In case anyone feels like reading the whole thing
It's been submitted now so when you spot glaring errors in judgement, spelling mistakes, and thing that are just stupid, please don't tell me, I don't want to know :P
Descartes in his Mediations on First Philosophy mused on the possibility of an evil demon controlling his every experience (Descartes, 1641). What is it about the mind that connects it to a real world, the body; is there any way of knowing whether that connection is real? While Descartes’ mind is an immaterial thing that can exist apart from the body, he also posited that it interacts in a causal manner with the body. This separation and interaction form the core of what is now known as Cartesian dualism. In a world increasingly populated and influenced by computers, this dualism lends itself to application in the digital realm, where representations of the mind have become a prominent theme in speculative fiction. Three texts in particular cast an interesting light on the way the issue is perceived: the movie The Matrix (Andy and Larry Wachowski, 1999), two Doctor Who television episodes “Silence in the Library” and “Forest of the Dead” written by Steven Moffat (these two episodes contain one complete narrative, thus they are read here as one text), and the book Accelerando by Charles Stross. Through exploring representation of the mind as distinct from the human body, analysis of these texts will explore the shift away from the traditional Cartesian mind/body dualism to a posthuman classification of the mind.
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 is created for their minds- the titular Matrix. This world 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.
The film is forward in addressing the philosophical issues raised by Descartes, positing instead of evil demon an evil immersive computer network as the deceptive agent, created by the Artificial Intelligence in the aftermath of the war.
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.
This deception of the real is analogous to Descartes’ demon- there is no way of knowing if what is seen is reality. The only perception that the mind has of the world comes via electrical impulses of the brain, and these are all subject to manipulation. Coming from outside the Matrix the rebels learn to understand and manipulate the parameters of the simulation, for example jumping unfathomably long distances, however they still retain the same corporeal image as in the real world (sans machine-imposed plugs). These mental projections look, speak and interact like their corporeal counterparts- indicative of how interrelated and interdependent the two instantiations initially are.
This causal interaction is elucidated further by the scenarios of life and death in the Matrix and the real world.
Neo: If you are killed in the Matrix, you die here?
Morpheus: The body cannot live without the mind.
Here the mind is required for the body to function, as is the body for the mind. This causal interaction is made explicit when Mouse is killed by the Agents in the Matrix, and when Cypher kills Apoc and Switch by disconnecting them while they are “jacked in”- severing the connection between the body and the mind. 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. Mysteriously hailed as “The One”, Neo dies in the Matrix and subsequently in the real world also, conforming to the traditional Cartesian duality. He is then resurrected. From this point he perceives the world as three dimensional structures of binary code. This ability to perceive the structure of deceptive world transgresses the traditional confines of the Cartesian dualist discourse- consciously visualising the deception as a deception was not an option for Descartes.
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 Cranny-Francis’ 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”. This treatment speaks to the body as being an “organic machine”, able to be broken down into its component parts (cells, minerals) and used to help create more bodies- these parts have no relation to the mind formerly inhabiting them. The Matrix thus reinforces the Cartesian duality in that the human body and mind interact and are required to support each other, but that they are separate. Even at its most transgressive, the human mind and body presented in The Matrix are still fundamentally interrelated, unable to exist without the other.
While The Matrix highlights this interrelatedness of the mind and body, the Doctor Who episodes “Silence in the Library” and “Forest of the Dead” begin to transgress this discourse.
These episodes take place on a planet known as The Library, where 100 years prior all the visitors to the planet disappeared. The titular Doctor and his travelling companion Donna Noble arrive at The Library and attempt to discover what happened, meeting a team of archaeologists doing the same. Together they discover the cause of the deaths; a microscopic carnivorous species called the Vashta Nerada, which hunts as swarms of shadows. While discovering this, one of the archaeologist’s party wanders off and is devoured by these creatures leaving nothing but a skeleton and part of her spacesuit including a communicator.
The technology of this communication device uploads the consciousness of the wearer or those around the device. After her death, Miss Evangelista remained conscious and expressed fear and embarrassment, conversing with those still alive.
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 in the neural relay and is able to interact with people as such. That the upload is sentient is demonstrated by Miss Evangelista- having been eviscerated by the Vashta Nerada she is found interacting with the uploaded Donna inside CAL. However as she was not an intentional teleport, rather her degrading data ghost was saved by the computer, her image is corrupted with her face visibly warped. She tells Donna that the world is a simulation against the wishes of the computer herself- showing that she is governed by her own thought patterns, not just a component of the simulation. When the rest of the uploads are returned to corporeality, Miss Evangelista is not. Neither are the other archaeologists who were killed, implying that while the mind can still exist as a decorporealised form, once the body had been destroyed there was no way to recorporealise.
It is in the second half of the narrative 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. (Silence in the Library,
2008)
Even this does not completely transgress the connectedness of the mind and body as CAL does have corporeal representations 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, while uploaded into an incorporeal medium there is still the potential for recorporealisation, such as would occur at the destination to which they were transported.
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 computer saved 4,022 people the only way a computer can. It saved them to the
hard drive. (Forest of the Dead, 2008)
These people are uploaded vie teleport into the hard drive of the computer where they exist and interact. These uploads are still associated with: “[The] physical self...stored in the library as an energy signature, it can be actualised again whenever you or the Library requires”. This allows 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 the two 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 “energy signature” to return them to a state of embodied dualism when required.
This treatment of the human mind as able to be separated from the corporeal form transgresses the ultimately linked nature of the mind/body in the Cartesian duality. This movement away from what is traditionally thought of as human, toward something that incorporates technology, is movement towards the discourse of posthumanism.
Nicholas Gane quotes Katherine Hayles in his discussion of posthumanism:
In the posthuman, there are no essential differences of absolute demarcations between bodily
existence and computer simulation, cybernetic mechanism and biological organism...(quoted in
Gane 2006, p432)
Many of the characters in these episodes fit this definition. CAL herself is both a computer and a girl; it is within her mind that the uploaded people interact. She has a cybernetic presence in her running and interacting in the systems of the library, and a biological presence in her aspect as a node-face. This applies to the uploaded people too, assuming that their “energy signature” comprises some bodily element; they exist in a computer simulation, yet are still associated with a biological capability. This energy signature involves the dissolution of the corporeal form, but there appears to be no clear boundary of where of how this biological component is stored as distinct from the uploaded mind. Thus “Silence in the Library” and “Forest of the Dead” show a movement away from the Cartesian dualism of previous thought, to a more posthuman view of the mind.
Accelerando by Charles Stross further explores the breakdown of the Cartesian dualist framework. This book explores a world in which the rate of technological acceleration approaches the “singularity”, a point past which no future predictions can be made due to the steep rate of technological change.
One path of scientific research in this world is a quest for immortality- not just the prolonging of corporeal senescence, but the uploading of neural networks into a computer such that they may still continue to function after the body has passed away. This quest in and of itself transgresses the boundaries of Cartesian dualism, and in its success creates something uniquely posthuman: the Franklin collective. This is a group of people who have committed to running the uploaded personality of Bob Franklin, a human who took many recordings of his personality to preserve it after his death.
“Hello, Bob. How long have you been dead?”
She chuckles. “I'm not dead, Manny. I may not be a full upload, but I feel like me.” She rolls her
eyes, self-consciously...
“You're acting as a, I guess, an interpreter for Bob?”
“Ack.” She looks at Manfred very seriously: "We owe him a lot, you know. He left his assets in
trust to the movement along with his partials. We feel obliged to instantiate his personality as
often as possible, even though you can only do so much with a couple of petabytes of recordings.
(Stross, 2005)
Even without a full recording of his personality, Bob Franklin is still able to interact with corporeal people through his collective. There is no border between the initial biological component of the individual members of the collective and the personality of Franklin that they run. Although they do show some individual personality while running Franklin, each member still values running this disembodied personality over using their own, corporeally bound mind. This emphasis of the informational over the corporeal is particularly posthuman.
As the story progresses the decorporealisation of the mind extends, such that disembodied uploads become commonplace. These copies of the mind, sundered from their corporeal forms, are what is sent to explore the reaches of space where sending a weighty physical body would be impractical.
Here we are, sixty something human minds. We've been migrated - while still awake - right out
of our own heads...and we're now running as software in an operating system designed to
virtualize multiple physics models and provide a simulation of reality that doesn't let us go mad
from sensory deprivation! And this whole package is about the size of a fingertip, crammed into a
starship the size of your grandmother's old Walkman, in orbit around a brown dwarf just over
three light-years from home, on its way to plug into a network router created by incredibly
ancient alien intelligences, and you can tell me that the idea of a fundamental change in the
human condition is nonsense? (Stross, 2005)
This complete separation of the mind and body further transgresses the model of Cartesian dualism. Amber and her crew embrace the changes of a posthuman future-fully cognisant of the simulation in which their uploaded selves exist, and knowing that their exploration of space is dependent on that.
The human mind in Accelerando is not just sundered physically from the corporeal form, but also conceptually from the sanctity of biological purity. The human mind is treated more as a piece of software, able to be improved upon and modified.
Others have modified their core identities to better cope with the changed demands of reality.
Among these are beings whom nobody from a previous century would recognize as human -
human/corporation half-breeds, zombie clades dehumanized by their own optimizations, angels
and devils of software, slyly self-aware financial instruments. (Stross, 2005)
That there could exist a hybrid of a human and a corporation, or a self-aware financial instrument is a contradiction of traditional Cartesian duality. This emphasis on the mind, on the “software” is a decidedly posthuman view, with no mention of the physical instantiation of these modified consciousnesses.
For the latter part of the book humanity is living in deep space, with consciousness expressed as similar to software. One core concept in this part of the novel is the process of “forking”, whereby two or more copies of a mind are created and both individually make their own way in the cyberworld. This can be used to gain information, where the forked selves eventually reintegrate with the initial mind, adding all the experiences gained to the sum of that mind’s being, or it can be used to create multiple copies of the self where sending one person would take too long, such as in Amber’s election campaign:
Approximately six million ghosts of Amber, individually tailored to fit the profile of the targeted
audience, fork across the dark fiber meshwork underpinning of the lily-pad colonies, then out
through ultrawideband mesh networks, instantiated in implants and floating dust motes to
buttonhole the voters. Many of them fail to reach their audience, and many more hold fruitless
discussions; about six actually decide they've diverged so far from their original that they
constitute separate people and register for independent citizenship, two defect to the other side,
and one elopes with a swarm of highly empathic modified African honeybees. (Stross, 2005)
These forks are completely autonomous units, with no connection to the initial consciousness from which they are divulged. This demonstrated here- had the forked versions of Amber been connected then it would be a schizophrenic event for some of the forks to declare themselves autonomous citizens, but the version of Amber which spawned these consciousnesses is unaffected by any changes that they experience after their independence.
Katherine Hayles characterizes the posthuman as tending towards four assumptions:
First, the posthuman view privileges informational pattern over material instantiation, so that
embodiment in a biological substrate is seen as an accident of history rather than an inevitability
of life.
Second, the posthuman view considers consciousness...as an epiphenomenon, as an evolutionary
upstart.
Third, the posthuman view thinks of the body as the original prosthesis we all learn to manipulate
so that extending or replacing the body with other prostheses becomes a continuation of a
process that began before we were born.
Fourth, and most important, by these and other means the posthuman view configures human
being so that is can be seamlessly articulated with intelligent machines. (Hayles, 1999 p 2-3)
Accelerando speaks to many of these concepts of posthumanism in its dealing with the human mind. The world of consciousness at the end of the book, where the human mind is decorporealised and able to fork repeatedly without affecting the initial consciousness is the end effect of a process throughout the book of valuing the information carried in something over its physical instantiation. By the end of the tale, the human consciousness is effectively disembodied, existing without a biological substrate. The role of consciousness is debated freely in this book, with many non-human species, corporeal or otherwise, are conscious and sentient. The possibility of creating a human/corporation hybrid appears peculiar in a world dominated by a dualistic school of thought, but can easily be expressed in a posthuman society where intelligence, be it machine, software or biological in nature, relates to things irrespective of their physical origin.
In each of these texts the mind is encountered outside the body, whether as a person inside the Matrix, a disembodied data ghost in a neural relay or as in image in a software package headed to the stars. In the Cartesian duality, these minds would be not just distinct from the body, but remain interacting in a causal manner with it. Of these texts, it is only The Matrix in which this is the case, where the sundering of the two parts, whether by the death of one part or by mechanical means, causes the other part also to die. In contrast, Miss Evangelista is able to exist within the virtual reality of CAL after the death of her body. Bob Franklin and his collective, Amber and the spaceship to the wormhole, and the development of forked consciousnesses all embrace the posthuman value of “privileging informational pattern over material instantiation”. This shift toward a posthuman framework of the mind reflects an increasing dependence on technology, where the physical elements of social discourse are increasingly devalued as interactions take place in the digital realm. Through exploring the possible ways the human mind could interact and evolve in such a space, further transgressions of the Cartesian mind/body dualism are thus posited or resisted in these works. The causal interaction evident in The Matrix is a reminder that while discourses of thought may be moving toward a posthuman devaluation of the physical form; the traditional discourse of the separation and interaction of the mind and body still carries weight in speculative fiction today. If we are moving toward viewing ourselves as posthuman, we are not there yet.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Cranny-Francis A, (2000) The Erotics of the (cy)Borg: Authority and Gender in the Sociocultural Imagery. Future Females: The Next Generation: New Voices and Velocities in Feminish Science Fiction Criticism, Barr MS (ed), Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
Descartes, R (1641) Meditations on First Philosophy, Cottingham J (transl). New York: Cambridge University Press
Gane, N (2006) Posthuman. Theory, Culture and Society, 23 (2-3), 431-434
Hayles, N K (1999) How we became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press
Moffat, S (2008) Silence in the Library, BBC
Moffat, S (2008) The Forest of the Dead, BBC
Stross, C (2005) Accelerando, London: Orbit
Wachowski, A & L (1999) The Matrix, Warner Bros
Descartes in his Mediations on First Philosophy mused on the possibility of an evil demon controlling his every experience (Descartes, 1641). What is it about the mind that connects it to a real world, the body; is there any way of knowing whether that connection is real? While Descartes’ mind is an immaterial thing that can exist apart from the body, he also posited that it interacts in a causal manner with the body. This separation and interaction form the core of what is now known as Cartesian dualism. In a world increasingly populated and influenced by computers, this dualism lends itself to application in the digital realm, where representations of the mind have become a prominent theme in speculative fiction. Three texts in particular cast an interesting light on the way the issue is perceived: the movie The Matrix (Andy and Larry Wachowski, 1999), two Doctor Who television episodes “Silence in the Library” and “Forest of the Dead” written by Steven Moffat (these two episodes contain one complete narrative, thus they are read here as one text), and the book Accelerando by Charles Stross. Through exploring representation of the mind as distinct from the human body, analysis of these texts will explore the shift away from the traditional Cartesian mind/body dualism to a posthuman classification of the mind.
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 is created for their minds- the titular Matrix. This world 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.
The film is forward in addressing the philosophical issues raised by Descartes, positing instead of evil demon an evil immersive computer network as the deceptive agent, created by the Artificial Intelligence in the aftermath of the war.
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.
This deception of the real is analogous to Descartes’ demon- there is no way of knowing if what is seen is reality. The only perception that the mind has of the world comes via electrical impulses of the brain, and these are all subject to manipulation. Coming from outside the Matrix the rebels learn to understand and manipulate the parameters of the simulation, for example jumping unfathomably long distances, however they still retain the same corporeal image as in the real world (sans machine-imposed plugs). These mental projections look, speak and interact like their corporeal counterparts- indicative of how interrelated and interdependent the two instantiations initially are.
This causal interaction is elucidated further by the scenarios of life and death in the Matrix and the real world.
Neo: If you are killed in the Matrix, you die here?
Morpheus: The body cannot live without the mind.
Here the mind is required for the body to function, as is the body for the mind. This causal interaction is made explicit when Mouse is killed by the Agents in the Matrix, and when Cypher kills Apoc and Switch by disconnecting them while they are “jacked in”- severing the connection between the body and the mind. 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. Mysteriously hailed as “The One”, Neo dies in the Matrix and subsequently in the real world also, conforming to the traditional Cartesian duality. He is then resurrected. From this point he perceives the world as three dimensional structures of binary code. This ability to perceive the structure of deceptive world transgresses the traditional confines of the Cartesian dualist discourse- consciously visualising the deception as a deception was not an option for Descartes.
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 Cranny-Francis’ 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”. This treatment speaks to the body as being an “organic machine”, able to be broken down into its component parts (cells, minerals) and used to help create more bodies- these parts have no relation to the mind formerly inhabiting them. The Matrix thus reinforces the Cartesian duality in that the human body and mind interact and are required to support each other, but that they are separate. Even at its most transgressive, the human mind and body presented in The Matrix are still fundamentally interrelated, unable to exist without the other.
While The Matrix highlights this interrelatedness of the mind and body, the Doctor Who episodes “Silence in the Library” and “Forest of the Dead” begin to transgress this discourse.
These episodes take place on a planet known as The Library, where 100 years prior all the visitors to the planet disappeared. The titular Doctor and his travelling companion Donna Noble arrive at The Library and attempt to discover what happened, meeting a team of archaeologists doing the same. Together they discover the cause of the deaths; a microscopic carnivorous species called the Vashta Nerada, which hunts as swarms of shadows. While discovering this, one of the archaeologist’s party wanders off and is devoured by these creatures leaving nothing but a skeleton and part of her spacesuit including a communicator.
The technology of this communication device uploads the consciousness of the wearer or those around the device. After her death, Miss Evangelista remained conscious and expressed fear and embarrassment, conversing with those still alive.
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 in the neural relay and is able to interact with people as such. That the upload is sentient is demonstrated by Miss Evangelista- having been eviscerated by the Vashta Nerada she is found interacting with the uploaded Donna inside CAL. However as she was not an intentional teleport, rather her degrading data ghost was saved by the computer, her image is corrupted with her face visibly warped. She tells Donna that the world is a simulation against the wishes of the computer herself- showing that she is governed by her own thought patterns, not just a component of the simulation. When the rest of the uploads are returned to corporeality, Miss Evangelista is not. Neither are the other archaeologists who were killed, implying that while the mind can still exist as a decorporealised form, once the body had been destroyed there was no way to recorporealise.
It is in the second half of the narrative 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. (Silence in the Library,
2008)
Even this does not completely transgress the connectedness of the mind and body as CAL does have corporeal representations 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, while uploaded into an incorporeal medium there is still the potential for recorporealisation, such as would occur at the destination to which they were transported.
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 computer saved 4,022 people the only way a computer can. It saved them to the
hard drive. (Forest of the Dead, 2008)
These people are uploaded vie teleport into the hard drive of the computer where they exist and interact. These uploads are still associated with: “[The] physical self...stored in the library as an energy signature, it can be actualised again whenever you or the Library requires”. This allows 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 the two 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 “energy signature” to return them to a state of embodied dualism when required.
This treatment of the human mind as able to be separated from the corporeal form transgresses the ultimately linked nature of the mind/body in the Cartesian duality. This movement away from what is traditionally thought of as human, toward something that incorporates technology, is movement towards the discourse of posthumanism.
Nicholas Gane quotes Katherine Hayles in his discussion of posthumanism:
In the posthuman, there are no essential differences of absolute demarcations between bodily
existence and computer simulation, cybernetic mechanism and biological organism...(quoted in
Gane 2006, p432)
Many of the characters in these episodes fit this definition. CAL herself is both a computer and a girl; it is within her mind that the uploaded people interact. She has a cybernetic presence in her running and interacting in the systems of the library, and a biological presence in her aspect as a node-face. This applies to the uploaded people too, assuming that their “energy signature” comprises some bodily element; they exist in a computer simulation, yet are still associated with a biological capability. This energy signature involves the dissolution of the corporeal form, but there appears to be no clear boundary of where of how this biological component is stored as distinct from the uploaded mind. Thus “Silence in the Library” and “Forest of the Dead” show a movement away from the Cartesian dualism of previous thought, to a more posthuman view of the mind.
Accelerando by Charles Stross further explores the breakdown of the Cartesian dualist framework. This book explores a world in which the rate of technological acceleration approaches the “singularity”, a point past which no future predictions can be made due to the steep rate of technological change.
One path of scientific research in this world is a quest for immortality- not just the prolonging of corporeal senescence, but the uploading of neural networks into a computer such that they may still continue to function after the body has passed away. This quest in and of itself transgresses the boundaries of Cartesian dualism, and in its success creates something uniquely posthuman: the Franklin collective. This is a group of people who have committed to running the uploaded personality of Bob Franklin, a human who took many recordings of his personality to preserve it after his death.
“Hello, Bob. How long have you been dead?”
She chuckles. “I'm not dead, Manny. I may not be a full upload, but I feel like me.” She rolls her
eyes, self-consciously...
“You're acting as a, I guess, an interpreter for Bob?”
“Ack.” She looks at Manfred very seriously: "We owe him a lot, you know. He left his assets in
trust to the movement along with his partials. We feel obliged to instantiate his personality as
often as possible, even though you can only do so much with a couple of petabytes of recordings.
(Stross, 2005)
Even without a full recording of his personality, Bob Franklin is still able to interact with corporeal people through his collective. There is no border between the initial biological component of the individual members of the collective and the personality of Franklin that they run. Although they do show some individual personality while running Franklin, each member still values running this disembodied personality over using their own, corporeally bound mind. This emphasis of the informational over the corporeal is particularly posthuman.
As the story progresses the decorporealisation of the mind extends, such that disembodied uploads become commonplace. These copies of the mind, sundered from their corporeal forms, are what is sent to explore the reaches of space where sending a weighty physical body would be impractical.
Here we are, sixty something human minds. We've been migrated - while still awake - right out
of our own heads...and we're now running as software in an operating system designed to
virtualize multiple physics models and provide a simulation of reality that doesn't let us go mad
from sensory deprivation! And this whole package is about the size of a fingertip, crammed into a
starship the size of your grandmother's old Walkman, in orbit around a brown dwarf just over
three light-years from home, on its way to plug into a network router created by incredibly
ancient alien intelligences, and you can tell me that the idea of a fundamental change in the
human condition is nonsense? (Stross, 2005)
This complete separation of the mind and body further transgresses the model of Cartesian dualism. Amber and her crew embrace the changes of a posthuman future-fully cognisant of the simulation in which their uploaded selves exist, and knowing that their exploration of space is dependent on that.
The human mind in Accelerando is not just sundered physically from the corporeal form, but also conceptually from the sanctity of biological purity. The human mind is treated more as a piece of software, able to be improved upon and modified.
Others have modified their core identities to better cope with the changed demands of reality.
Among these are beings whom nobody from a previous century would recognize as human -
human/corporation half-breeds, zombie clades dehumanized by their own optimizations, angels
and devils of software, slyly self-aware financial instruments. (Stross, 2005)
That there could exist a hybrid of a human and a corporation, or a self-aware financial instrument is a contradiction of traditional Cartesian duality. This emphasis on the mind, on the “software” is a decidedly posthuman view, with no mention of the physical instantiation of these modified consciousnesses.
For the latter part of the book humanity is living in deep space, with consciousness expressed as similar to software. One core concept in this part of the novel is the process of “forking”, whereby two or more copies of a mind are created and both individually make their own way in the cyberworld. This can be used to gain information, where the forked selves eventually reintegrate with the initial mind, adding all the experiences gained to the sum of that mind’s being, or it can be used to create multiple copies of the self where sending one person would take too long, such as in Amber’s election campaign:
Approximately six million ghosts of Amber, individually tailored to fit the profile of the targeted
audience, fork across the dark fiber meshwork underpinning of the lily-pad colonies, then out
through ultrawideband mesh networks, instantiated in implants and floating dust motes to
buttonhole the voters. Many of them fail to reach their audience, and many more hold fruitless
discussions; about six actually decide they've diverged so far from their original that they
constitute separate people and register for independent citizenship, two defect to the other side,
and one elopes with a swarm of highly empathic modified African honeybees. (Stross, 2005)
These forks are completely autonomous units, with no connection to the initial consciousness from which they are divulged. This demonstrated here- had the forked versions of Amber been connected then it would be a schizophrenic event for some of the forks to declare themselves autonomous citizens, but the version of Amber which spawned these consciousnesses is unaffected by any changes that they experience after their independence.
Katherine Hayles characterizes the posthuman as tending towards four assumptions:
First, the posthuman view privileges informational pattern over material instantiation, so that
embodiment in a biological substrate is seen as an accident of history rather than an inevitability
of life.
Second, the posthuman view considers consciousness...as an epiphenomenon, as an evolutionary
upstart.
Third, the posthuman view thinks of the body as the original prosthesis we all learn to manipulate
so that extending or replacing the body with other prostheses becomes a continuation of a
process that began before we were born.
Fourth, and most important, by these and other means the posthuman view configures human
being so that is can be seamlessly articulated with intelligent machines. (Hayles, 1999 p 2-3)
Accelerando speaks to many of these concepts of posthumanism in its dealing with the human mind. The world of consciousness at the end of the book, where the human mind is decorporealised and able to fork repeatedly without affecting the initial consciousness is the end effect of a process throughout the book of valuing the information carried in something over its physical instantiation. By the end of the tale, the human consciousness is effectively disembodied, existing without a biological substrate. The role of consciousness is debated freely in this book, with many non-human species, corporeal or otherwise, are conscious and sentient. The possibility of creating a human/corporation hybrid appears peculiar in a world dominated by a dualistic school of thought, but can easily be expressed in a posthuman society where intelligence, be it machine, software or biological in nature, relates to things irrespective of their physical origin.
In each of these texts the mind is encountered outside the body, whether as a person inside the Matrix, a disembodied data ghost in a neural relay or as in image in a software package headed to the stars. In the Cartesian duality, these minds would be not just distinct from the body, but remain interacting in a causal manner with it. Of these texts, it is only The Matrix in which this is the case, where the sundering of the two parts, whether by the death of one part or by mechanical means, causes the other part also to die. In contrast, Miss Evangelista is able to exist within the virtual reality of CAL after the death of her body. Bob Franklin and his collective, Amber and the spaceship to the wormhole, and the development of forked consciousnesses all embrace the posthuman value of “privileging informational pattern over material instantiation”. This shift toward a posthuman framework of the mind reflects an increasing dependence on technology, where the physical elements of social discourse are increasingly devalued as interactions take place in the digital realm. Through exploring the possible ways the human mind could interact and evolve in such a space, further transgressions of the Cartesian mind/body dualism are thus posited or resisted in these works. The causal interaction evident in The Matrix is a reminder that while discourses of thought may be moving toward a posthuman devaluation of the physical form; the traditional discourse of the separation and interaction of the mind and body still carries weight in speculative fiction today. If we are moving toward viewing ourselves as posthuman, we are not there yet.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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