Posthumanism note

Time's "person of the year" in 1982 was a computer. (But note that a person is still required to gawk at it)

Christmas, travel, yadda yadda. But I'm back online now, at least with a small note about a sidecar of theory: posthumanism.

Neil Badmington. "Theorizing Posthumanism." Cultural Critique, No. 53, Posthumanism (Winter, 2003), pp. 10-27

Neil Badmington, an advocate for "posthumanism," tells us to slow down and be "patient" in the project of posthumanism. As far as I can tell, the central issue here is that the fundamental dualism between the human and the non-human, long grounded in the mind, the reasoning center, breaks down as we begin to imagine machines that can imitate the human mind. Badmington would enjoy a complete collapse of humanist thought in the wake of this discovery, but cautions that the idea that the mind is distinct from the body will not easily die, and must be removed in careful steps via indirect strategies as we re-read old humanist texts -- Badmington demonstrates this with a passage on robots from Descartes' Confessions:

...we can certainly conceive of a machine so constructed that it utters words, and even utters some regarding the bodily actions that cause certain changes in its organs, for instance if you touch it in one spot it asks what you want to say to it; if in another, it cries out that you are hurting it, and so on; but not that it arranges them [the words] diversely to respond to the meaning of everything said in its presence, as even the most stupid [hebetes] of men are capable of doing. Secondly, even though they might do some things as well as or even better than we do them, they would inevitably fail in others, through which we would discover that they were acting not through understanding [connaissance] but only from the disposition of their organs. For whereas reason is a universal instrument which can be of use in all kinds of situations, these organs need some particular disposition for each particular action; hence it is impossible to conceive that there would be enough of them in a machine to make it act in all the occurrences of life in the way in which our reason makes us act.

Surely Descartes was a bit anxious when he wrote, "it is impossible to conceive that there would be enough of them in a machine to make it act in all the occurrences of life in the way in which our reason makes us act;" now, we are even more anxious.