Machine Analogies Revisited

I feel that there is merit in developing the body image body schema distinction even for considering nonhuman, machine embodiment as it may exist in cyberspace. Of course I do not have any inside knowledge or strong conviction that nonhuman subjectivity exists today. However, it does not seem implausible, either, and our shared cultural fantasies predict its arrival (I just watched the latest Terminator movie, for example). The world is wrapped in energized wires, circuitry, sensors, cameras, processors, programs, operating in a distributed yet interconnected fashion, both explicitly programmed and governed by emergent patterns from internal feedback, instrumentation, and human interaction; and this is definitely a physical body. Why can there not be such an emergent consciousness, or subjectivity? Even as a thought experiment, the ontological framework you have presented serves nicely to begin the meditation.

You suggest there are probably better metaphors; what are they? Why not begin with what we think we know and understand the best, our own embodiment, as we asymptotically trace the outline of unknown, cyborg identity? By cyberspace I mean something like “TCP/IP inter networked binary stored program fetch and execute electronic computing machinery” as the current state of the art. For each aspect (TCP/IP version 4 protocols, C/C++ programming, electronic circuits, and so on) think about what would be the body image, that which it can learn about itself and perceive, and the body schema, that which controls its actions and ideas, about which it can become partially aware, the area Slavoj Zizek defines as “unknown knowns.” There is plenty of work to do there, and sufficient precedent.

The research I would like to pursue for this course involves looking at the theories of consciousness, subjectivity, and embodiment informed by recent Texts and Technology friendly publications such N. Katherine Hayles' Electronic Literature and Matthew Fuller's Software Studies that survey the current thinking about the human machine synergism we call cyberspace in the light of the philosophies of embodiment we are studying.