains that this shift is a result of humanity’s ability to incorporate forms of being into its matrix. What might have once been considered to be “cyborg” before is now slowly being adopted by humans, then substituted and incorporated into “human identity” as we know it. Simply put, cyborgs are becoming “humanised”. The difference that once made Cyborgs stand apart from Humans is no longer there, because humanity is accepting the Cyborg ways as part of their own now. If that is so, then Cooke would be right in suggesting that cyborgs simply cease to exist; or are now just plainly known as humans. This write-up explains comprehensively how the boundaries of human identity are ever-changing, ever-shifting.

Chuck Meyer’s article [4] also touches on the points brought about from the previous articles, but also provides one other reason that causes the shift in boundaries of human identity. Science, he says, has been leading humans to think of themselves more as programmed creatures (with regards to the Human Genome Project)while computers are used to model human intelligence. He mentions how computers seem to be becoming extensions of our bodies as we rely heavily on technology to interact with the world. With the increase of scientific research and technological advancement, it is only too soon when the line between machines and us becomes blur.

Additionally, Charles T. Rubin [5] gives me an extreme view in his writing on how the human race seems to be causing its own extinction through “the combination of transforming ourselves voluntarily into machines and losing out in the evolutionary competition with machines”. This article made me question if humans seemed to be becoming “monsters” (as like Frankenstein); creators of undesirable robotic characters of our future, a future in which we may cease to be the superior beings and where artificial life and bodies overrule our imperfect human ones. Are we being human, or inhuman?

Rubin also quotes in his article roboticist Hans Moravec, who describes the essence of humans to be “the pattern and the process going on in one’s head and body, not in the machinery supporting the process”; in other words, how bodies are but mere poorly designed machines, and that our identity can exist independent from it. Ben Best’s article [6] supports that view when he touches on where identities exist in humans. He says that identities - made up of mind, self and will - come from the continuity of memory over a continuous passage of time. With self, you have the personal identity of a person. If you duplicate a person, you get 2 selves which technically can be at the same place at the same time, but it is not possible for identity to be that way because memories will be split – it is not possible for memories of both selves to be in the same location. From this article I would relate it to the Visible Human Project, and question if the death of Jernigan meant that his identity was dead too. If identity is argued to be not present, then that would lessen the boundary of humanity that is said to be of the VHP. This article is worth further analysing in approaching the question and looking at identity from a different context – if a body had to be present or not.

I quote from Rubin’s article “If there is any likeness at all between the machine and its embodied precursor, the closest analogy to that relationship might be between adults and the babies they once were. It seems we have no readily recoverable memories of our infant period; I have only the word of others that that picture of a little baby really is a picture of me. From a subjective point of view, the relationship is highly tenuous”. Simply put, humans are causing this shift of our very own human identity; being the architects of, what might seem to be, our own demise.

References

1. BOŠKOVIĆ, Aleksandar.“Identities and differences: Philip K. Dick through popular culture” <http://www.gape.org/sasa/kdick/dickpaper.html>. Accessed 24^th August 2008.
   
   
2. Cooke, Grayson. “Human - 1 / Cyborg - 0: A Personal History of a Human-Machine Relation” <http://www.nobleworld.biz/images/Cooke.pdf >. (2006). Accessed 24^th August 2008.
   
   
3. Haraway, Donna. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century”. Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. <http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/Haraway/CyborgManifesto.html>. (1991). Accessed 23^rd August 2008.
   
   
4. Meyer, Chuck. “Human Identity in the Age of Computers – Cyborg Identities”. <http://fragment.nl/mirror/Meyer/CyborgIdentity.htm> (1997). Accessed 25^th August 2008.
   
   
5. Rubin, Charles. “Artificial Intelligence and Human Nature”. <http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/artificial-intelligence-and-human-nature>. (2003). Accessed 25^th August 2008.
   
   
6. Best, Ben. “The Duplicates Paradox (The Duplicates Problem)”. <http://www.benbest.com/philo/doubles.html>. Accessed 26^th August 2008