Some thoughts on posthumanism

Perhaps we might understand posthumanism at least in part as a challenge to the traditional borders, boundaries, and oppositions that have structured how humans understand and relate to the world. Posthumanist theory, or what we might term “posthumanist theory” for the sake of keeping track of scholarly discussions while acknowledging their heterogeneity, asks us to think about what is stake on how we construct and maintain differences between terms such as natural and unnatural, human and animal, mechanical and organic.

The idea of “boundaries,” in particular, plays a central role in Donna Haraway’s 1985 essay, “A Cyborg Manifesto.” The term appears frequently in the essay. Here are a few examples of how she uses the concept:

My cyborg myth is about transgressed boundaries, potent fusions, and dangerous possibilities which progressive people might explore as one part of needed political work. (154)

Of course, who controls the interpretation of bodily boundaries in medical hermeneutics is a major feminist issue. (169)

We are responsible for boundaries; we are they. (180)

There is no drive in cyborgs to produce total theory, but there is an intimate experience of boundaries, their construction and deconstruction. (181)

Cyborg imagery can help express two crucial arguments in this essay: first, the production of universal, totalizing theory is a major mistake that misses most of reality, probably always, but certainly now; and second, taking responsibility for the social relations of science and technology means refusing an anti-science metaphysics, a demonology of technology, and so means embracing the skillful task of reconstructing the boundaries of daily life, in partial connection with others, in communication with all of our parts. (181)

To confront a boundary is to confront a limit – a line one must not pass. Boundaries are imaginative. Boundaries, their maintenance, and their dismantling involve confronting relationships of social power. Boundaries may also create the very entities that they purport to separate.  Boundaries are performative.

It seems as if the human, historically, in the West anyway, has certainly been the cultural product of shifting boundaries. We need think only of something as simple as our contemporary preference for the word “human” over “man” to understand this. In the United States Declaration of Independence, the word “men” doesn’t include men of color, nor does it include women. In a historical light, then, we see that the human has been defined, and continues to be defined, in opposition to its racialized and gendered others. Judith Butler, whom we wouldn’t necessarily recognize as a “posthumanist,” makes a rather posthuman theoretical gesture when she writes:

That we cannot predict or control what permutations of the human might arise does not mean that we must value all possible permutations of the human; it does not mean that we cannot struggle for the realization of certain values, democratic and non-violent, international and antiracist.  The point is only that to struggle for those values is precisely to avow that one’s own position is not sufficient to elaborate the spectrum of the human, that one must enter into a collective work in which one’s own status as a subject must, for democratic reasons, become disoriented, exposed to what it does not know.

What I mean to get at with these observations is that “posthumanism” probably doesn’t emerge from a particular techno-cultural moment, although emerging technologies certainly disrupt, and force us to reconsider, traditional human boundaries. Rather, as Butler seems to suggest, posthumanism involves making room for new and unexpected “permutations of the human,” and confronts us with the notion that the historical human subject has always been in a process of permutation.

The Dixie Flatline

Philosopher of mind John Searle begins his book The Mystery of Consciousness with the following reflection:

The enormous variety of stimuli that affect us – for example, when we taste wine, look at the sky, smell a rose, listen to a concert – trigger sequences of neurobiological processes that eventually cause unified, well-ordered, coherent, inner, subjective states of awareness or sentience. Now what exactly happens between the assault of stimuli on our receptors and the experience of consciousness, and how exactly do the intermediate processes cause the conscious states? (3)

Without resorting to dualism between body and mind, and without eliminating human subjectivity in favor of reductive materialism, Searle attempts not to explain consciousness, but to move us toward exploring consciousness as an emergent property of a physical, embodied system: “The liquidity of water is a good example: the behavior of the H₂0 molecules explains liquidity, but the individual molecules are not liquid” (16). According to Searle, consciousness does indeed emerge from the material operations of the brain. However, he maintains, “Consciousness has a first-person or subjective ontology and so cannot be reduced to anything that has third-person or objective ontology” (212). He argues that our dualist/materialist vocabulary of mind stymies our ability to formulate a coherent response to the hard problem of consciousness.

I am interested in how we might understand the differences between human consciousness and machine “consciousness.” I believe a character in William Gibson’s Neuromancer offers a literary example of these concepts. The Dixie Flatline, who exits only as a “ROM personality construct” utilizes language, responds to verbal commands, carries out autonomous tasks, and analyzes vast amounts of data. “Dix” would certainly pass the Turing test as developed in Alan Turing’s 1950 paper “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” a simple game in which a human player attempts to distinguish between a computer and another human player through text based queries. If the investigator incorrectly declares the computer a human, according to Turing, we might then think of the computer as an “intelligent” machine. If our criteria for determining machine intelligence is merely its ability to process and manipulate a wide array of linguistic information, the Flatline would indeed possess the capacity for thought as defined in the Turing test. However, it is precisely this narrow definition of conscious thought that Gibson’s character poignantly undermines. First, the Dixie Flatline forces us to confront the gulf between syntax and semantics. Searle explains:

Computation, so defined, is purely a syntactical set of operations, in the sense that the only features of the symbols that matter for the implementation of the program are the formal or syntactical features. But we know from our own experience that the mind has something more going on it than the manipulation of formal symbols; minds have contents. For example, when we are thinking in English, the English words going through our minds are not just uninterpreted formal symbols; rather, we know what they mean. For us the words have a meaning, or semantics. The mind could not be just a computer program, because the formal symbols of the computer program by themselves are not sufficient to guarantee the presence of the semantic content that occurs in actual minds. (10)

The reverse holds true as well, a computer program cannot be a mind if it merely manipulates symbols without possessing semantic content. Searle’s famous rebuttal to Turing’s account of machinic thinking, “The Chinese Room Argument – as it has come to be called – has a simple three-step structure: 1. Programs are entirely syntactical. 2. Minds have a semantics. 3. Syntax is not the same as, nor by itself sufficient for, semantics. Therefore programs are not minds. Q.E.D” (11-12). Like the occupant of the Chinese room who successfully manipulates symbols without understanding their semantic content, the Dixie Flatline appears to be conscious, but does not possess a self, a locus of subjective experience in which words come to “mean” something. Circuits and silicon cannot recreate the experience of embodied consciousness or the feeling of qualia. For Dix, the biological character of the human sensorium has been completely liquidated, and with it human feeling and the meaning sedimented in the formal symbols of our language.

In short, I am interested in exploring the question of whether there exists some kind of “ontological” distinction between human consciousness and machinic intelligence.