KNHayleshowwebecameposthuman

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how we became posthuman

Turing, you use the responses to decide which is the human, which the machine. Turing argued, that machines can think.the formal generation and manipulation of informational patterns. Shannon and Wiener. information as an entity distinct from the substrates carrying it. >> information as a kind of bodiless fluid that could flow between different substrates with- out loss of meaning or form.

Moravec proposed that human identity is essentially an informational pattern rather than an embodied enaction.machines repository of human consciousnes

enacted body- represented body

What the Turing test "proves" is that the overlay between the enacted and the represented bodies is no longer a natural in evitability but a contingent production, mediated by a technology that has become so entwined with the production of identity that it can no longer meaningfully be separated from the human subject a cybernetic circuit that splices your will, desire, and per- ception into a distributed cognitive system in which represented bodies are joined with enacted bodies through mutating and flexible machine inter- faces.

critisicm Hayles to Moravec: how would body be separated from brain, how would consiousness remain the same in another medium

molecular biology treats information as the essential code the body ex- presses.In fact, a defining characteristic of the present cultural moment is the belief that in- formation can circulate unchanged among different material substrates

cyborg-informational pathways connecting the organic body to its prosthetic extensions. This presumes a conception of information as a (disembodied) entity the idea of the feedback loop implies that the boundaries of the autonomous subject are up for grabs, since feedback loops can flow not only within the subject but also between the subject and the envi ronment. From Norbert Wiener on, the flow of information through feed- back loops has been associated with the deconstruction of the liberal humanist subject, the version of the "human" with which I will be con- cerned.

posthuman: privileges informational pattern over material instantiation, s consciousness, regarded as the seat of human identity as an epiphenomenon, as an evolutionary upstart trying to claim that it is the whole show when in actuality it is only a minor sideshow. body as the original prosthesis we all learn to manipulate

C. B. Macpherson's analysis of possessive individualism. Its possessive quality is found in its conception of the individual as essentially the proprietor of his own person or capaci- ties, owing nothing to society for them . ... The human essence is freedom from the wills of others, and freedom is a function of possession, The liberal self is produced by market relations and does not in fact predate them. posthuman by doing away with the "natural" self.

for the posthuman's collective heterogeneous quality implies a dis- tributed cognition located in disparate parts that may be in only tenuous communication with one another If "human essence is freedom from the wills of others," the posthuman is "post" not because it is necessarily unfree but because there is no a priori way to identify a self-will that can be clearly distingUished from an otherwil liberal humanist subject (feminism=white European male, postcolonialism = unified identity , Delleuze and Guattari Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari have linked it with capitalism, body without organs)

erasure of embodiment

Only because the body is not identified with the self is it possible to claim for the liberal subject its notorious universality,

(human)first of all embodied being, and the complexities of this embodiment mean that human awareness unfolds in ways very different from those of intelligence embodied in cybernetic machines.” (1999, p. 284)

...

information over materiality

The triumph of information over materiality was a major theme at the first Macy Conference. John von Neumann and Norbert Wiener led the way by making clear that the important entity in the man-machine equation was information, not energy. Central was how much information could flow through the system and how quickly it could move. Wiener, emphasizing the move- ment from energy to information, made the point explicitly: "The funda- mental idea is the message . . . and the fundamental element of the message is the decision."l Decisions are important not because they pro- duce material goods but because they produce information. Control infor- mation, and power follows.

Since structural information indicates how a message should be inter- preted, semantics necessarily enters the picture

Claude Shan- non defined information as a probability function with no dimensions, no materiality, and no necessary connection with meaning.

Like Shannon, Wiener thought of informa- tion as representing a choice. More specifically, it represents a choice of one message from among a range of possible messages.

LIBERAL SUBJECTIVITY IMPERILED