Nowhere near finished...
But I have to go away to a staff meeting, so I put this to you dear f'list on the offchance that someone is bored and feels like doing some proofreading :P
Caution, much of this has been written on little/no sleep so may not be optimally coherent :P
In a world increasingly populated and influenced by computers, representations of the mind in the digital realm have become a prominent theme in speculative fiction. This essay examines the decorporealisation of the mind in three texts: the movie The Matrix (Andy and Larry Wachowski, 1999), two Doctor Who television episodes “Silence in the Library”/“Forest of the Dead” written by Steven Moffatt (read here as one text as the two episodes create one complete narrative), and the book Accelerando by Charles Stross. Through exploring how the mind is represented as adistinct from the human body, analysis of these texts will speak to the shift away from the traditional Cartesian mind/body dualism.
“The Matrix” takes place in a dystopian future, where the human race has been enslaved as a power source by sentient machines. To prevent the human crops from trying to wake up, an artificial reality was created for their minds- the titular Matrix. The world of the Matrix is set in 1999, “at the peak of [human] civilisation”, where the mind of each enslaved person interacts with the minds of others in a fictional city. Having been rescued by a group of rebels from the simulation of the Matrix, the protagonist Neo is released into the real world, a bleak Earth ravaged by war between the humans and the Artificial Intelligence they created. He learns about the world through computer programmes, uploaded directly into his brain via a cortical plug.
Neo: Right now we're inside a computer program?
Morpheus: Is it really so hard to believe? Your clothes are different. The plugs in your arms and
head are gone. Your hair is changed. Your appearance now is what we call residual self-image. It is
the mental projection of your digital self.
Neo: This...this isn't real?
Morpheus: What is real? How do you define real? If you're talking about what you can feel, what
you can smell, what you can taste and see, then real is simply electrical signals interpreted by
your brain. This is the world that you know. The world as it was at the end of the twentieth
century. It exists now only as part of a neural-interactive simulation that we call the Matrix.
Although the rebels do learn to understand and manipulate the physics model of the Matrix, for example jumping unfathomably long distances, they still retain the same corporeal image as in the real world (sans machine-imposed plugs). This mental projection looks, speaks and acts like Neo’s corporeal form outside the simulation- this is indicative of how interrelated and interdependent the two instantiations initially are.
Neo: If you are killed in the Matrix, you die here?
Morpheus: The body cannot live without the mind.
When immersed in the world of the Matrix, the human slaves function and interact solely through the mind. Here the body is required for the mind to function, with the human mind unable to survive in the Matrix without a body, as happens when Cypher kills Apoc and Switch by disconnecting their bodies while their minds are “jacked in”. The most interesting aspect of the Matrix portrayal of mind however occurs in the character of Neo; it is here that the Matrix pushes the boundary from mind to body most prominently. Mysteriously hailed as “The One”, he dies in the Matrix and subsequently in the real world also, conforming to the traditional Cartesian duality. He is then, however, brought back to life. From this point he perceives the world as three dimensional structures of binary code, and is able to defeat and penetrate the representations of the AI consciousness .
The representation of the role of the body in the Matrix is reminiscent of William Gibson’s Neuromancer as described by Cranny-Francis. Neuromancer features a similar interactive cyberworld, where people interact via mental projections rather than corporeally.
The physical...is relegated to the status of “meat”- it is the “wetware” that enables the individual
to experience cyberspace. The body is the cyberspace wanderer’s life-support system, an organic
machine that must be tended occasionally so that the wanderer doesn’t die...The mind/body split
that characterises Western metaphysics is preserved in this fictional account of our interaction
with information technology. (Cranny-Francis, p146)
In the people-fuelled power plants of The Matrix, the bodies of those enslaved perform the function of being “meat” in two ways: both as a life-support system, a construct to supply the dreaming brain with a location in which to exist, and literally as source of actual meat, protein and nutrients: “[the machines] liquefy the dead so they could be fed intravenously to the living”.
The Matrix thus reinforces the Cartesian duality in that the human body and mind interact and are required to support each other. The agents against whom Neo fights do transgress this duality as they are pure programmed consciousness devoid of real-world corporeal form, however these artificial intelligences are just that, artificial.
While The Matrix highlights the interrelatedness of the mind and body, the Doctor Who episodes “Silence in the Library” and “Forest of the Dead” do transgress this co-dependence somewhat.
These episodes take place on a planet known as The Library, where 100 years prior there was an emergency and all the visitors to the planet disappeared, suspected dead. The titular Doctor and his travelling companion Donna come to The Library and attempt to discover what happened, where they meet a team of archaeologists doing the same. They discover the cause of the deaths; a microscopic carnivorous species called the Vashta Nerada, which hunt as swarms of shadows. While discovering this, one of the archaeologists party wanders off and is devoured by these creatures leaving nothing but a skeleton and part of her spacesuit with communicator. As the remainder of the party discover her, she appears to consciously speak to them.
The Doctor: There's a neural relay in the communicator, lets you send thought mails. That's it
there, those green lights. Sometimes it can hold an impression of a living consciousness for a
short time after death. Like an after image.
This transgresses the traditional Cartesian duality as the consciousness of the mind is extant once the body is gone. This consciousness does not remain for very long, degrading and eventually looping, but for a short while it does exist separate from the body and able to interact with people as such.
It is in the second half of the story that the boundaries of the mind/body duality are really pushed. The central computer housing all the books in the library is revealed to not be an artificial construct; rather the computer is itself the mind of a small girl.
Mr Lux: She's not in the computer. In a way, she is the computer. The main command node. This
is CAL.
The Doctor: CAL is a child! A child hooked up to a mainframe? Why didn't you tell me this? I
needed to know this!
Mr Lux: Because she's family! CAL... Charlotte Abigail Lux. My grandfather's youngest daughter.
She was dying, so he built her a library, and put her living mind inside.
Even this does not completely transgress the connectedness of the mind and body as CAL does have a corporeal representation in the form of a security camera, and an information node with an image of her face: and it is these that speak directly to the Doctor and the archaeologists. This is true also of the minds that were uploaded into CAL
River: It tried to teleport 4,022 people?
The Doctor: Succeeded, pulled 'em all out, but then what? Nowhere to send them, nowhere safe
in the whole Library, Vashta Nerada growing in every shadow. 4,022 people all beamed up and
nowhere to go. They're stuck in the system, waiting to be sent, like emails. So what's a computer
to do? What does a computer always do?
River: It saved them.
The Doctor: The Library, a whole world of books, and right at the core, the biggest hard drive in
history. The index to everything ever written, backup copies of every single book. The computer
saved 4,022 people the only way a computer can. It saved them to the hard drive.
These people were teleported into the harddrive of the computer where they existed and interacted. There is still some corporeal form associated with these uploaded people: “[The] physical self...stored in the library as an energy signature. It can be actualised again whenever you or the Library requires”, allowing bodies to recorporealise their transported selves, and to present a non-sentient face on an information node, as Donna does at the cliff-hanger between episodes. These uploads thus push the boundaries of the mind/body interaction, as they exist only as a coded representation of their mind, with the technobabble “energy signature” to return them to a state of dualism at a later date.
More interesting in terms of the mind/body duality is what happens to Miss Evangelista, the character eviscerated by the Vashta Nerada near the beginning. Uploaded from the consciousness degrading in her neural relay, she presents a horrifying, mangled visage in the world of CAL.
Donna: So why do you look like that?
Miss Evangelista: I had no choice. You teleported. You're a perfect reproduction. I was just a data
ghost caught in the Wi-Fi and automatically uploaded.
Donna: And it made you clever?
Miss Evangelista: We're only strings of numbers in here. I think a decimal point may have shifted
in my IQ
Caution, much of this has been written on little/no sleep so may not be optimally coherent :P
In a world increasingly populated and influenced by computers, representations of the mind in the digital realm have become a prominent theme in speculative fiction. This essay examines the decorporealisation of the mind in three texts: the movie The Matrix (Andy and Larry Wachowski, 1999), two Doctor Who television episodes “Silence in the Library”/“Forest of the Dead” written by Steven Moffatt (read here as one text as the two episodes create one complete narrative), and the book Accelerando by Charles Stross. Through exploring how the mind is represented as adistinct from the human body, analysis of these texts will speak to the shift away from the traditional Cartesian mind/body dualism.
“The Matrix” takes place in a dystopian future, where the human race has been enslaved as a power source by sentient machines. To prevent the human crops from trying to wake up, an artificial reality was created for their minds- the titular Matrix. The world of the Matrix is set in 1999, “at the peak of [human] civilisation”, where the mind of each enslaved person interacts with the minds of others in a fictional city. Having been rescued by a group of rebels from the simulation of the Matrix, the protagonist Neo is released into the real world, a bleak Earth ravaged by war between the humans and the Artificial Intelligence they created. He learns about the world through computer programmes, uploaded directly into his brain via a cortical plug.
Neo: Right now we're inside a computer program?
Morpheus: Is it really so hard to believe? Your clothes are different. The plugs in your arms and
head are gone. Your hair is changed. Your appearance now is what we call residual self-image. It is
the mental projection of your digital self.
Neo: This...this isn't real?
Morpheus: What is real? How do you define real? If you're talking about what you can feel, what
you can smell, what you can taste and see, then real is simply electrical signals interpreted by
your brain. This is the world that you know. The world as it was at the end of the twentieth
century. It exists now only as part of a neural-interactive simulation that we call the Matrix.
Although the rebels do learn to understand and manipulate the physics model of the Matrix, for example jumping unfathomably long distances, they still retain the same corporeal image as in the real world (sans machine-imposed plugs). This mental projection looks, speaks and acts like Neo’s corporeal form outside the simulation- this is indicative of how interrelated and interdependent the two instantiations initially are.
Neo: If you are killed in the Matrix, you die here?
Morpheus: The body cannot live without the mind.
When immersed in the world of the Matrix, the human slaves function and interact solely through the mind. Here the body is required for the mind to function, with the human mind unable to survive in the Matrix without a body, as happens when Cypher kills Apoc and Switch by disconnecting their bodies while their minds are “jacked in”. The most interesting aspect of the Matrix portrayal of mind however occurs in the character of Neo; it is here that the Matrix pushes the boundary from mind to body most prominently. Mysteriously hailed as “The One”, he dies in the Matrix and subsequently in the real world also, conforming to the traditional Cartesian duality. He is then, however, brought back to life. From this point he perceives the world as three dimensional structures of binary code, and is able to defeat and penetrate the representations of the AI consciousness .
The representation of the role of the body in the Matrix is reminiscent of William Gibson’s Neuromancer as described by Cranny-Francis. Neuromancer features a similar interactive cyberworld, where people interact via mental projections rather than corporeally.
The physical...is relegated to the status of “meat”- it is the “wetware” that enables the individual
to experience cyberspace. The body is the cyberspace wanderer’s life-support system, an organic
machine that must be tended occasionally so that the wanderer doesn’t die...The mind/body split
that characterises Western metaphysics is preserved in this fictional account of our interaction
with information technology. (Cranny-Francis, p146)
In the people-fuelled power plants of The Matrix, the bodies of those enslaved perform the function of being “meat” in two ways: both as a life-support system, a construct to supply the dreaming brain with a location in which to exist, and literally as source of actual meat, protein and nutrients: “[the machines] liquefy the dead so they could be fed intravenously to the living”.
The Matrix thus reinforces the Cartesian duality in that the human body and mind interact and are required to support each other. The agents against whom Neo fights do transgress this duality as they are pure programmed consciousness devoid of real-world corporeal form, however these artificial intelligences are just that, artificial.
While The Matrix highlights the interrelatedness of the mind and body, the Doctor Who episodes “Silence in the Library” and “Forest of the Dead” do transgress this co-dependence somewhat.
These episodes take place on a planet known as The Library, where 100 years prior there was an emergency and all the visitors to the planet disappeared, suspected dead. The titular Doctor and his travelling companion Donna come to The Library and attempt to discover what happened, where they meet a team of archaeologists doing the same. They discover the cause of the deaths; a microscopic carnivorous species called the Vashta Nerada, which hunt as swarms of shadows. While discovering this, one of the archaeologists party wanders off and is devoured by these creatures leaving nothing but a skeleton and part of her spacesuit with communicator. As the remainder of the party discover her, she appears to consciously speak to them.
The Doctor: There's a neural relay in the communicator, lets you send thought mails. That's it
there, those green lights. Sometimes it can hold an impression of a living consciousness for a
short time after death. Like an after image.
This transgresses the traditional Cartesian duality as the consciousness of the mind is extant once the body is gone. This consciousness does not remain for very long, degrading and eventually looping, but for a short while it does exist separate from the body and able to interact with people as such.
It is in the second half of the story that the boundaries of the mind/body duality are really pushed. The central computer housing all the books in the library is revealed to not be an artificial construct; rather the computer is itself the mind of a small girl.
Mr Lux: She's not in the computer. In a way, she is the computer. The main command node. This
is CAL.
The Doctor: CAL is a child! A child hooked up to a mainframe? Why didn't you tell me this? I
needed to know this!
Mr Lux: Because she's family! CAL... Charlotte Abigail Lux. My grandfather's youngest daughter.
She was dying, so he built her a library, and put her living mind inside.
Even this does not completely transgress the connectedness of the mind and body as CAL does have a corporeal representation in the form of a security camera, and an information node with an image of her face: and it is these that speak directly to the Doctor and the archaeologists. This is true also of the minds that were uploaded into CAL
River: It tried to teleport 4,022 people?
The Doctor: Succeeded, pulled 'em all out, but then what? Nowhere to send them, nowhere safe
in the whole Library, Vashta Nerada growing in every shadow. 4,022 people all beamed up and
nowhere to go. They're stuck in the system, waiting to be sent, like emails. So what's a computer
to do? What does a computer always do?
River: It saved them.
The Doctor: The Library, a whole world of books, and right at the core, the biggest hard drive in
history. The index to everything ever written, backup copies of every single book. The computer
saved 4,022 people the only way a computer can. It saved them to the hard drive.
These people were teleported into the harddrive of the computer where they existed and interacted. There is still some corporeal form associated with these uploaded people: “[The] physical self...stored in the library as an energy signature. It can be actualised again whenever you or the Library requires”, allowing bodies to recorporealise their transported selves, and to present a non-sentient face on an information node, as Donna does at the cliff-hanger between episodes. These uploads thus push the boundaries of the mind/body interaction, as they exist only as a coded representation of their mind, with the technobabble “energy signature” to return them to a state of dualism at a later date.
More interesting in terms of the mind/body duality is what happens to Miss Evangelista, the character eviscerated by the Vashta Nerada near the beginning. Uploaded from the consciousness degrading in her neural relay, she presents a horrifying, mangled visage in the world of CAL.
Donna: So why do you look like that?
Miss Evangelista: I had no choice. You teleported. You're a perfect reproduction. I was just a data
ghost caught in the Wi-Fi and automatically uploaded.
Donna: And it made you clever?
Miss Evangelista: We're only strings of numbers in here. I think a decimal point may have shifted
in my IQ