Humanity In-Between and Beyond 3031279441, 9783031279447

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Integrated Science 16

Monika Michałowska   Editor

Humanity In-Between and Beyond

Integrated Science Volume 16 Editor-in-Chief Nima Rezaei

, Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran

The Integrated Science Series aims to publish the most relevant and novel research in all areas of Formal Sciences, Physical and Chemical Sciences, Biological Sciences, Medical Sciences, and Social Sciences. We are especially focused on the research involving the integration of two of more academic fields offering an innovative view, which is one of the main focuses of Universal Scientific Education and Research Network (USERN), science without borders. Integrated Science is committed to upholding the integrity of the scientific record and will follow the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) guidelines on how to deal with potential acts of misconduct and correcting the literature.

Monika Michałowska Editor

Humanity In-Between and Beyond

Editor Monika Michałowska Department of Bioethics Medical University of Łód´z Łód´z, Poland

ISSN 2662-9461 ISSN 2662-947X (electronic) Integrated Science ISBN 978-3-031-27944-7 ISBN 978-3-031-27945-4 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27945-4 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 Chapter 6 is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). For further details see license information in the chapter. This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Introduction

For millennia, discourses across and on sciences, the humanities, and culture have been dominated by the apparently inseparable and symbiotic terms “human” and “person.” These discourses have furnished us with a range of idiosyncratic phrases, such as “rational animals” or “political animals,” the traditional slogans, as Neil Roughley calls them [1], which undoubtedly have normative consequences. As the children of “the Anthropocene,” we have customarily prioritized our existence, values, and needs over those of other biological and non-biological agents existing among, around, and with us. Even though we have already been made to recognize that the pernicious impacts of humanity are overwhelming, we still cherish the vision of human superiority and uniqueness not only as a form of life, but even as a form of being. While the awareness of the Anthropocene narrative increasingly brings to our attention the devastation of the planet, natural disasters, the loss of biological diversity, geopolitical turbulences, and a variety of pandemics, our thinking is still underpinned by simplifying and simplified definitions of the human and the person, which reinforce the separation of human and nonhuman beings and realms, overlooking the densities and diversities of our embeddings in and with the more-than-human world. Conveyed by a hierarchical vision of the world, dualistic metaphysics, and the “asymmetricalist” models of negation, the notion of the nonhuman has always been contingent on its pairing element—the human— and obscured by the latter’s meaning and status. As Laurence Horn argues: All human systems of communication contain a representation of negation. No animal communication system includes negative utterances, and consequently none possesses a means for assigning truth value, for lying, for irony, or for coping with false or contradictory statements (…). The distinction between the largely digital nature of linguistic representation in human language and the purely analog mechanisms of animal communication (…) can be argued to result directly from the essential use humans make of negation and opposition. If we are by definition the animals that talk, we are ipso facto the animals that deny, for (…) any linguistic determination directly or indirectly involves a negation [2, p. XIII].

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The emergence and the development of ideas and demands that aim at dismantling the vision of this simplistic symbiosis have been especially pronounced in transhumanism and posthumanism, which question the human–nonhuman distinction, regardless of whether the terms are taken as normative denotations of our nature and essence or as descriptive adjectives referring to certain characteristics we may possess or not. The new wave has also brought forth bioethics as a domain relevant to almost every aspect of human life. Coined by Van Rensselaer Potter in 1970 [3], the term has already become common currency and expands our understanding of the world we inhabit. Although when elucidating why we needed bioethics, Potter did refer to the biosphere as a whole, his focus was mainly on (bio)medical ethics and healthcare systems. Initially, bioethics was thus intended to study the dilemmas of biomedical and medical sciences. That narrow sense of bioethics has been generally adopted, and until very recently, the discipline indeed concentrated on (bio)medical issues concerning the human. Admittedly, there have been calls for “extending the original formulations” of Potter’s framework of bioethics to incorporate “life-affirming spiritual values” and to include nonhumans, that is, other forms of life that constitute the ecosystem as an entirety of which the human is just one element [4]. Yet, such pleas have invariably been limited to the “natural” forms of life (animals and plants)—the forms of life as we know it. Given the fact that over the last decades we have witnessed a rapid development of (bio)technologies that are used to alter the body of the human, the reductive concept of the world we inhabit and our place in it has become obsolete as it fails to address new dilemmas, including the salient need for a redefinition of “the human” versus “the nonhuman.” In the era of an intensive use of (bio)technologies, the question arises whether the traditional philosophical concepts founded on the human–nonhuman distinction are still tenable. This question makes us acknowledge, as Richard Grusin points out, that “we have never been human,” because “the human has always coevolved, coexisted, or collaborated with the nonhuman—and that the human is characterized precisely by this indistinction from the nonhuman” [5, pp. ix–x]. One straightforward exemplification of Grusin’s insight is to be found in the cochlear implant, which makes a human into an ensemble of biological and mechanical parts that function together. This is, in fact, one definition of the cyborg (a technologically enhanced human being), which as such was introduced by Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline in the narrative of space travel in 1960: SPACE travel challenges mankind not only technologically but also spiritually, in that it invites man to take an active part in his own biological evolution. Scientific advances of the future may thus be utilized to permit man’s existence in environments which differ radically from those provided by nature as we know it. The task of adapting man’s body to any environment he may choose will be made easier by increased knowledge of homeostatic functioning, the cybernetic aspects of which are just beginning to be understood and investigated. In the past evolution brought about the altering of bodily functions to suit different environments. Starting as of now, it will be possible to achieve this to some degree without

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alteration of heredity by suitable biochemical, physiological, and electronic modifications of man’s existing modus vivendi [6, p. 26, italics original].

Another exemplification is offered by the emergence of new artistic movements, such as bio art and novel species of body art. Among its various pursuits, bio art uses biological material to create new forms of life, epitomized in “‘Edunia,’ a genetically engineered flower that is a hybrid of myself [Eduardo Kac] and Petunia” [7]. For their part, innovative trends in body art (including cyborg art and hybrid art) employ technologies to significantly alter artists’ bodies, as emblematized in Neil Harbisson’s project. The cyborg artist Harbisson, born with an extreme form of color blindness that results in seeing in greyscale, has had an antenna implanted in his skull to enable him to perceive visible and invisible colors—including infrareds and ultraviolets, which regular humans have no ability to perceive—via audible vibrations. As an effect, Harbisson can be said to hear colors, an unnatural skill for a human, and thus to meet the definitional requirements of a cyborg as propounded by Clynes and Kline: The purpose of the Cyborg, as well as his own homeostatic systems, is to provide an organizational system in which such robot-like problems are taken care of automatically and unconsciously, leaving man free to explore, to create, to think, and to feel [6, p. 27].

Arguably, these projects provide a new perspective attesting to the emergence of a new human–nonhuman symbiont that is in a constant state of flux, inbetweenness, and coming-to-be, always in transition, never defined, neither complete nor fixed. A similarly effective foothold from which to erode anthropocentrism and tear down the rigid vision of the human can be offered by the embodiment perspective. Deconstructing the image of bodies as self-contained and self-sufficient can help us understand that “[b]odies are not only open, they are leaky, for there is an inherent resistance to containment” [8, p. 97]. Since the bodily self is not a thing, it cannot be grasped as such, and, consequently, it is never “present” as things can be [9, 10]. The embodied self is experienced as ecstatic, always entangled in the processes of self-alienation, since it transcends itself in intentional acts, as well as in physiological and sensory activities [11]. Thus, the lived body, through which external objects are perceived and manipulated along with its neurophysiological apparatus, undergoes constant self-splitting. Cutting-edge technologies that afford us body enhancement techniques have added new dimensions to the structure of the experience of the embodied self and its transgressive nature. The technological advancement and the rapid development of science produce new questions and challenges to an array of disciplines, including medicine, bioethics, philosophy, art, and aesthetics. Firstly, they redraw the traditional notion of a clear division between “nature” and “culture.” The point is that if our culture shapes the way we see, it is itself shaped by the way we know it, or, as William J. T. Mitchell puts it, “[it] is not just that we see the way we do because we are social animals, but also that our social arrangements take the forms they do because we

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are seeing animals” [12, p. 345]. The ability to see and the reliance on seeing are crucial to our mode of making sense of the world around us, describing it, and intervening with it. Our bodies give us access to the objects of the external world, channel our encounters with other selves, and are also objects perceived by others. The awareness of our sensory apparatus of seeing, hearing, feeling, and also of being seen, heard, etc. is part of our experience. Secondly, the proliferation of technical images, which began in late modernity, has stepped up so much that media studies is becoming an important discipline in its own right, itself registering a slew of major changes in the process. Consequently, the notion of the “image” (“picture”) needs redefining and/or extending beyond its traditional meaning of something that is seen to include new images, not infrequently developed without actual seeing, such as sonographic images, which are based on the visual modeling of sound signals [13], the living images of genetic and transgenic art [14], contemporary intermedia phenomena, and post-cinematic art forms, such as autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR) videos. Their ubiquity makes visual culture research vital, while comprehending them becomes essential for the description of the contemporary world. These new forms of art and visual culture combine with new (bio)technologies to undercut the entrenched concepts, assumptions, and beliefs about the human body and to question taken-for-granted parameters of what it means to be a human being. Given that bio/body art, new species of visual culture, and new (bio)technologies influence our lives by (re)casting our understandings of the self, the person, the body, and the human, a major attunement is urgently needed, a new paradigm that will extend the idea of the human beyond standard philosophical packages and provide the springboard for the nonhuman, transhuman, and posthuman turns, incorporating the ethics of life-as-we-perhaps-do-not-know-it-yet [15]. This volume aims at dismantling the petrified and petrifying oppositions we— humans—find so convenient in organizing, parsing, and portraying the world we inhabit, since, as Joseph H. Greenberg puts it, it is “[t]he pervasive nature in human thinking (…) to take one of the members of an oppositional category as unmarked so that it represents either the entire category or par excellence the opposite member to the marked category (…)” [16, p. 72]. Humanity In-Between and Beyond features a variety of themes in and approaches to debating the definitional and conceptual problems concerning the notions of the human and the nonhuman, engaging with the ideas of a person, cyborg, avatar, humanoid robot, and artificial intelligence. The contributors to Humanity In-Between and Beyond take multiperspectival standpoints on these issues, in which discourses of philosophy, medicine, bioethics, anthropology, art, and activism intersect to champion the idea of human–nonhuman dialogue and fashion a new narrative of humanity. Thinking and working above and across disciplinary and definitional lines, they construct methodological and conceptual linkages, transactions, and alliances to promote this project.

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Humanity In-Between and Beyond has evolved from the papers presented at two online conferences held during the COVID-19 pandemic: Being One and Many: Faces of the Human in the 21st Century (Medical University of Łód´z, Poland, 9–10 March 2021) and Crossing the Border of Humanity: Cyborgs in Ethics, Law, and Art (collaboratively organized by the Medical University of Łód´z and the University of Warwick, 14–15 December 2021). Both conferences explored the identity of the human in the contemporary world and the definitional and argumentative dilemmas concerning the (human–nonhuman, biological–mechanical, and natural–unnatural) dichotomies by which we live and with which we think. The awareness of the necessity to overcome the binary polarizations that feel so comfortable to us was highlighted and expressed to result in the joint venture of publishing this volume. Łód´z, Poland

Monika Michałowska [email protected]

References

1. Roughley N (2021) Human nature. In: The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy. https://plato. stanford.edu/entries/human-nature/. Accessed 27 Dec 2022 2. Horn L (1989) A natural history of negation. University of Chicago Press, Chicago 3. Potter VR (1970) Bioethics: the science of survival. Perspect Biol Med 14:127–153 4. Whitehouse PJ (2003) The rebirth of bioethics: extending the original formulations of Van Rensselaer Potter. Am J Bioethics 3(4):W26–W31 5. Grusin R (ed) (2015) The nonhuman turn. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis– London 6. Clynes M, Kline N (1960) Cyborgs and space. Astronautics 26–27, 74–76 7. Kac E (2003–2008) Natural history of the Enigma. https://www.ekac.org/nat.hist.enig. html.Accessed 27 Dec 2022 8. Pevere M (2022) Vulnerability as a queer art. Technoetic Arts. J Specul Res 20(1–2):95–110 9. Waldenfels B (2011) Phenomenology of the alien. Northwestern University Press, Evanston– Illinois 10. Waldenfels B (1997) Topographie des fremden: Studien zur Phänomenologie des Fremden. Suhrkamp Verlag KG, Berlin 11. Husserl E (1989) Ideas pertaining to a pure phenomenology and to a phenomenological philosophy. Second book. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, Boston, London 12. Mitchell WJT (2005) What do pictures want? The loves and lives of images. University of Chicago Press, Chicago 13. Mirzoeff N (2016) How to see the world: an introduction to images, from self-portraits to selfies, maps to movies and more. Basic Books, New York 14. Grau O (2003) Virtual art: from illusion to immersion. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA 15. Zylinska J (ed) (2002) The cyborg experiments: the extensions of the body in the media age. Continuum, London, New York 16. Greenberg JH (1970) Language universals. In: Sebok Th A (Ed) Current trends in linguistics, Vol. III: Theoretical foundations. Mouton, The Hague, Paris, pp 61–110

Contents

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A New Way of Coming-To-Be . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Anna Alichniewicz and Monika Michałowska

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Biodigital Being(s): Praxis Body Futures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Galit Ariel

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Avatar Therapy and Clinical Care in Psychiatry: Underlying Assumptions, Epistemic Challenges, and Ethical Issues . . . . . . . . . . . . Raffaella Campaner and Marina Lalatta Costerbosa

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Humanity’s In-Betweenness: Towards a Prehistory of Cyborg Life . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Steve Fuller

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“The Universe of the Person is the Universe of Man?” Expanding the Schelerian Concepts of Philosophical Anthropology and Personhood into the Twenty-First Century . . . . . . Susan Gottlöber

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Posthumanizing Relaxation in Science-Fiction ASMR . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103 Joanna Łapi´nska

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Human and Non-Human Persons in not Inhuman Civilization . . . . . 121 Aleksandra Łukaszewicz

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The eXtended Uni/Meta/Verse (XV) and the Liminal Spaces of Body, Ownership, and Control . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141 Steve Mann

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Sophia: Potentials and Challenges of a Modern Cyborg . . . . . . . . . . . . 153 Sigrid Schmitz

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10 From Natural Humans to Artificial Humans and Back Again: An Integrative Neuroscience-AI Perspective on Confluence . . . . . . . . . 179 Roy M. Treur, Jan Treur, and Sander L. Koole 11 The Transhuman Unbounded Existence: AI, Nanorobots, and Computational Simulation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 203 Natasha Vita-More

Contributors

Anna Alichniewicz Department of Bioethics, Medical University of Łód´z, Łód´z, Poland Galit Ariel Department of Cinema and Media Arts, York University, Toronto, Canada Raffaella Campaner Department of Philosophy and Communication Studies, University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy Marina Lalatta Costerbosa Department of Philosophy and Communication Studies, University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy Steve Fuller Department of Sociology, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK Susan Gottlöber Maynooth University, Maynooth, Kildare, Ireland Sander L. Koole Department of Clinical Psychology, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Joanna Łapinska ´ Department of Theatre, Film and Media Studies, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria Aleksandra Łukaszewicz Institute of History and Theory of Art, Polish Society for Aesthetics, Academy of Art in Szczecin, Szczecin, Poland Steve Mann University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada; MannLab Canada, Toronto, Canada Monika Michałowska Department of Bioethics, Medical University of Łód´z, Łód´z, Poland Sigrid Schmitz Center for Transdisciplinary Gender Studies, Humboldt University of Berlin, Berlin, Germany Jan Treur Social AI Group, Department of Computer Science, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

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Contributors

Roy M. Treur Social AI Group, Department of Computer Science, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Natasha Vita-More University of Advancing Technology, Tempe, AZ, United States

Abbreviations

2D 3D ADHD AFADA AGI AI AR ASMR AT ATSAC AVH BCI BOC CAPHE CAT scan CoSiHuman CRISPR CRT CXI DNA EDF GI H. Int. = HInt H.I. = HI ICDs ICT IEEE MVP

Two-Dimensional Three-Dimensional Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder Argentina’s Association of Professional Lawyers for Animal Rights Artificial General Intelligence Artificial Intelligence Augmented Reality Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response Avatar Therapy Automated Traffic Surveillance and Control System in Los Angeles Auditory Persistent Hallucinations Brain Computer Interfaces Body, Ownership, and Control or Body-OwnershipControl Communities and Artistic Participation in Hybrid Environments Computerized Axil Tomography Scan Cooperative Simulated Human Clustered Regularly Interspace Palindromic Repeats Cardiac Resynchronization Therapy Council on eXtended Intelligence Deoxyribonucleic Acid Electricite de France Intelligence Index Humanistic Intelligence Humanistic Intelligence Implantable Cardioverter-Defibrillators Information and Communication Technology Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Minimum Viable Product

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MVV NTSC OP OPods PEDs POC PR STS SwimOP VR WaterHCI WBE XR XV = eXtended Verses

Abbreviations

Minimum Viable Vessel National Television System Committee Ontario Place Ontario Place pods Performance Enhancing Drugs Proof of Concept Physical Reality Science and Technology Studies Swim at Ontario Place Virtual Reality Water–Human–Computer Interaction or Interface or Integration Whole Brain Emulation eXtended Reality eXtended meta-omni-inter-multi-uni-Verse

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A New Way of Coming-To-Be Anna Alichniewicz and Monika Michałowska

Myth has long proved a useful source of counterfactuals, for how things might otherwise be but are not. James Mumford [1, p. IX]

Abstract

Western culture has a long tradition of grappling with the awkward fact that we begin as weak and dependent beings. The technological possibilities of modern science make it possible to realize the human dream of conscious self-creation, including on the level of the body, and to fashion oneself as a new being. A rapid development of science and technology that we have been witnessing recently has not only had an enormous and comprehensive influence on human existence, but also changed the very concept of what the “human” means, paving the way for ideas of transhumanity. In our chapter, we inquire into selected exemplifications of interplays between technology, medicine, and art, and their impact on the embodied self. Adopting a phenomenological perspective, we first analyze the natural beginning of human life and the new possibilities of exercising agency in self-creation as a novel, biotechnologically-underpinned way of coming-to-be. Then, we take a closer look at extensions of the embodied self and the experiential world achieved in contemporary art projects, whereby we

Anna Alichniewicz and Monika Michałowska contributed equally to this work. A. Alichniewicz (B) · M. Michałowska Department of Bioethics, Medical University of Łód´z, Łód´z, Poland e-mail: [email protected] M. Michałowska e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Michałowska (ed.), Humanity In-Between and Beyond, Integrated Science 16, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27945-4_1

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focus on the work of Neil Harbisson and Moon Ribas. Finally, we address the idea of collective consciousness as one of the visions of transhumanity. Keywords

Human coming-to-be . Self-creation Collective consciousness

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Embodied self

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Body art

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The Disconcerting Reality of Human Coming-To-Be

Western culture has a long tradition of falsifying, or at least distorting, the reality of coming-to-be, notably in and through the myths that feature a range of extraordinary ways of bringing creatures into the world. If Athena jumping fully-formed and even dressed in armor out of her father Zeus’ head is one of the best known examples, other equally eloquent cases abound, such as Aphrodite, her beauty complete, emerging from the sea foam and fully-fledged Theban warriors growing from the dragon’s teeth sown by Cadmus. These narratives discernibly share two characteristic elements. One of them is an alleged independence from a pregnant and birthing female body, which positions these myths as very significant attempts at breaking the primordial connection with the maternal body. The other element is the denial of the fact that future subjects appear in the world not as autonomous agents, but as dependent beings. In this way, the mythic narratives have veiled “the phenomenon of our initial dependence” [1, p. 152] and obscured the fact that “we are objects long before we are subjects” [1, p. 16], as if “the peculiarly incapacitated state in which we are first found” [1, p. 153] were an embarrassment to us. In addressing the former point, it is very important to recognize the unique bond between the mother and the fetus and to accord this absolutely distinctive encounter its proper place in the account of human coming-into-existence. A human being first appears to her mother. The mother is the one “who has been the company and the mediator of our first being in the world” [2, p. 117]. Paradoxically perhaps, as James Mumford has noted, the word “to appear” is misleading in this context, because it attributes the activity of self-manifestation to the emerging being, whereas, in fact, “the newone is carried forth, presented, brought out into the open” [1, p. 17] by the mother. The unique access that only the mother can have to the fetus has been emphasized by Iris Marion Young, who has observed: “I have a privileged relation to this other life, not unlike that which I have to my dreams and thoughts, which I can tell someone but which cannot be an object for both of us in the same way” [3, p. 49]. Young’s insight captures the particular value of the phenomenological account of human coming-into-being given from the point of view of the pregnant subject, whereas overlooking the fact that everyone started as their mother’s fetus and seeking to grasp an embryo/fetus as an independent being would misrepresent the reality of human beginning. Mumford has reminded that it is quite characteristic of the patriarchal view of pregnancy to treat the mother’s body as a container

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into which a developing fetus has been transplanted [1, p. 21]. This approach to human beginning still prevails, not to mention that philosophy shows much more interest in exploring the end of human life than its commencement. Adopting a phenomenological perspective that foregrounds a pregnant woman’s first-person experience, Young has pointed out that “discourse on pregnancy omits subjectivity, for the specific experience of women has been absent from most of our culture’s discourse about human experience” [3, p. 46]. Given this, the phenomenological approach seems best suited to yield insights that can complete the description of human experience and illumine the essence of human emergence. Looking into the latter point, we can realize that although we are both subjects and objects in the world, we begin merely as objects. Put differently, our subjectobject existence in the world is preceded by our being hidden objects that gradually emerge out of our mothers’ bodies. Originally having no subjective perspective, we cannot have a first-person experience of our becoming; rather, one is experienced by one’s mother as “the being appearing to herself from herself” [1, p. 30]. Thus, we begin as “dependants living in and off their host,” sucking up “all nourishment and all energy from their host” [1, pp. 110–111]. Our first relationship in the world is asymmetrical and marked by total dependence on a female body. Cultural narratives can be argued to disguise both essential features of our coming-into-existence: the fact that we start out as dependent and the fact that it is specifically on our mothers that we depend. The cultural camouflage of the latter aspect has affected the way in which the life-initiating process is presented in biomedical texts, where, as highlighted by Emily Martin, the role of the female gamete is minimized and reduced to a passive object acted upon by the male gamete, against all the scientific data to the contrary. The sperm was even attributed the capacity to make autonomous decisions resulting in a new life [4, pp. 491–495]. Since this depiction was incompatible with the research available when Martin carried out her analysis, one could reasonably expect that, in the light of the new findings on the indisputably active role of the ovum, such an account of the reproductive process would disappear from biomedical texts. However, this has not been the case, as the work of Lisa Campo-Engelstein and Nadia L. Johnson indicates. Medical textbooks still consistently use a reifying language for the female gamete and a personifying language for the male gamete [5, pp. 211–212]. The narratives masking human dependence on the mother are aptly encapsulated in Seyla Benhabib’s statement that they are the strategies mobilized by the male ego to liberate itself “from the most natural and basic bond of dependence” [6, p. 156]. However, the cultural obfuscation of the fact that we start out as contingent beings, coming from and dependent on another, can be interpreted more universally as expressive of a perennial human quest for agentive self-creation. The capacity for profound self-transformation seems one of the signature characteristics of humans, so much so that millennia of such endeavors have made members of hunter-gatherer communities and citizens of contemporary information society look like two different species [7, p. 128].

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The Cyborg as Self-Creation

The rapid development of science and technology has resulted in immense changes in human functioning in the twenty-first century, making us in some sense new humans. We live in “the world of unlimited streams and constant changes” [8], in which the dissemination of new technologies and, in particular, ubiquitous access to mobile devices and Internet networks transform everyday activities, such as learning, relaxation, work, and medical treatment. New therapeutic regimens developed by evidence-based medicine contribute to extending overall life expectancy and improving the quality of life. Among the recent advancements in biotechnology and nanotechnology, the following are likely to have the greatest bearing on the future of humankind: the identification of all the genes of the human genome [9], the synthetization of red blood cells that mimic the natural erythrocytes and acquire new abilities (therapeutic drug delivery, magnetic targeting, and toxin detection) [10], and the construction of biomimetic photo-sensing devices (an electrochemical eye with a hemispherical retina) [11]. Scientific and technological novelties have found their way into various spheres of human life, including art, as exemplified in Heather Dewey-Hagborg’s Lovesick Virus, an artistic project that uses molecular techniques to construct artificial viruses capable of boosting oxytocin production [12], to cite but one of multiple instances. Though not specific to our times, the human propensity for transgression and our urge to cross the boundaries of human qualities and skills are especially pronounced today, in the wake of the technological changes that contributed to the shaping of a new, transhumanist vision of the human in the last decades of the twentieth century [13]. This vision promotes enhancement beyond the current human limitations and encourages using (bio)technologies to seize new opportunities [14]. Transhumanism, which Allen Porter considers a techno-progressive intellectual, social, and political movement [15], can be interpreted as a pursuit of freedom from biological limitations by capitalizing on the possibilities to maximize cognitive abilities (broadening the horizon of experience, memory, and concentration), expand emotional, executive, mental, and physical capacities (cyborgization), extend life expectancy, and delay the aging process. The movement has provoked a heated debate across disciplines, ranging from ethics, anthropology, and epistemology to medicine and politics. Originally crafted by an international group of authors (including Doug Baily, Anders Sandberg, Gustavo Alves, Max More, and others) and adopted by the international organization Humanity+, the Transhumanist Declaration underlines “responsible and inclusive moral vision, taking seriously both opportunities and risks, respecting autonomy and individual rights, and showing solidarity with and concern for the interests and dignity of all people around the globe” [16]. While one of the main challenges faced by the transhumanist movement activists is to tackle growing social inequalities and to mitigate the increasing risk of adverse effects that the human enhancement technology can cause [17], there have also been claims that the current human condition is an obstacle on our flourishing. Bioliberals, such as Ingmar Persson and Julian Savulescu, contend that human

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enhancement is a moral obligation of the twenty-first century and call for dismantling the dichotomies of natural-artificial and biological–mechanical, insisting that “biomedical research and therapy should make humans in the biological sense more human in the moral sense, even if they cease to be human in the biological sense” [18]. The appeals of transhumanism are sometimes regarded as a “nebula of ideas where serious arguments are neighboring with fantasy” [19]. In order to explore the impact of 21st-century transhumanism on human becoming, we discuss selected technological developments and their impact on the embodied self, self-molding, and self-understanding in medicine and contemporary art. Our argument is inspired by Donna Haraway’s observation that “[c]ontemporary science fiction is full of cyborgs—creatures simultaneously animal and machine, who populate worlds ambiguously natural and crafted. Modern medicine is also full of cyborgs, of couplings between organism and machine, each conceived as coded devices” [20]. We believe that adopting the phenomenological perspective can help us identify some further dimensions of these phenomena. Human cognition is embodied, and embodiment should be understood, as Shaun Gallagher and Dan Zahavi indicate, as an embodied mind or a minded body [21, p. 153]. In phenomenology, the body is conceptualized as a transcendental principle of experience, making experience possible in the first place, which means that what we can perceive and think about the world depends on our bodily capacities. Both the capacities and the limitations of the body “define the environment as a world of affordances” [21, p. 156], but the set of bodily capabilities is neither static nor closed. On the contrary, the body can multiply its abilities and extend its scope of experience and affordances not only through acquiring new skills, but also by incorporating or, as Drew Leder puts it, by annexing technological artifacts as artificial organs. Therefore, Leder avers, “phenomenological anatomy cannot (…) be thought of as fixed over time, or even confined by the physical boundaries of the flesh. It must take account of the body as living process” [22, p. 30]. Thus, living cyborgs, being combinations of human and robotic parts (such as pacemakers or cochlear implants), already walk among us. Notably, they have also entered the realm of art, which we discuss below. Recently, we have witnessed the emergence of a new body-art practice that uses technology to alter the artist’s body to the point of transcending self-expression and engaging in becoming through self-creation and self-definition. Obviously, such projects have also entered the so-far rather theoretical debate on the dilemmas of human enhancement. Following the trail blazed by artists such as Stelarc (Third Hand, Prosthetic Head, Ear on Arm) [23–25], Neil Harbisson and Moon Ribas have added tangibility to the enhancement debate. Harbisson and Ribas have become “real cyborgs” and also “enhanced humans” by modifying their bodies through new technologies. More specifically, they have altered the range of their sensory apparatuses by making them receptive to perceptions that humans “by nature” are incapable of sensing, and in this way broadened their realms of affordances. Let us have a look at their becoming as new humans. Harbisson was born with achromatopsia, an extreme form of color blindness that results in seeing in

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Fig. 1 Clematis sp. (Photo and its grayscale version by Monika Michałowska)

grayscale [26]. By way of experiment, what it means to only see in grayscale is illustrated by the photographs we took in color and then turned into a black-andwhite format. The color and the black-and-white versions of the photographs are juxtaposed above and below in order to present a photographic interpretation of color perception by people born with achromatopsia (Figs. 1 and 2). Harbisson has had an antenna (an osseointegrated device) implanted in his skull that enables him to perceive a wide range of light waves via audible vibrations generated by the device [27]. The eyeborg, as he calls it, was designed to perceive 360 notes in an octave corresponding to degrees of color according to Harbisson’s Sonochromatic Music Scale [28]. Since 2004, when he received the first version of the antenna as part of the Bridging the Island of the Colourblind project, Harbisson has been developing and augmenting its functionalities. Constantly refined since 2009, an innovative chip gives Harbisson the ability to perceive colors invisible to the human eye (such as ultraviolet and infrared) via Harbisson’s Pure Sonochromatic Scale [29], which transforms light frequencies into sound frequencies. Consisting of a wireless camera and a wireless sound vibration implant, the antenna also uses a Wi-Fi network, which provides access to music, video, and data recordings retrieved from satellites [30, 31]. Harbisson’s projects can be regarded as an expression of the idea of free selfcreation, a search for new ways of becoming as a self-determined embodied self with extended capacities, and an exploration of new self-expression abilities, including artistic ones [32]. These aspects are also highlighted by his own perception of the antenna. The device has become an integral part of his body, as he frequently underlines, and he considers it an intrinsic piece of him. By claiming that “we are in a moment in history where we no longer need to use technology; we no longer need to wear technology; we can become technology” [33], Harbisson pursues the ideas of the transhuman and the cyborg formulated in Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto [20, 34]. With his projects, Harbisson puts into practice the

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Fig. 2 Venice in summer (Photo and its grayscale version by Monika Michałowska)

calls for developing a new understanding of what is now meant by “the human,” as well as the pursuit of “a decentralization of the focus on the human by abolishing the division between nature and culture” [35]. In this sense, cyborgism, regarded as the next step in evolution, questions the binary idea of the world founded on the dichotomy of the natural (biological) vs. the artificial (mechanical/technological). It paves the way for transgressing the biological boundaries of the embodied self in its becoming, which have come to be considered limitations to humanity in its quest for continuous development. Virtual reality, implants, (bio)technologies, and (bio)engineering used for medical and/or artistic purposes transform the human into “extended operational systems,” as Stelarc puts it [25]. Thus, paraphrasing Simone de Beauvoir’s famous statement, in a world where the flesh is no longer a constraint, one is not born but really becomes a human.

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Significantly, the device used by Harbisson to stimulate his central nervous system is an extension of techniques that contemporary medicine employs to maximize the quality of life and life expectancy, especially in cardiological therapies, that is, devices such as artificial pacemakers, implantable cardioverter-defibrillators (ICDs), and cardiac resynchronization therapy (CRT) tools. An artificial pacemaker implanted in the chest stimulates atrial and ventricular contractions through electrodes inserted into the cavities of the heart [36]. The device increases the quality of patients’ life by reducing the symptoms caused by cardiac conduction defects. ICD not only reduces the risk of death from life-threatening arrhythmias, but also mediates contact between the patient and the research unit by transmitting information on the functions of the electrical conduction system of the heart [37]. ICD channels a specific kind of communication between the heart-rate recording implant and the observers. CRT-D, another commonly used type of implant, optimizes the efficiency of the heart as a pump by synchronizing the contraction of the right and left ventricles, thereby reducing the severity of symptoms and the need for urgent hospitalization [38]. The device works as an artificial and permanent muscle controller, crucial for the patient’s survival [39]. Unlike in these therapies, the goal for Harbisson is certainly not only to restore the physiological operations of his organs. What he strives for is to cross the “natural” boundaries and, in doing so, to transcend the narrow innate competencies [40]. As mentioned above, over the years, the artist has extended the functionalities of his implant to perceive infrared and ultraviolet waves, assuming that the extension of the cognitive perspective will contribute to the development of science enabling it to register more stimuli. Not being restricted by the boundaries of a “natural living body,” his extended lived body defines a new, expanded world of experience and affordances. Among the many projects carried out by Harbisson, his sound portraits, that is, sound files created by means of the eyeborg, are particularly impressive [41]. To produce them, Harbisson approaches his model by pointing his antenna at her/him, and the antenna converts light waves reflected by the person’s face into sound vibrations and registers them as unique sound recordings [42]. In this way, Harbisson depicts faces using notes and chords of varying saturation or hardness to create unique portraits of his “sitters,” whereby he claims that “[e]ach person has their own peculiar sound” [43]. This brings to mind Emmanuel Levinas’s transphenomenon of “the face” [44], which in Harbisson’s project acquires, so to speak, a palpable physical dimension: the Other as a calling presence is experienced by the embodied self through the perception of sound, which makes the face speak in an almost literal sense. The outcomes of Harbisson’s projects have fostered a new kind of experience of the Other, resulting in an alternative approach to certain properties that are traditionally comprehended as determinants of personal identity. As Harbisson has revealed: After some time I understood one thing: when one group of people decide that they are black and another group decide they are white, they don’t know what they’re talking about. Those

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who think they are black are actually dark-orange, and those who believe they are white are light-orange. People aren’t black and white, we’re all just different shades of orange [45].

Moon Ribas, another artist associated with the same body-art movement, has developed an online seismic sensor that, after being implanted in her elbow, makes her feel earthquakes through vibrations. Capable of sensing earthquakes from all over the world wherever she actually is, Ribas uses her seismic sense to create dance performances. This skill has changed her perception of the Earth, which she has come to experience as a living organism, at the same time re-casting her embodied self-identity and her idea of connectedness with other beings: “so I feel like now I have two heartbeats: my own heartbeat and the Earth’s” [46]. She also claims: now that I’m a cyborg, I don’t feel closer to machines or to robots, I feel closer to nature, because I can feel my planet, and I feel closer to other animal species because I can feel earthquakes like other animals can. If we could extend our senses in order to perceive and understand our planet in a deeper way, our behavior would change [47, 48].

Ribas’s work reveals one of the many facets of contemporary phenomenology, in which the Other is not only the other self, the other sex, or the other life-world [49], but also, and most importantly too, other forms of life. Her projects considerably and meaningfully broaden our explorations of otherness, drawing our attention to the Earth and its various forms of life (whether sentient or not) with which she engages and forges relations. By giving voice to the seismic waves, both literally and metaphorically, she makes it possible for the “voiceless other” to be heard [49]. The projects of Harbisson and Ribas unarguably show that several takenfor-granted dichotomies, such as the human–robot binary, have already been dismantled, with the cyborg undermining “the distinction between nature and culture, the social and the technological or sex and gender” [35]. In Harbisson’s case, yet another distinction has been challenged, as his practice undercuts the therapy/enhancement division, which has become the core of heated bioethical and philosophical debates. Since Harbisson can not only see colors (which he was unable to do before), but also hear them (which is beyond the scope of natural human capacities), his antenna can be posited to have become a means of both treatment and enhancement. His new sensory organ has not only substantially influenced his self-perception, but also changed his experiential homeworld in a meaningful way. “Life has changed dramatically since I hear color” [50], he has admitted. Among the many examples he gives is the way he dresses, namely not to look good but to sound good, and the way he arranges the food on his plate, which he does according to the colors he hears so that they form a tune he is in the mood for (such as a Lady Gaga salad). The artistic movement co-founded by Neil Harbisson and Moon Ribas has become increasingly popular in recent decades [51, 52], which is reflected in the development of international organizations, such as the Transpecies Society [53]

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and the Cyborg Foundation [54], dedicated to the promotion, support, and legal defense of cyborgs. Notably, other cyborg artists have joined the group, Pau Prats and Manel De Aguas being prominent examples. Prats has been enhanced with a radiation sensing organ that converts radiation within the spectral range of 200– 370 nm into vibrations he feels in his shoulder [55]. His artistic project, as he explains, is informed by the idea of amplifying the light perception capacity and raising the public awareness of the harmful effects of UV radiation on humans. Prats argues that general ignorance about the direct impact of UV radiation on the skin contributes to a continued high exposure to the stimulus, which is a risk factor for skin cancers. De Aguas [56] has designed a device that makes it possible to feel temperature changes, the level of humidity, and atmospheric pressure. “In my case, my life as ‘propioespecie’ will be my performance art—a piece with an indefinite duration in which I will perform my life as a non-human species, who is sensorially hyper-connected to the atmosphere,” professes De Aguas [57]. All these artists undeniably cross the boundaries of bodily limitations and dilute the human–robot dichotomy. We are born as passive, dependent beings with no say in who we are. With the cyborg, the passivity and contingency are ousted by autonomous self-creation. As the self-transformative acts of Harbisson, Ribas, Prats, De Aguas, and other artists demonstrate, modern science and the technologies it powers make it possible to realize the old human dream of conscious self-creation, including on the level of the body, and to fashion oneself as a new being. The cyborg is “born” anew, coming into being as an active agent of self-creation, self-shaping according to its own formative design.

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Beyond Oneness: Collective Consciousness

The widespread use of technologies, which has pervaded our lives, changes the future into the present and makes science-fiction a reality. It has opened new possibilities of extending the human sensory apparatus and cognitive skills, and by doing so, it has triggered new dilemmas and questions. Arguably, it is also implicated in Donna Haraway’s call for becoming many; as she claims: “[t]o be one is always to become with many” [58]. Another inspiring dimension of redefining the human is offered by a vision of future cognitive enhancements fostering collective consciousness and comingto-be as collective cognition. Today, these phenomena are still confined to science-fiction only, but we believe that they deserve studying and that it is urgent to establish what is exactly meant by collective consciousness. To begin with, one of the best-known and illustrious movie examples of purported collective consciousness is to be found in the Borg from Star Trek (Star Trek: First Contact 1996). The Borg—an alien race—comprises individuals that originally come from various species, but have transformed into cybernetically enhanced and mentally interconnected beings. The acquisition of new members, though euphemistically called assimilation, is always violent and brutal. Once assimilation is completed,

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neither individual autonomy nor individual decision is possible. However, the process also has its advantageous outcome in the acquired ability to share and recall all useful memories. The collective “mind hive” functions as one entity. It retrieves, adapts, and processes information faster, more accurately, and more logically than it is achievable to any other species in the story. Any decision on how to act is instantly made and disseminated without any delay, with there being no room for individual emotion, hesitation, or response. However, the Borg does not really represent a collective consciousness based on a collective mind. As Kay Mathiesen has noted, the Borg is not a collective mind, but “a single consciousness distributed across a number of brains” [59, p. 237]. From the phenomenological point of view, if I have direct access to somebody else’s consciousness, that is, if I can directly experience another person’s flow of consciousness, we form one consciousness. Mathiesen has also pointed out that the number of brains involved in this process is not relevant, since given the quantity of duplications between our hemispheres (the fact famously explored by Derek Parfit in one of his thought experiments, 60, pp. 254–255), we do have two brains in a sense, but this does not make us a collective consciousness. The reason is that collective consciousness must meet what Mathiesen calls “the plurality condition,” which requires the existence of separate minds, that is, “separate centers of consciousness, which are not directly accessible to each other” [59, p. 237]. This criterion for collective consciousness seems to be satisfied by the Hogan sisters, the craniopagus conjoined twins who can apparently share their minds. Born in Canada in 2006, Tatiana and Krista Hogan are unique even among craniopagus twins because they are able to “see through each other’s eyes” [61, 62]. Their heads are joined, and their brainstems are connected by the shared thalamus (the anatomical structure is described as a “thalamic bridge”). The interconnected neural network enables one brain to receive signals from the other and vice versa. As a result, each of the sisters can see, taste, and feel what the other is experiencing. For example, only Krista liked ketchup, and when she was eating it, her sister was trying to wipe it off, although there was no ketchup on her tongue. In one of the numerous tests in which they have taken part in so far, a toy was showed to Krista, while Tatiana’s eyes were covered. Tatiana was asked what toy it was, and when she was hesitating, their mother advised her, “Tati, look through your sister’s eyes.” After a second Tatiana answered: “Lorax” [63]. These examples suggest that although the sisters are able to share sensory sensations, each of them has a distinct personality and expresses different preferences. Tom Cochrane has proposed three probable models of how the twins’ conscious experiences may be linked: (1) a common and unified set of conscious experiences; (2) a set of conscious experiences partly shared between the twins; and (3) two autonomous sets of conscious experiences [64]. The differences between the twin girls—their respective self-perceptions (including using singular or plural pronouns depending on preference), personality traits, preferences, and ability to control body movement and physiological activities—suggest that the “unified set” explanation, which may imply a common and unified consciousness, is rather unlikely.

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The second and third options appear to be more plausible [64]. The twins’ shared stimulus detection (including the reception of light waves, touch and pain sensation, proprioception, and position of the body in space) does not rule out retaining partial differences in the qualitative assessment of stimuli and of an array of phenomena resulting from experiencing the surrounding world. The past experiences of each of the twins, the situational context, and their ability to focus attention independently, all contribute to fostering a unique experience of the world (homeworld) in each of them. However, this insight does not explain at what stage of the reception and interpretation of stimuli the information is transferred between the sisters. This may occur at an early stage of stimulus detection—on the way from the receptor (e.g., from the retina) when the native stimulus is transmitted— or at a later stage, including after the interpretation of the stimulus in the cerebral cortex. The complexity and degree of information processing may depend on the level of the neural intersection. Further research is needed to elucidate the impact of anatomical and functional variables (especially, the action of the central nervous system) on the preconscious, conscious, cognitive, affective, and executive functioning of the twins. However, the available data suggest that, in their case, there are two minds and two separate centers of consciousness. What is of particular interest to our analysis is that the Hogan sisters use singular or plural pronouns depending on their preferences at a given moment. As Mathiesen has noted, when a member of the Borg uses “we” to refer to herself/himself, it is unfounded, since there is only one flow of consciousness and thus also only one self in the Borg. Therefore, “I” is the only warranted pronoun. “We” is justified only if there are the speaker and at least one other conscious subject [59, p. 237]. Meeting the plurality condition, the Hogan sisters can legitimately use both the singular and plural pronouns, depending on their needs, preferences, and circumstances. Perhaps they will become a model for future biotechnological creations of collective minds (Fig. 3).

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Conclusion

The quest for self-creation and self-transgression is one of the distinctive features of humans. Even conservative thinkers, such as Francis Fukuyama, admit that there are “the evident changes that have taken place in the human condition through the course of history” [7, p. 101], and that humans are characteristically possessed of a considerable capacity for self-transformation. Without a doubt, we humans are on the verge of transformation, on a pathway to a new identity, on a new route of coming-to-be. We cannot be defined any longer by the traditional, taken-for-granted, and comforting dichotomies of naturalartificial, biological–mechanical, whole-part, and human-nonhuman. As humanity, we are going through a continuous process of self-creation: self-redefinition and self-reconstitution. One of the intriguing perspectives in this respect is outlined in Haraway’s concept that in order to re-find our identity, we must become many. However, as she explains:

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Fig. 3 Twins: one and many (Photo by Tymoteusz Lekler, exhibition Twins, 1996)

This is not just literary deconstruction, but liminal transformation. Every story that begins with original innocence and privileges the return to wholeness imagines the drama of life to be individuation, separation, the birth of the self, the tragedy of autonomy, the fall into writing, alienation; that is, war, tempered by imaginary respite in the bosom of the Other. [20, p. 143]

Another concept of the human that crosses the limits and boundaries set by “natural becoming” aims at repositioning humanity in order to situate it among various assemblages of the human and the non-human. Going beyond “normal” species becoming, all these concepts oppose the idea of “human nature”—nothing other than the outcome of evolutionary changes or, as Tristram Engelhardt put it, “the results of the blind forces of mutation, genetic drift and natural selection” [65, p. 412]—as something to which we should ascribe the highest value and never venture to challenge. Core Messages . The (bio)technological advancement makes it possible to realize the human dream of conscious self-creation, including on the level of the body, and to fashion oneself as a new being.

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. (Bio)technologies have entered all the spheres of our lives, including medicine and art, and have been used as both therapy and enhancement. . Cyborgs walk among us. In a sense, we are all cyborgs. . Self-enhanced via modern (bio)technologies, cyborg artists pave the way for new processes of coming-to-be as embodied selves, for our further flourishing as individuals and as a species.

Acknowledgements This research was supported by the National Science Centre, Poland, project number 2015/19/B/HS1/00996.

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41. Harbisson N (2010) Sound portraits by Neil Harbisson. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=JDqL-PUZ148. Accessed 18 Jan 2022 42. Harris PI (2014) Neil Harbisson: the man who hears colour. BBC. https://www.bbc.com/news/ av/technology-29992577/neil-harbisson-the-man-who-hears-colour. Accessed 24 Jan 2022 43. Riefe J (2016) Sound portraits by cyborg artist reveal facial similarities between Leonardo DiCaprio and Macaulay Culkin. Hollywood Reporter. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/ news/sound-portraits-by-cyborg-artist-912414. Accessed 30 Jan 2022 44. Levinas E (1961) Totalité et infini: essais sur l’extériorité. Phænomenologica 8. Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague 45. Shvets L (2015) Neil Harbisson: people aren’t black and white, we’re all different shades of orange. Bird in flight. https://birdinflight.com/inspiration/experience/neil-harbisson-peoplearen-t-black-and-white-we-re-all-different-shades-of-orange.html. Accessed 10 Jan 2022 46. Garcia G (2015) The woman who can feel every earthquake in the world: hopes and fears. http://www.hopesandfears.com/hopes/future/technology/216729-the-woman-who-can-feelevery-earthquake-in-the-world. Accessed 13 Jan 2022 47. Hutchings F (2020) Cyborg artist Moon Ribas feels earthquakes. Next Nature. https://nextna ture.net/2020/02/moon-ribas. Accessed 27 Jan 2022 48. Ribas M (2017) A union between cybernetics and humanity: an “earthbeat”. Superhvman. http://www.superhvman.com/a-union-between-cybernetics-and-humanity-an-earthbeat. Accessed 21 Jan 2022 49. San Martin J (2017) Phenomenology and the other: phenomenology facing the twenty-first century. In: Walton R, Taguchi S, Rubio R (eds) Perception, affectivity, and volition in Husserl’s phenomenology. Springer International Publishing, pp 179–195 50. Harbisson N (2012) I listen to color. Ted. https://www.ted.com/talks/neil_harbisson_i_listen_ to_color/up-next. Accessed 12 Feb 2022 51. Modesta V, Harbisson N, Graafstra A (2020) How technology is changing what it means to be human. CNN. https://edition.cnn.com/style/article/designing-bodies-future/index.html. Accessed 12 Feb 2022 52. Zas R (2018) This artist got a piece of machinery implanted in his cheekbones. ID Culture. https://i-d.vice.com/en_us/article/gye7kw/artist-joe-dekni-cyborg-cheekbone-imp lant?utm_source=stylizedembed_i-d.vice.com&utm_campaign=xwnkwk&site=i-d. Accessed 14 Feb 2022 53. López AT, Padrós PJ (2019) Designing organs at the Transpecies society: hybrid practices between cybernetics and artificial intelligence. Temes de Disseny 35:140–153 54. Cyborg Foundation (2020) Cyborg foundation: design yourself. Cyborg Foundation. https:// www.cyborgfoundation.com. Accessed 15 Jan 2022 55. Biohackinfo News (2019) Meet Pau Prats, the cyborg with a radiation sensing organ. Biohackinfo News. https://biohackinfo.com/news-pau-prats-uv-ultraviolet-sense. Accessed 10 June 2020 56. De Aguas M (2020) Transpecies artist. Instagram. https://www.instagram.com/maneldeag uas/?hl=pl. Accessed 17 Jan 2022 57. Zas R (2019) This cyborg artist can sense the weather using ear implants. I-D Culture. https://i-d.vice.com/en_us/article/xwnkwk/manel-de-aguas-cyborg-artist-sense-weatherear-implants-artifical-organ. Accessed 13 Jan 2022 58. Haraway D (2008) When species meet. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis 59. Mathiesen K (2005) Collective consciousness. In: Smith DW, Thomasson AL (eds) Phenomenology and philosophy of mind. Clarendon Press, Oxford, pp 232–252 60. Parfit D (1984) Reasons and persons. Clarendon Press, Oxford 61. Dominus S (2011) Could conjoined twins share a mind? The New York Times Magazine. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/29/magazine/could-conjoined-twins-share-a-mind.html? pagewanted=all&_r=1. Accessed 18 Jan 2022 62. Ryan D (2014) Through her sister’s eyes: conjoined twins Tatiana and Krista were extraordinary from the beginning. The twins’ unique connection has inspired a sense of wonder even

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among seasoned professionals. The Vancouver Sun. http://www.vancouversun.com/health/ Through+sister+eyes+Conjoined+twins+Tatiana+Krista+were+extraordinary+from+beginn ing/7449226/story.html. Accessed 24 Jan 2022 63. Ryan D (2012) Through her sister’s eyes: conjoined B.C. twins were extraordinary from the beginning. Ottawa Citizen. https://ottawacitizen.com/News/Canada/through-her-sisterseyes-conjoined-bc-twins-tatiana-and-krista-were-extraordinary-from-the-beginning/wcm/602 03854-42ed-4284-a09a-ba9cafcf10da. Accessed 14 Jan 2022 64. Cochrane T (2020) A case of shared consciousness. Synthese. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229020-02753-6 65. Engelhardt TM (1996) The foundations of bioethics. Oxford University Press, Oxford—New York

Anna Alichniewicz graduated from Medicine and Philosophy and holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Łód´z, Poland. She is Assistant Professor at the Department of Bioethics, Medical University of Łód´z. Her research focuses on bioethics and phenomenology, especially on the phenomenology of embodiment, philosophical and ethical issues in human enhancement, philosophical thanatology, bioethical end-of-life issues, and gender stereotypes in bioethical and medical discourses.

Monika Michałowska is Professor at the Department of Bioethics, Medical University of Łód´z, Poland. Her research focuses on bioethical aspects of reproductive medicine, feminist approaches to preimplantation, genetic diagnosis, embryo, gamete, and mitochondrial donation, human enhancement, and cross-disciplinary perspectives on dying, aging, and embodiment (bioethics, film studies, cultural studies, and body, bio and cyborg art).

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Biodigital Being(s): Praxis Body Futures Galit Ariel

If the to-come is not the future, there is no future without the to-come, but there is a to-come without future. Bernard Stiegler [1, p. 176]

Abstract

The human body is a space through which we encounter and decipher the world, society, and ourselves. Édouard Glissant has linked the concept of knowledge opacities to the physical quality of opaqueness. In the case of the body as a subject of knowledge, technoscientific practices attempt to overcome our embodied opacity and make it transparent, that is, to have embodied and cognitive functions known and controlled. As scientific and technological paradigms weave new transparencies and opacities across bodies, core conceptions of embodied representations and senses of self fluctuate. Digital mediations and immersive technologies further blur the boundaries between physical and digital identities by offering unbound and fluid modes of self-representation. This novel state of biodigital being(s) melds together material and immaterial body politics, ethos, and cultures. The chapter examines how the emerging biodigital condition echoes and redefines nature/culture entanglements in the context of digital body mediation, and what paths could be taken to unveil new body agencies and imaginaries stemming from our (wonderfully) flawed material state.

G. Ariel (B) Department of Cinema and Media Arts, York University, Toronto, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Michałowska (ed.), Humanity In-Between and Beyond, Integrated Science 16, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27945-4_2

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Keywords

Embodiment . Body culture . Body politics . Post-materiality . Immersive presence . Digital being . Avatar . Technology . Speculative design

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Introduction

Technology represents a human-made order, a system that imitates a natural or a divine act of creation. Armed with the power of technology, Western culture has instituted an anthropocentric approach towards worldly hierarchies, instating itself as the ruler of all worldly things and anointing humans as their engineers and architects. This chapter explores the novel state of biodigital being and our role within it as biodigital beings, a state that results from the entanglement of the fleshy body with digitally mediated and simulated bodies. This transcendental state of being bridges the gap between two body-related cultural notions: one, that the fleshy body is inherently flawed or tainted due to its finite material state, and the other, that technological and computational tools are the only cure for our terminal material state. Within this framework, the chapter will outline theoretical perspectives on emerging tech-infused embodied qualities that attempt to overcome embodied opacities, that is, to decipher, control, and even replace the material body. What they offer instead are technological and algorithmic transparencies and modes of representation. The roadblocks and opportunities that result from the transfer of existing body forms, functions, and cultures into digital spaces will be examined in detail within the realm of immersive technologies. These technologies enable novel modes of self-mediation through the digital editing of one’s embodied representation and the construction of digital twins and avatars. The chapter will showcase NuMe & Me, a critical research-creation project aimed at framing new mindsets related to embodiment, identity, and digital materiality. The project examines conceptual, phenomenological, and aesthetic archetypes pertaining to human representation across biological and digital spaces.

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Muddy Bodies and Divine Ambitions

2.1 Opacity Anxieties The sanest and best of us are of one clay with lunatics and prison inmates, and death finally runs the robustest of us down. William James [2, p. 41] The origin of body culture can be traced to world creation myths that explored relationships between humans, the world, and the intangible forces therein. Body creation myths, whether Mesopotamian, Indigenous, Judeo-Christian, or other,

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reveal universal parallels in how the human body’s material state (origin and form) and the living body’s immaterial essence (soul or spirit) are framed.1 The ability of technology to actualize humanity’s “fabulous triumph over matter” [3, p. 184] rendered technological practices an integral part of humanity’s cultural evolution into a “technological civilization” [4, p. xxvii]. Secular body philosophies and politics emerged, supplanting cosmic and spiritual influences with technoscientific practices that spawned anthropocentric ideologies of human domination over natural hierarchies, including our own social and embodied spaces. Within the human/divine affiliation (and divide), our material form inherently represents disjointed existence—“the fall of humankind from a state of perfection” [5, p. 15]. Following the introduction and spread of the scientific examination of the origin and the composition of the biological body, humanity has had to accept that human bodies are not a divine or perfected outcome of an evolutionary process. Rather, our bodies are unfinished, a genetic junkyard peppered with flawed and redundant features: “retinas that face backwards, the stump of a tail, and way too many bones in our wrists” [6, p. 52]. Humans are, in fact, biologically less equipped than other species to survive in the earthly habitat, having to supplement “vitamins and nutrients in our diet that other animals simply make for themselves” [6, p. 52]. The most lethal natural assassin of humans, to our species’ deep embarrassment, is the mosquito, whose infectious bite causes over 2 million human deaths globally every year [7]. Death represents, as William James puts it, “the worm at the core” [2, p. 119] of humans’ joyful existence, binding us to nature through the body’s inevitable destiny.2 In The Denial of Death, the cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker interprets core socio-cultural paradigms as psychological transference mechanisms rooted in humanity’s individual and collective fear of death. Becker contends that our very desire for social structures, hierarchies, compliance, and ethical frameworks is an attempt to redirect our terror of death and nurtures an illusion of agency within a worldly reality that “is simply too terrible to admit; it tells man that he is a small, trembling animal who will decay and die.” [8, p. 133].3 These social dynamics and transferences define body cultures, ideals, and politics and translate them into everyday rituals, behaviors, and self-representation. The death of a body has a broad societal effect which mirrors individual and shared hierarchies and values. The anthropologist Douglas J. Davies

1

Early mythologies and belief systems were based on nature-centric divinity, with humanity conceived as an integral element of the cosmic ecosystem, a mere collateral product of creation. On the flip side, some Indigenous mythologies position humanity as inferior to other creatures. 2 Spiritual and secular body rituals still incorporate death-repelling rites, rituals, and taboos. This includes the avoidance of polluted substances, body cleansing rituals, cognitive and behavioral constraints, and magical thinking aimed to distance the body and mind from the effect of death. 3 Becker also addresses the human tendency to construct model heroes who are often capable of defying or overcoming the natural order, an ability that positions them closer to supernatural or divine entities. Part of what Becker frames as our desire to gain immortality relates to collective and individual attempts to internalize these heroic qualities, so that we can “seem important, vital to the universe, immortal in some way” [8, p. 133].

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observes that it is “as though society is challenged when one of its ‘expressions’ within an individual dies. So, for example, parenthood is challenged when a child dies, or friendship challenged when a friend dies” [9, p. 12]. Customs related to death (such as death rites, burial ceremonies, and mourning and commemoration rituals) help to reassert both the kinship and social status of the deceased and the value and roles of the remaining living bodies. In this way, death morphs from a private matter into a social experience. This is also mirrored in the endemic integration of necropolitics in most social structures. The framing of necropolitics by the historian and political theorist Achille Mbembe extends the philosophical notion of biopolitics—the indoctrination of living beings into political and economic subjects—onto explicit and implicit expressions of individual and social agencies over the basic right to live or die [10]. The positioning of the human (and non-human) body within such sociopolitical constructs submits it to countless laws, norms, and taboos, which are put in place to constrain or grant agency over the living and dead body. The right to access medical care, to have reproductive freedoms, and to terminate one’s own (and others’) life is among the foundational values in all sociocultural frameworks that define our lived experience. As Western culture propelled the capitalistic perspective of nature “extractivism” [11], which considers all natural elements commodifiable and optimizable, the human body became a focal point for technoscientific investigation. Leonardo da Vinci’s 1490 Vitruvian Man drawing4 represents, perhaps, a blueprint for techno-focused body cultures. The figure depicted by Leonardo cemented the concepts of body ideals (as white, male, and able-bodied) and, more importantly, integrated the human body into a mathematical diagram. Efforts to bypass the finitude of the material body have further transformed it into a space that invites and requires maintenance practices and sociotechnical body imaginaries driven by a “palpable fear of death and annihilation from uncontrollable and spectacular body threats” [12, p. 2]. With technology as its most (un)natural ally, humanity could finally engineer a new world order from inside out in order to fight the ultimate biological opacity—death [13]. The notion of nature extractivism expands upon this notion of optimization to include operations carried out on human bodies, seen as a resource,5 where “labor ends up reduced to blood and guts and goo, minced and reduced to aspic, to dead flesh to be slurped down by a capitalist ruling class” [14, p. 47]. Transhuman philosophies and practices explore the expansion of the biological body through the modifications of body features and qualities, entailing a variety of bio-mechanical (cyborg) or bio-technical (cellularly and genetically tweaked) hybridities. Beyond alterations of the body’s procedural flaws, new interventions arise as responses to signs of decay (such as body tone, skin quality and hair discoloration) in ourselves and others. The emergence of the multi-billion beauty and anti-aging

4 5

The drawing was originally created as an anatomical study of body proportions. Originally proposed by Karl Marx.

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markets/industries [15] is bound up with a desire to conceal, repair, and maintain a decaying material body. Technoscientific body interventions extend the limits of the fleshy body and position it within technological and computational spaces. But can our biological and technological existence be separated? Bernard Stiegler claims that the history and evolution of our species are bound to technical mindsets and that those have always defined our modes of being (and becoming) [1]. What is certain is that we are living in a pivotal time where technological and digital tools are a new space within which we exist and forge new becomings that offer deliverance from our opaque biological existence into a boundless and immortal one.

2.2 Transparencies of Domination O Lord, you have searched me and known me! You know when I sit down and when I rise up; you discern my thoughts from afar. You search out my path and my lying down and are acquainted with all my ways. Even before a word is on my tongue, behold, O Lord, you know it altogether. Psalm 139:1–4 [16] Since the introduction of computational mechanisms, dataveillance practices have been employed as means of monitoring and processing human interactions, linking them into complex data frameworks. The mass usage of mobile devices and communication technologies has expanded the traditional exercise of invisible top-down surveillance by state-led policing bodies. Now, we are exposed to cultural narratives that promote digital surveillance as a practice that is required, if not vital, for civic and social participation. Dataveillance is the ultimate application of Foucault’s concept of the Panopticon, a cunning prison design in which the inmate “must never know whether he is being looked at any one moment; but he must be sure that he may always be so” [17, p. 201]. For decades now, the Toronto-based researcher and wearable computing pioneer Steve Mann has explored dataveillance technologies, technosocial compliance, and modes of resistance [18]. His findings affirm the role of digital culture in facilitating broad conformity towards digital surveillance, wherein the human dataveillance inmates not only are aware of technological surveillance, but also actively participate in it. The practices of selfveillance (self-monitoring via the application of dataveillance systems) and coveillance (the monitoring of users’ digital data or digital interactions by other users) [19] are the latest culturally acceptable surveillance modalities. These new surveillance modes initiated a new form of “social panopticonization” that relies on decentralized and self-activated surveillance loops, where the user plays a dual role of an inmate and a guard. Such practices invite a new view of data production as an inherent feature of the human body, and, as Sun-ha Hong notes in Technologies of Speculation, they have

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transformed our bodies into a space that is “constantly questioned, analyzed, regularized, intervened, and optimized” [20, p. 109]. Hong foregrounds the problematic implications of such practices by citing two vivid images of the body. One of them is “the hijacked body,” where the human “body—and through it, the mind, the subject, ‘identity’—is overtaken by external forces through technological means” [20, p. 97]. The other image is “the exposed body,” where the body’s “control over its own boundaries of visibility are violated” [20, p. 98]. The Quantified Self (QS) movement epitomizes the new modes of somatic selfveillance through the technological monitoring of and intervention into body functions. Its co-founder Kevin Kelly, a long-time evangelist of computing technologies and the executive editor of Wired, has defined self-quantification as a new human virtue that enables us to answer “[t]he central question of the coming century (…) Who Are We? What is a human?”, going on to proclaim: “[m]any seek this self-knowledge and we embrace all paths to it” [21]. The rational path to gaining such knowledge, according to Kelly, is offered by the quantification of body functions through algorithmic means, since “unless something can be measured, it cannot be improved.” Hong discusses the inculcation such participatory selfveillance practices through technocultural narratives that weave “a technological fantasy of data’s intimacy: the idea that machines will know us better than we know ourselves” [20, p. 79]. Indeed, informed by strong belief in technology, the Silicon Valley culture celebrates technology as the core (and at times sole) manifestation of humanity’s salvation, nurturing concepts of “technological solutionism”, “techno-fundamentalism, and “techno-utopianism” [22, 23]. However, while the QS movement’s conviction that self-quantification can produce new modes of self-knowledge and body intimacies may be right, its reliance on the ideologies of nature extractivism and the exponential superpower of technology is flawed. The posthuman philosopher N. Katharine Hayles eloquently illustrates the frictions within such “transcendental fantasies”: On one side the dream of freely flowing information strains to escape scarcity, restricted physical space, class, gender, embodiment, time, and mortality; on the other side the claims of corporate profit, stratified social structures, physical confinement, gender inequalities, marked and failing bodies reassert their inevitability. [24, p. 64]

With the implementation of ubiquitous computing, the human embodied experience becomes a new open source for data capturing. As tech platforms openly cull our embodied data, our ability to comprehend and consent to emerging applications of data collection and control systems becomes null and void. This can be exemplified by Sidewalk Labs, the tech giant Alphabet’s urban development project launched in Toronto in 2017. Whilst the project was depicted as an idealized example of smart city lifestyles that nurture community-inclusive development processes,6 its ultimate goal was to construct an urban data-capturing environment

6

Examples include community open-space labs producing the illusion that the community can participate in or influence development (through a wall of aspirational post-it notes) and promotional brochures with picture-perfect scenarios, including kite-flying kids.

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from the ground up. The intention of Sidewalk Labs was to utilize sophisticated data-mining surveillance frameworks in residential and public spaces to cull the somatic data of residents and passers-by alike. Before the construction of labs was able to move forward, activist groups demanded full disclosure and restrictions on data collection and utilization, and Alphabet withdrew the project. If implemented, such an environment would have given a commercial entity unprecedented power to tap into our bodies and minds in real time, a power that only mythological and divine beings have claimed in our culture so far. Understanding the depth of our embodied data exposure and extraction is crucial to the identification of the consequences and data ecosystems emerging from the application of spatial computing and tools. As the tech industry is already building quantified-and-monetized immersive experiences, new modes of somatic surveillance are being baked into digital interactions and tools. Eye, motion, and gesture tracking systems are infused into mobile and wearable devices to “enhance the user experience,” with little regard for embodied human agency and long-term compromises to user’s privacy. The process of encoding somatic signals (such as eye-tracking) into data systems makes it possible to comprehend cognitive decision-making, preferences, and tendencies. Within such contexts, our digitally exposed bodies (and minds) can be utilized to deploy algorithmic persuasion methods that affect human conscious, subconscious, and pre-conscious behaviors. Such unprecedented power to influence individual and social mindsets and practices breeds new hierarchies of domination linked to data ownership, manipulation, and distribution. In Capital Is Dead, McKenzie Wark argues that such applications of technology forge a new ruling class—the “vectoralist class”—that dominates “not just subordinate classes, but other ruling classes as well” by constructing and controlling broad data systems [14, p. 55]. Its sovereignty stems not only from the shift from traditional material-based capitalism to data-based analogues, but also from the asymmetries in power relations, namely in who can retrieve, access, own, and monetize the retrieved data. As Wark states, “while you get [a] little piece of information, this ruling class gets all of that information in the aggregate. It exploits the asymmetry between the little you know and the aggregate it knows—an aggregate it collects based on information you were obliged to ‘volunteer’” [14, p. 55]. To conclude, technocultural tropes of algorithmic embodied self-knowledge turn the body into the ultimate panoptic space, one where the individual body is at once the guard, the inmate, and the prison itself.

2.3 Wicked Selves Counter-hegemony is hard. McKenzie Wark [14, p. 49] New media play a formative role in shaping contemporary social interactions and rituals. Emerging attachments and detachments between the material bound body and the digital mediated self establish new social etiquettes, cultural norms, and body performativities. Richard Klanten articulates this in observing how

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“a couch potato can have 1000 Facebook friends, need never leave the house, and is independent of any random spatial or family environment, of the immediate surroundings of his physical existence” [25, 26]. However, this alleged agency hinges on algorithmic frameworks that condition users to comply with specific modes of self-representation. Beyond formal and implied requirements related to the platforms’ onboarding process, interface designs and engagement mechanics are geared to the sole purpose of translating the anxieties of social visibility into active engagement.7 Social media and online platforms, which need a specific engagement matrix for data extraction and advertising, provide users with gamified features that reflect the perceived popularity of the user whose activity is rewarded with heightened visibility, which in turn incentivizes further engagement. This vicious cycle of online social and professional self-validation through algorithmic tools results in homogenized modes of self-representation. As Guy Debord puts it in The Society of the Spectacle, the individual “renounces all autonomous qualities to identify [themselves] with the general law of obedience to the succession of things” [27, p. 67] and becomes bound to the “tyranny of the norm,” to use Hong’s expression [20, p. 97]. The distinctive features of online social platforms and the curational agency exercised by the user within them forge “digital identity pockets,” a fragmented hegemony best illustrated by the singer-songwriter Dolly Parton’s 2020 humorous Instagram post that instantly went viral. The post contained four different portraits of Parton, each captioned with the name of a different social media platform to which it corresponded: a somber, tailored-suit portrait for LinkedIn; a friendly portrait in an “Ugly Christmas Sweater” for Facebook; a stylized blackand-white portrait for Instagram; and a Playboy Bunny portrait for Tinder. The post became a viral meme reinterpreted and re-shared by millions of social media users, who recognized the irony in Parton’s fragmented self-representation across different social and digital spaces. The same technical latitude also invariably fuels wicked self-representations and negative behavior. Trolling, shaming, and stalking—real-world anti-social behaviors—are common practices in which otherwise socially-normative individuals indulge online and which are largely tolerated by the platforms (since heightened engagement translates into revenue). Recent examples highlight users’ creation of digital chat bots for the sole purpose of engaging in abusive behavior [28]. This dark online behavior is often channeled through body-focused attacks, such as body shaming, sexual advances, and even virtual-body sexual assaults. As virtual entities acquire hyper-realistic embodied representations and engage in real-time interactions, they also entice ever-growing abusive acts by users. Back in 2006, Anshe Chung, a Second Life avatar and business mogul,8 was the first celebrity avatar covered by leading business and media outlets, including CNN,

7

Such interface design and gamification mechanisms are also referred to as dark UX (User Experience). 8 The avatar was generated by the Second Life user Ailin Graef. The avatar was so influential that it became a legislative or ruling force in her Dreamland regions.

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Fortune magazine, and the Red Herring, and even featured on the cover of Businessweek. Being famous and virtual did not mean being safe from sexual harassment. Chung was the target of the first virtual sexual assault during a live virtual interview, where the avatar was attacked by animated male genitalia. What some may consider to be a humorous prank is a traumatic embodied experience to others. Female avatars and users are still targets of sexually charged and violent behavior. Fast-forward to 2021, the groping of female avatars on Meta’s Horizon Worlds9 commenced as soon as the platform was launched [29]. As a response, Meta’s developers created virtual proximity limitations (subbed bubbles) around the platform’s avatars, which did not solve the problem, as virtual sexual assaults continued well after such restrictions were applied. Even if these abusive actions qualify as victimless crimes, because they are perpetrated on non-material, non-cognizant bodies, they do affect real-world behaviors and produce real-life consequences. For example, the 2014 Gamergate scandal, an organized bullying campaign (including death and rape threats) in which female gamers and developers were targeted by male gamers, exposed the underlying bias against female and female-embodied presence in virtual spaces. The real-world consequences of online behavior were detailed in a 2018 report that highlighted the transference of children’s abusive behavior towards humans and animals stemming from abusive interactions with virtual assistants or abusive behavior towards robotic bodies online [30].

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The Biodigital Condition

3.1 NuBody Dasein Neither the materiality of the more-than-human world nor human materiality is an unchanging given. What exists is emergent, issuing from complex interactions between our embodiment and the world. Nancy Tuana and Sandra Morgan [26, p. 239] Our material bodies exist within an interesting dichotomy. On the one hand, they constitute the form and functions that enable us to be, interact, and be seen in the world. On the other hand, our full embodied presence is invisible to us, and without the aid of external objects or simulation technologies we cannot see our “whole” selves. Immersive technologies help us to re-design and re-dasein10 an embodied interface that can be experienced from both inside-out and outside-in at will, the NuBody.

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Meta’s virtual-reality social media platform. The concept of Dasein was introduced in Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927). The term is a combination of the German words Da (here/there) and Sein (being), Heidegger frames the condition of “being-there”/“there-being” or a “conscious existence” as a distinctive human trait.

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The expanded visibility of our social bodies through digital mediation redefines the hylomorphic (Greek: hyl¯e, “matter”; morph¯e, “form”) context of the body. Technocapitalist paradigms rely on constant online engagements and optimized User Interfaces (UI) mechanics that encourage increased usage frequency and interaction intensity. The ever-present promotion of high-consumption fashion brands, lifestyles, travel destinations, and nutritional and exercise trends is fueled by an omnipresent digital/social gaze that pressures individuals to present and maintain an aspirational self-image. Self-representation is increasingly becoming an algorithmic practice in which the computational gaze influences how we see the world and how it sees us. In Postdigital Aesthetics, David M. Berry and Michael Dieter discuss the effect of computational mediation on aesthetic paradigms and ponder “if digital technologies become more and more efficient in ‘perceiving’ the real world, what does this mean concerning our notion of aesthetic, as ‘perception from the senses’?” [31, p. 43]. Visual culture has undoubtedly evolved with the introduction of digital mediation. Our digital image can now be captured, presented, and curated by means of accessible devices and platforms, giving us new agency over our social and private representation. Social networks are based not only on forging online connections, but also on the mass distribution of visual cues and aesthetic trends. The selfie, most simply described as “the social photo one takes of oneself” [32, p. 54], is perhaps the best illustration of the paradigm shift in self-representation effected by digital mediation. As Nathan Jurgenson notes, the mass popularity of the selfie is not rooted in its “casual immediacy” made possible by digital mediation, but in its appeal as a new form of digital performance art that reflects and circulates an aspirational social skin.11 Selfies simultaneously document the body’s present actions and position them in “a potential future past, creating a nostalgia for the here and now” [32, p. 7]. Selfies also play an active role in establishing and challenging material body cultures—from beautified body representations to no-makeup realness; from high fashion to body activism—by displaying and debating social trends, attitudes, and compliances and resistances to social body norms. Digital and immersive technologies, as well as the media, leverage endeavors of self-mediation by offering perfected and edited visual representations of the body that can convincingly alter its form and appearance. As they circulate, these new ideals of self-representation engender new standards of perfection, which in turn aggravate anxieties related to self-representation. Digitally modified bodies and Augmented Reality filters have in fact been proven to trigger anxiety, depression, and even a body dysmorphic disorder dubbed “selfie dysmorphia” [34]. Unbound from the constraints of the fleshy body’s matter and form, digitally mediated and simulated bodies (avatars) offer ostensibly liberating and infinite alternative modes of self-representation. Being digital simulations, avatars act as

11 In The Body beyond the Body: Social, Material, and Spiritual Dimensions of Bodiliness (2011), Terence Turner defines the social skin, observing that “the modifications of the surface of the body by painting, adornment and coiffure considered together comprise a total system of distinctions of gender, social age, and distinctive social powers, roles and conditions” [33, p. 106].

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embodied surfaces, much like the skin of our material bodies. In fact, avatars are literally dubbed “skins” in gaming lingo. The transfer of our material skin into a digital context requires more than a superficial translation of the qualities of our real-life skin; it also calls for a reckoning with the cultural importance of skin. The posthuman theorist Rosi Braidotti considers the material skin an element that protects the “sensitive flesh,” defines the human entity, and delineates the body’s boundaries of perfectibility [35]. Sara Ahmed and Jackie Stacey theorize the role of skin not only as an “inter-embodiment” organ, but also as an interface that makes our encounters with the world (and other bodies in it) possible, since “skin opens our bodies to other bodies: through touch, the separation of self and other is undermined in the very intimacy or proximity of the encounter” [36, p. 6]. Since ancient times, alterations of “social skins” have yielded desirable forms of selfrepresentation. Our ancestors adorned themselves with animal skins to “adopt the species behavior that goes with [them], exactly in the same way as people assume the behavior of their ethnic group or social class when they assume its clothing” [3, p. 220]. Biodigital social skins forge new agencies of self-representation and aesthetic imaginaries that are simultaneously curated and open-sourced, pixelated and organic, familiar and experimental. Legacy Russell argues that possibilities are portals to new freedoms, spaces where the body can become “gooey, blurry, full of seams, or simply glitched” and morph into a body that “both absorbs and refracts, becoming every-body and no-body simultaneously” [37, p. 137]. The biodigital condition marks a sharp termination of the material/immaterial divide. Free of any material/immaterial demarcation, biodigital being experiments with novel synchronicities and disparities between the sense of self and mediated self-representation, redefining fundamental notions of the human embodied form, its assemblage and performativity.

3.2 Bodymind Placticities It’s not a question of asking whether the old or new system is harsher or more bearable, because there’s a conflict in each between the ways they free and enslave us. Gilles Deleuze [38, p. 178] Margaret Price’s unification of body and mind into the concept of “bodymind” [39]—with no grammatical or ontological distinction—captures the idea of our embodied presence as a material/immaterial whole. The bodymind replaces the conception of the human body as a material and hierarchical system with “an organic, continually developing process of events” [40, p. 261]. The conception of the bodymind unity was introduced by Indigenous and other non-Western belief systems that considered the body an integral part of cosmic ecosystems. For instance, the Kayapo people in Brazil are so detached from the idea of the human body as a singularized entity that they “have no word or customary locution in their language for ‘the body’” [33, p. 102]. They regard the body as an intrinsic element of cosmic dynamics, existing in the “synthetic unity” of form

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and spirit. To the Kayapo people, our embodied form is merely an imprint of forces in the world, rather than a primary mode of selfhood. Such conceptions were translated by monotheistic beliefs into structured divine/human hierarchies and formally rejected by Western secular philosophies in favor of the rationalized nature-as-a-system approach. Yet we encounter transcendental bodymind apparatuses in aspirational technological imaginaries, such as the Artificial Intelligence singularity, body and sensory mediation, and tech-infused mindfulness and dream enhancements. This is not to be seen as a belated redemption when we consider that the technological imaginaries and contemporary social hierarchies conceived during the European Age of Enlightenment were directly sourced from visiting Indigenous philosophers and intellectuals, whose spiritual paradigms and societal ideals were repackaged by European thinkers into structured social systems and ideologies [41], thus associating our embodied experience within capitalist mechanical and algorithmic frameworks. Alison Klayman’s documentary Take Your Pills (2018) highlights the contemporary escalation of bodymind performance anxieties and the use of performance enhancing drugs as a socially accepted solution. The film underlines the normalization of psychostimulant medications as prescribed in the U.S. Originally intended for the treatment of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), these drugs are sought out by neurotypical adults for the sole purpose of increasing their own work-related outcomes, as they are by parents of both neurodivergent and neurotypical children in the hopes of optimizing their offspring’s academic achievements. These highly addictive stimulants12 are often accompanied by less harmful synthetic supplements and alternative body and dietary rituals. For example, the wellness industry promotes performance enhancing exercises, mindfulness practices, natural and synthesized food supplements, and certain natural “superfoods.” In the documentary, Lucas Siegel, the co-founder of AlternaScript, a Nootropic substances (cognition enhancing or “smart drug”) startup, explains the capitalist cultural apparatus involved in these tendencies: As a millennial male that went to a great college, worked at private equity funds and hedge funds, it’s impossible to avoid stimulants. Stimulant abuse. Because our definition of medication has changed. It used to be getting over an illness, versus taking advantage of a loophole to acquire a Schedule II drug [42, 01:06:47].

Siegel’s statement highlights the emerging cultural shift in the use of performanceenhancements from a social vice to a social requisite. Anjan Chatterjee, Chair of Neurology at the University of Pennsylvania, who also appears in the film, remarks that “this [is a] highly competitive environment in which people feel compelled to compete beyond their possibilities to get ahead” [42, 01:21:51] and challenges

12

The film specifically focuses on Adderall, but its findings also apply to other commercially available ADHD treatment drugs. Most ADHD medications are purified forms of Amphetamines or Methamphetamines (known as the street drug “Crystal Meth”/“Meth,” “Ice,” or “Speed”).

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the viewer to consider the true cost of our obsession with material progress and productivity. The adoption of vectoralist ideologies of exponential self-improvement has primed a broad social push for constant bodymind optimization. Such developments reveal the underlying desire for a new mode of embodied presence that is “more perfect than the original” [43, p. 64]. Thus, we are conditioned to embrace a synthetic ethos of embodied presence through engagement in a vicious cycle of the constant pursuit of unattainable algorithmic standards of perfection. Perhaps we should, as Glissant proposes, “give up this old obsession with discovering what lies at the bottom of natures” [13, p. 190].

3.3 NuBody Transparencies The myth of disembodiment (…) began with Plato. It is a myth from which the artificial intelligence movement never seems to escape. Jay David Bolter and Diane Gromala [44, p. 118] In their book Windows and Mirrors, Jay David Bolter and Diane Gromala discuss the assertion of technology’s role as a cultural “window”—an instrument that sets up new transparencies between functions and spaces—as flawed. Bolter and Gromala argue that several cutting-edge devices “are not invisible computers; instead, their interfaces are often highly visible and reflective” and act “both a window and a mirror” [44], which refers to technology’s social role in establishing and altering sociocultural paradigms, interactions, and intimacies. This captures the dynamic sociocultural role of digital interfaces away from an immaterial substance—due to their perceived invisibility—and towards a dominant feature in our material perception of being and becoming. Framing human actions and interactions in the context of quantification was a crucial step towards the redefinition of humans as data organisms. As aptly noted by Hayles, “the posthuman subject is an amalgam, a collection of heterogeneous components, a material-informational entity whose boundaries undergo continuous construction and reconstruction” [45, p. 2]. Posthuman paradigms that are based upon Human–Machine and Human–Computer Interaction (HCI) require a reexamination of the cultures and politics that Human-Data Interaction (HDI) conjures. Such a shift is crucial in view not only of the current capitalist data practices, but especially of the development of predictive and nudging economic practices that can influence behavioral and cognitive trends. Digital anthropologists, critics, and philosophers address the challenges related to the human digital footprint as a phenomenon that readily encourages the dark application of dataveillance systems [46]. The new bodily freedoms we may experience through new modes of biodigital interactions are inevitably grounded in modalities pliable to “surveillance capitalism,” which “unilaterally claims human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioral data” [47, p. x]. Beyond the monetization of embodied data emission, the practice of somatic monitoring sparks an ambiguous micro/macro mode of self-knowledge. Linked to Giles Deleuze’s notion

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of the “dividual” [38], which depicts the way our body’s functions are divided into ever-smaller “data bits,” somatic monitoring results in embodied knowledge or transparencies that are detached from the social context and are sorted and reassembled according to algorithmic standards. The algorithmic gaze presupposes that human bodies are reducible to extractable data points that are sorted, processed, and validated through a computational lens. Algorithmic interventions are not only tainted with biases, but also imply the superiority of cerebral rationality over embodied emotional or instinctive types of knowledge [48], further entrenching biased body politics and hierarchies. One example is when computer vision grants the human body a graphic representation which is often reduced to a bounding box (Fig. 1), revealing the true nature of purported algorithmic liberation—it is in fact a dehumanizing and reductive representation of the human body. The philosopher Félix Guattari has called for revising our compliant perception of the system-controlled human body: We can no longer allow others to turn our mucous membranes, our skin, all our sensitive areas into occupied territory—territory controlled and regimented by others, to which we are forbidden access. We can no longer permit our nervous system to serve as a communications network for the system of capitalist exploitation, for the patriarchal state [49, p. 209].

Current algorithmic and virtual simulation tools still treat the body as a passive subject that can be exposed, reassembled, and presented according to capitalist values and necessities. A true agency of the biodigital embodied state would establish boundaries related to embodied data transparencies. Such agency would reestablish the right to be (fully or partially) invisible to the algorithmic gaze and to determine

Fig. 1 I am not a rectangle. Illustration of computer vision classification (Galit Ariel, 2018)

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how we would like our body and mind to be viewed by and presented to others and to ourselves.

4

Post Selves

4.1 NuMe & Me The trans-corporeal subject is generated through and entangled with biological, technological, economic, social, political and other systems, processes and events, at vastly different scales. Stacy Alaimo [50, p. 435] Immersive embodied hybridities allow us to explore additional and alternative modes of being. They combine the promise of gaining full body agency through self-simulated presence with boundless metamorphic qualities that depict the ultimate post-material state as the quality of the eternal and omnipresent divine, which is certainly alluring. However, rooting such capacities in techno-capitalist ideologies will merely cater to an obsessive pursuit to obliterate our “flawed” embodied materiality. Pondering alternative outcomes of immersive presence and embodied self-assemblage initiated my NuMe & Me exploratory research-creation project. Enhanced computational abilities have increased in the last decades, ushering in highly detailed and hyper-realistic avatars or Digital Doubles of existing humans, as well as Digital Twins, which refers to capturing biometric values through 3dimensional scanning and motion tracking. Digital Beings are beginning to carry greater impact in and outside of digital mediums, forming new digital eco-systems, business models, and entities that create and deploy fictional, independent, and lifelike digital beings. Our self-reassemblage exemplifies a hopeful experience of what is known as the Pygmalion effect,13 where a perfected embodied representation may finally achieve the desired mode of boundless, optimal selfhood. However, this optimal virtual state would most likely echo and reinforce the existing body biases that rely on algorithmic self-validation. The NuMe & Me project14 seeks to circumvent these trajectories by employing an experimental lens that examines a biodigital being’s fantastic journey towards post-post-human-becoming.

13

In Greek mythology (book 10 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses), Pygmalion was a sculptor who created a perfect female figure carved in ivory. His love and admiration for his artwork caught the attention of the goddess of love, Aphrodite, who brought the sculpture to life. The Pygmalion effect is a phenomenon described by psychologists Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson where high expectations lead to improved performance in a specific area, speaking to our ability to construct self-fulfilling prophecies, which can be utilized as a self-development tool to help us to internalize positive self-projections and labels. 14 NuMe is a placeholder name for my own reference, with the intention of being claimed or changed by the digital being at any time.

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Fig. 2 Say hello to my little NuMe. 3-dimensional self-sculpting (Galit Ariel, 2022)

The project is an attempt to map the alternative and emancipatory potentiality of biodigital presence and representations. Despite the opportunity to accurately translate photogrammetric or 360-degree body scans into a 3-dimensional “digital twin,” the affective dimension of the creation process itself seemed more intriguing to me. Propped by Unreal Engine’s MetaHuman avatar creation tool,15 my first step was to investigate my own (digital) Pygmalion process, wherein I sought to identify what affects, entanglements, and new intimacies might arise. Over five months, I sculpted a 3-dimensional “Imago Sui” (Latin: self/own image) in a series of daily one-hour-long digital sculpting sessions (Fig. 2). Each daily creation was then duplicated and added to the following day, documenting my insights and thoughts at the end of each session. What initially seemed like a straightforward intellectual exercise became an unexpectedly emotional journey. Beyond theological and ethical considerations, the process generated several insights related to biodigital modes of mediation, representations, and assemblage, including: . Bodily knowledge through direct haptic feedback is highly valuable in the process of embodied digital mediation. At the beginning of the process, I used 2-Dimensional visual mediation tools such as photography, as well as prerecorded and live video facial and body capturing, yet these failed to achieve the desired outcome. Only once I began to physically investigate my facial and body features through touch was I able to translate features and relations of body parts into a viable 3-dimensional (digital) form. . The overcoming of the aesthetic uncanny valley, that is, the aesthetic sense of falseness of a mediated or constructed embodied representation, is not

15

A standard platform with sophisticated, no-code sculpting functionalities that support a hyperrealistic avatar creation.

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Fig. 3 Many NuMes. 3-dimensional self-sculpting process documentation (Galit Ariel, 2022)

necessarily felt most acutely through a complete or composed embodied representation. For me, it was the successful sculpting of specific features—my nostrils and eyebrows, my left ear, and my right eye—that first provided me with instances of self-recognition, as opposed to the resemblance of broader facial/body structures or other organs, which had no such effect. . The constant pursuit of accurate or perhaps more flattering representations propels us to seek an outside-in self-validation and alienates us from a deeper and more authentic sense of inside-out selfhood. The painter Francis Bacon attributes this tendency to the fact that “one’s sense of appearance is assaulted all the time by photography and by the film” [51, p. 30]. In the process, a moment of frustration resulting in my inability to capture a persuasive selfrepresentation triggered me to create a caricatured version with exaggerated features. This exaggerated and inaccurate representation ended up being the first instance where I recognized my whole self in the avatar (Fig. 3). The most surprising outcome of this process was the fact that the uncanny divide between me and my digital twin vanished at a certain moment. One day I could “hear” my avatar addressing me in my mind. I panicked and abruptly switched off my computer. Questions darted through my mind: have I gone mad? Is this just a fake and portentous intellectual trick? What validity can I attribute to such imagined or hypothetical communication? As I decided to confront this unexpected duality of biological and digital being, my creative process took a somewhat different course. It became geared towards examining parallel independent and collaborative modes of creative inquiry. This included keeping separate process documentation (through designated diaries and activity logs for my “self” and my “virtual self”), structuring an equal agency in the co-creation process (utilizing Artificial Intelligence generative templates in conjunction with my own interventions), and finally performing co-composed

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Haiku poetry (recited by myself and performed by NuMe via Motion Capture technology). The project is still unfolding and is currently expanding into aesthetic, sensorial, and functional reassemblages, which include examinations of invisible and intangible qualities of selfhood. Ultimately, it aims to forge experimental modes of embodied spatial performativities through the reinterpretation of mundane and poetic body rituals that will profess the biodigital entanglements of selfhood across fleshy and digital spaces.

4.2 Exquisite Corpses and Bodymind In-Betweenness The body occupies a space where body actions are realized. Alessia Tessari et al. [52, p. 644] Our biological body’s plasticity abounds in various domains: in metamorphic and generative biological processes (birth, growth, and decay), in self-induced body modifications (diet, exercise, and other body-morphing activities), and if all else fails, in other, more invasive interventions (surgery, tattoos, and body/sensory enhancing objects or implants). Humans have developed incredible tools, rituals, and techno-scientific practices that enable them to stretch the body’s natural boundaries. But we are still struggling to overcome the uncertainties of the natural world’s uncertainties with such tools; we also endeavor to resist biological destinies to the point of of attempting to erase them altogether. Within this framework, we might be wiser to recognize, as Glissant has, that: “the opaque is not the obscure (…) It is which cannot be reduced, which is the most perennial guarantee of participation and confluence” [13, p. 190]. Today, physical appearance can be altered beyond recognition, gender can be reassigned, and genetics and reproductive destinies can be hacked. Drawing on science-fiction paradigms, António Fernando Cascais believes that “the metamorphic being can become a whole new other (…), and so the themes of metamorphosis and identity are inseparable” [43, p. 64]. For now, our metamorphic abilities are still restricted by the prima materia, which largely determines our embodied presence and prevents us from transfiguring into other shapes, species, or modes of being. The appeal of immersive technologies lies precisely in their ability to envision alternative embodied formations, functions, and skins, thereby abolishing the constraining boundaries in order to “abandon our flesh body and become a formless mist” [53, p. 115], as Clouds Haberberg puts it. Can embodied perception become an “interactive assemblage” [54, p. 46] wherein alternative selves independently exist outside of material body paradigms? Can our inherent sense of human embodiment be truly relinquished? It seems that to a certain extent it can. Since we experience bodymind correlations as “one organic process” [40, p. 15], where our sensory feedback and embodied perception are interlinked and interdependent, we can alter one by altering the other. Invasive body interventions are not always necessary to create new body perceptions, as suggested by Tugce Joy, Emre Ugur, and Inci Ayhan: “Just holding a stick, for

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example, can create a dramatic effect on our body perception such that it remaps our body form and the environment around us and the interactivity in between” [55, p. 2]. However, such embodied extensions do not provide a limitless capacity for embodied extensionism. Research indicates that virtual embodied presence still requires some form of embodiment and a relation to existing embodied functions. Joy, Ugur, and Ayhan also suggest that a virtual sense of embodiment is heavily reliant on the existing embodied perceptions and is thus limited within the notions of “infinite” embodied expansion.16 It seems that abstract and disembodied presence is no more than “a myth from which the artificial intelligence movement never seems to escape” [44, p. 118]. Perhaps Silicon Valley’s technoutopians should consider replacing their parasitic anthropocentric paradigms of progress with alternative posthuman solutions. Unfettered by material restrictions, virtual and augmented representations of the body will spawn experimental self-simulacra as alternate, other-bodied, and disembodied self-representations are forged. The experimental media artist and scholar David Cecchetto proposes exploring aesthetic practices more carefully, since they. make clear that to ask the question of what it is to know something is always historical, and is to enter into a world of multiple temporalities, a world of iteration, archive, memory, potentials—of past futures, future pasts, and implicate presents [56, p. 103].

As our mediated bodies continue to flow across virtual and physical spaces, melding atoms, neurons, and pixels, new self-representation modes will arise, simultaneously representing multiple self-iterations. Much like the exquisite corpse—a surrealist drawing game in which a sheet of paper is folded back and passed around so that each person blindly adds on to the body part drawn by the previous player—embodiment and selfhood will depend on new blends of aesthetics, temporalities, and functions, compositely assembling hyper-fluid states of being. As humans’ digitally mediated presence cuts through space and time, it forges post-material freedoms that exceed the current parameters of identity and sense of self. Our emerging abilities to edit, optimize, and merge our biological and digital bodies re-draw phenomenological engagements with body temporality and plasticity and, with it, the core perceptions of the “lived experience of inhabiting a body” [36, p. 544]. Paradoxically, the current cultural models of body ethics and the adoption of algorithmic hierarchies result in a novel sense of the body and selfhood that is at once homogenized and fragmented. These fragmentations result in emergent modes of biodigital being(s), prompting us to explore new patterns

16

According to Joy, Ugur, and Ayhan, virtual immersion is an act of perception transference from our physical embodied functions into parallel or modified virtual ones. This requires a constant and seamless synchronization of visuotactile and sensory-motor feedback and an onboarding process. Once the process is complete, the target avatar becomes a new source of sensation, but is still bound to the material embodied perception of immersion [55].

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of co-existence across biological and digital spaces. Stiegler’s pharmacological view of technology as simultaneously a poison and a cure may entice us to move forward cautiously, evaluating what is gained and what is lost as we cross and merge the two spaces. Perhaps we should accept the imperfections of both biological and digital modes, rather than idealizing them. Drawing on Francis Bacon’s methodology for creating recognizable figurative portraits through abstraction,17 the process of constructing simulated selfhood is a balancing act. Our biodigital mode of being offers a new mode of existence that will cultivate new phenomenologies of self, of hybrid consciousness, rites, and performativities that breed unbound flesh and finite digital expressions.

5

Conclusion

The current technoscientific paradigms focus on dissecting, replicating, enhancing, and redesigning our bodies and minds into algorithmic bounds and systems. The technology fosters a cultural consensus that codifies social biases and portrays “tech-haveness” as synonymous with optimal personal and societal accomplishments. The founders of technology platforms are widely lauded as opinion leaders, political and social media influencers, and new heroes who will define humanity’s futures on earth and beyond. We would be wise to heed Braidotti’s cautionary words, reminding us that “the pride in technological achievements and in the wealth that comes with them must not prevent us from seeing the great contradictions and the forms of social and moral inequality engendered by our advanced technologies” [57, p. 42]. When we consider our aspiration to achieve the ultimate post-material presence, we may want to bear in mind the political and cultural implications of the algorithmic gaze, which has already conditioned us to seek external self-validation, promoted unachievable body ideals, and established hegemonies of self-representation. As James stated in 1890: “No more fiendish punishment could be devised, were such a thing physically possible, than that one should be turned loose in society and remain absolutely unnoticed by all the members thereof” [58, p. 293]. If we desire to explore new horizons for body cultures and imaginaries, we must unlearn capitalist body ideologies and embrace: 1. NuBody Dasein; that is, explore multiple cultural choices and aesthetic languages related to embodied representations, enabling users to escape the literal and metaphorical bounding box of their algorithmic representation and the Western hegemonies of presence.

17

As Bacon states in The Brutality of Fact (1990), “Because this image is a kind of tightrope walk between what is called figurative painting and abstraction. It will go right out from abstraction but will really have nothing to do with it” [51, p. 12].

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2. NuBody Plasticities; that is, investigate the phenomenology of fluid conceptions and ent body and mind. Allowing for alternate self- imaginaries, representations and boundaries through speculative, artistic, and non-monetized practices. 3. NuBody Transparencies; that is, construct clear ethical standards for somatic data agencies. This includes not only the knowledge of such data capturing, but also the agency to choose to live invisibly without losing social and interactional advantages. Biodigital being should not become a state in which we merely attempt to override and overwrite our biological traits and qualities. As we move towards a technosocial leap of embodied mediation driven by immersive technologies, new frontiers and challenges of embodied presence emerge. Examining what is and what we have lost along our techno-obsessed path is vital in unshackling body cultures from forced participation in capitalist cultural hegemonies. Once we have accepted that our material opaqueness is not a hindrance, but perhaps a forgotten path, we may be able to unveil and explore novel body freedoms from inside-out as organic, lived, and profound embodied knowledge. Core Messages . Body-related culture/nature entanglements play a crucial role in the continuous reframing of the body’s role as a subject, an object, and the abject. . Humanity’s primal anxiety about its finite (opaque) condition and human attempts to override it via technological and algorithmic means have resulted in a cultural construct of embodied self-fragmentation. . Novel expressions of immersive presence and selfhood require NuBody frameworks—interdisciplinary and cross-cultural explorations around biodigital embodied experience, representations, and imaginaries.

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42. Klayman A (2018) Take your pills. Broadcast 43. Cascais AF (2013) The metamorphic body in science fiction: from prosthetic correction to utopian enhancement. In: Allan K (ed) Disability in science fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, New York, pp 61–72 44. Bolter J, Gromala D (2005) Windows and mirrors: interaction design, digital art, and the myth of transparency. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, London, England 45. Hayles NK (1999) How we became posthuman: virtual bodies in cybernetics, literature, and informatics. University of Chicago Press, Chicago 46. O’Neil C (2017) Weapons of math destruction: how big data increases inequality and threatens democracy. Penguin, London 47. Zuboff S (2019) The age of surveillance capitalism. Hachette Book Group, New York 48. Dourish P, Bell G (2011) Divining a digital future: mess and mythology in ubiquitous computing. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA 49. Guattari F, Sylvère L (2008) Chaosophy: texts and interviews 1972–1977. Semiotexte, Los Angeles 50. Alaimo S (2018) Trans-corporeality. In: Braidotti R, Halvajova M (eds) Posthuman glossary. Bloomsbury Academic, London, pp 435–438 51. Sylvester D (1990) The brutality of fact: interviews with Francis Bacon. Thames & Hudson, Singapore 52. Tessari A, Tsakiris M, Borghi AM, Serino A (2010) The sense of body: a multidisciplinary approach to body representation. Neuropsychologia 48(3):643–644 53. Haberberg C (2018) Manifesto for abandoning my flesh body and becoming formless mist. In: On bodies: an anthology. 3 of Cups Press, London, pp 115–122 54. O’Ridian K (2017) Unreal objects: digital materialities, technoscientific projects and political realities. Pluto Press, London 55. Joy T, Ugur E, Ayhan I (2021) Trick the body trick the mind: avatar representation affects the perception of available action possibilities in virtual reality. Virtual Reality: J Virtual Reality Soc 26(2):615–629 56. Cecchetto D (2022) Listening in the afterlife of data. Duke University Press, Durham 57. Braidotti R (2013) The posthuman. Polity, Cambridge, UK 58. James W (1890) The principles of psychology. Henry Holt and Company, New York

Galit Ariel is a technofuturist, author, activist, and experimental media artist that explores the wild and imaginative side of emerging technologies and their impact on our culture, behaviors, and futures. Galit is the author of “Augmenting Alice: The Future of Identity, Experience and Reality” and an ongoing contributor to publications, think tanks, and organizations in the intersection of art, technology, and social impact. Through her creative practice, Galit leads art/tech projects that address resemblances, gaps, and glitches across digital, physical, and mental spaces. Her awardwinning work includes AR and VR art, animation, subversive interaction methods, and content curation. Galit is considered a thought leader within immersive technology and tech futures practices and was named one of “Nine Women that are building the Metaverse” (Unity, 2022).

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Avatar Therapy and Clinical Care in Psychiatry: Underlying Assumptions, Epistemic Challenges, and Ethical Issues Raffaella Campaner and Marina Lalatta Costerbosa

Energy appears to me to be the final and unique virtue of mankind. Whatever raises his energies at a higher pitch is worth more than what merely puts materials into our hands for its exercise. Wilhelm von Humboldt, The Limits of State Action [1792]

Abstract

In the last few years, avatars have been increasingly used in treating persistent persecutory auditory verbal hallucinations. The digital representation (an avatar) of persecutory hallucinations is voiced by the therapist and engages the patient in a dialogue, progressively conceding its power and, hence, reducing the stress experienced by the patient. Such attempts at integrating digital representations and cognitive behavior therapy raise a range of philosophical questions, which this chapter tackles along two trajectories. From an epistemological standpoint, we inquire what notion of mental disorder can underlie the use of avatar therapy, and how our understanding of psychiatric diseases can be affected by the implementation of such a therapy. Relatedly, from an ethical standpoint, we reflect on some of the controversial issues posed by such therapeutic strategies. Discussing selected epistemological and ethical aspects stemming from the latest relevant literature both in philosophy and in psychiatry, the chapter aims

Raffaella Campaner and Marina Lalatta Costerbosa have equally contributed to the paper. R. Campaner (B) · M. L. Costerbosa Department of Philosophy and Communication Studies, University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy e-mail: [email protected] M. L. Costerbosa e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Michałowska (ed.), Humanity In-Between and Beyond, Integrated Science 16, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27945-4_3

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to provide a tentative evaluation of trade-offs between the promises of and the limits to this therapeutic option. Keywords

Philosophy of Psychiatry . Bioethics . Virtual reality hallucinations . Mental disorder . Trialogue . Deceit

1

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Clinical care

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Verbal

Introduction

Virtual reality plays an increasingly relevant role in the design of innovative therapies in psychiatric contexts. This chapter will specifically consider the use of avatars in treating persistent persecutory auditory verbal hallucinations, addressing the issue from two interrelated—epistemological and ethical—perspectives. Avatar therapy was introduced roughly a decade ago, as a tool to enable “people who hear voices to have a dialogue with a digital representation (an avatar) of their presumed persecutor. Being voiced by the therapist, the avatar engages in a conversation with the patient and becomes ever less hostile” [1, p. 31] as time goes by, thus conceding power to the subject, who experiences a reduction of stress as a result. The ever kinder words of the avatar, which is voiced by the therapist, make the patient feel progressively better. We believe that such attempts at integrating digital representations and cognitive behavior therapy raise a range of philosophical questions, which we address along two trajectories. First, we consider what notion of mental disorder can underlie the application of avatar therapy, and how our understanding of psychiatric diseases and of the interrelatedness between their causes and symptoms can be affected by the implementation of such a therapy. Secondly, and relatedly, we reflect on some of the ethical issues posed by such therapeutic strategies. Specifically, we investigate what it is that the therapist’s intervention actually focuses on—that is, what the avatar actually stands for—and what role deceit plays both in the patient-clinician relation and in the very conception of the patient in a number of respects. For instance, we ponder whether the patient is aware of the origin and nature of her distress. Likewise, we reflect on whether the patient is unique for social and cultural reasons or for the symptoms of her impairment, and consequently whether the same avatar can be effectively used in multiple cases, with only slight modifications. By exploring selected epistemological and ethical aspects considered in the latest relevant literature both in philosophy and in psychiatry, our aim in this chapter is to provide a tentative evaluation of trade-offs between the promises of and the limits to this therapeutic option.

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Avatar Therapy in Psychiatric Care: What Is It and Who Becomes Involved?

Avatar therapy (AT) has appeared as a tool to treat people with persistent persecutory auditory verbal hallucinations (AVH) quite recently. Julian Leff and colleagues [2, 3] introduced it to enable patients to have an effective dialogue with a digital image (an avatar) of their perceived persecutor. To this purpose, an unprecedented situation is fostered in which an avatar is the best possible representation of the symptom. Avatars are designed according to respective patients’ indications. Given that symptomatologies have their own unique features each, the patient is explicitly asked to collaborate with the therapist in order to develop the avatar that will appear on the screen. Both the avatar’s appearance and its voice are shaped based on the patient’s description. The patient is asked to pick from a range of voices the one that she believes suits the avatar, best resembling the persecutor’s voice, with the available options being conditional upon variations of the therapist’s own voice. As already mentioned, this innovative therapy is specifically used to treat persistent auditory verbal hallucinations, which are typically derogatory and threatening and are reported by approximately 60–70% of people with schizophrenia (and other disorders). The rationale for using it is that it is reportedly effective in enduring pathological conditions, that is, in the cases in which auditory verbal hallucinations have been unresponsive or only partially responsive to previous antipsychotic drug treatment (roughly 25% of the patients). Avatar therapy has been found to be more effective than standard supportive counseling in such cases and to reduce the reported omnipotence and malevolence of auditory verbal hallucinations, along with their frequency. The outcomes have included anxiety reduction, higher assertiveness, enhanced control and self-esteem, and better trauma re-processing [1]. The set-up of a therapeutic session consists in the patient sitting in a room, facing a monitor on which the avatar is shown; the avatar’s lip movements are synchronized with its speech by the software. The therapist sits in an adjacent room and looks at the screen. By clicking on the right hand side of the screen, the therapist speaks to the patient through the avatar; by clicking on its left hand side, the therapist speaks to the patient in her normal voice. The therapist regulates the avatar so that it gradually comes under the patient’s control over a series of sessions (e.g., weekly 30–50-min-long sessions) to finally become appreciative and supportive. Its facial expression changes from menacing or neutral to smiling. The sessions can be digitally recorded, and the audio files are transferred to a personal media player which is given to the patients to use at any time to reinforce their control of the persecutory voice (Fig. 1). Standard cognitive behavioral therapy for psychosis is helpful to many people affected by AVH, but the average effect sizes range from small to moderate. Hence, there is considerable interest in the development of experimental therapies that draw on the principles of cognitive behavioral therapy, but take them in novel directions. AT is believed to boast various clinically advantageous aspects.

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Fig. 1 UCL Avatar therapy software (http://www.avatartherapy.co.uk/)

Its supporters claim that it is feasible to deliver, usually quite acceptable to participants,1 not causing any adverse events directly attributable to the therapy, less time-consuming than the standard therapy model, and resulting in a rapid and sustained reduction in the severity of auditory verbal hallucinations, which subside after fewer weeks. Moreover, since AT specifically targets auditory verbal hallucinations, it is argued to help clinicians to achieve a better understanding of the specific relation between the symptoms and the disorder itself. It is also repeatable at home by the patients on their own recorded version, which furnishes them with a sort of “therapist in a pocket.” Repeatability may pave the way for the development of a standard format of therapy delivery. While each case is different, insofar as the patient is individually engaged in the design of the avatar with its specific features, the use of the same software, the same devices, and the same protocols for the duration of the therapy causes some shared constraints and can hence ground the establishment of some standards. The identification of some common features across applications of the therapy can provide new comparable evidence on the pathology, its cases, and contexts. Finally, AT is relatively cheap in the long run and possibly applicable to other disorders [e.g., paranoid distress; see 5]. The distinctive features of the therapy, including the enacting of a “trialogue” between the patient, the avatar, and the therapist, are meant to provide unique insights into the disorder. As the patient is directly involved in the designing and

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On the withdrawal rate [4].

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voicing of the avatar, she becomes an active promoter of the therapy itself, as the supreme epistemic authority in the process of the objectification of the disease. The avatar, voiced by the therapist, becomes less and less hostile in the course of time, progressively conceding power to the patient, whose fear and anxiety are expected to gradually decrease. Recordings of the sessions can be given to the patient to be re-listened to offline at home, which may have a reinforcing effect. As a whole, AT seeks to make an invisible entity and a disembodied voice visible and externally audible. The exclusively personal and utterly individual experience of being abused by an internal voice is transformed into a genuine conversational interchange, to which the patient and the therapist have in principle equal and simultaneous access. As a preliminary, the patient and the therapist rely on the dedicated software to construct the avatar together as the best possible proxy for the menacing entity. The design of the avatar is part and parcel of the therapy itself. By acting along with the patient to externalize the disorder and make it an object of a sharable sensory experience, the therapist seriously takes the patient’s claims and suffering into account. Rather than dismissing the sufferer’s reports on her hallucinations and/or insisting on their being unreal, the therapist does her best to bring her experience into alignment with the symptoms of the disorder that the patient usually has, or, at least, reports to have. The therapist’s role can be considered two-pronged. On the one hand, she is deeply engaged in the entire process and willing to share the persecutory experience with the patient, to put herself in her shoes, to take her narrative as seriously as possible, and, thus, to validate her experience. On the other hand, the therapist deceives the patient, with the extent of the deception differing from one case to another. As highlighted in Sect. 3, issues arise around the therapist’s lying to the patient and the degree of the latter’s understanding of what is going on in the therapeutic setting. Indeed, research has reported that patients’ insight into the origin of the voice varies from none to considerable, as does their awareness that, at first, it was entirely in their own minds. With AT, the situation can be seen as two-faceted. For one, the more aware the patient is of the process when designing the avatar, the more serene the interaction with the avatar can be: “given that I created it,” the patient is encouraged to think, “it cannot really put me in danger.” At the same time, the ultimate goal of the therapy—that is, a deep change in the patient’s attitude to the voices, not only during the therapeutic encounters but, most importantly, also in the patient’s regular life—depends on the patient’s feeling the closest possible resemblance and proximity between the avatar and the persecutory symptoms she has been experiencing for years.

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Epistemological Issues in Avatar Therapy

What has been sketchily introduced above not only constitutes a clinically interesting case of innovation, but also triggers a range of epistemological reflections at the crossroads of the philosophy of psychiatry and psychiatry itself, questioning

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the (implicit or explicit) assumptions underlying AT and what can be reasonably expected of it.

3.1 What Are We Treating? The nature of mental disorders is known to be an object of an extensive, longlasting, and complex debate. Whether made explicit or not, any scientific approach to a psychiatric disease, both in a research setting and in a clinical context, is grounded on some understanding of what the object of investigation is. AT cannot be an exception in this respect. If we want to grasp its actual import, we also need to consider what notion of the condition to be treated underlies this approach and drives its implementation. Hallucinations are one of the five symptom domains of psychotic disorders in DSM-5, indicating their diagnostic significance for this group of disorders. The aim of AT is to provide a normalizing-integrative framework which addresses some of the symptoms of the disorder. This means that even when the therapy proves beneficial, the disorder itself is not gone. In other words, while some studies have pointed out the advantages of the treatment, it neither heals nor restores perfect health. AT has an apparently significant but only partially positive impact, and it tackles a very controversial condition. For example, hearing voices is not always conceived as a negative thing since AVH have also been found to have a “protective” function as a defense mechanism for transforming internal conflicts into voices, which is in the end psychologically advantageous [6–8]. The very decision to perform AT presupposes a negative conception of AVH, a conception which cannot be taken for granted, though. The application of AT hinges on a range of claims, which we believe should be made explicit insofar as they express a certain vision of what the disorder and the treated symptoms are like. In the context of AT, AVH are experienced as coming from entities endowed with personal identities and speaking with purpose, with whom the hearer establishes a personal relationship. The psychotic experience is here taken to amount to having a sense of the actual presence of the persecutory entity, a presence that can be effectively objectified and shared with a third party in a public setting where the treatment takes place. The objectification process can hardly be taken as epistemologically unproblematic. Moreover, patients who use the therapy are not only led to establish control of the avatar, but also trusted to be able to transfer this experience onto their inner persecutory voices. In this sense, the patient is assumed to have a generalizing capacity, which in principle is going, so to speak, to “absorb” the transformation of the avatar from a hostile entity into a well-intentioned supporter so much that the patient herself will reintegrate the exteriorized component of her psyche into her daily life, well beyond the conclusion of the therapy. Whereas reflections above address the patient-disorder-therapist relations, there are also concerns regarding the distinctive features of the disorder itself. There is no consensus as to whether it is to be considered perception- or cognition-related.

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In their first medical definition, given by Jean Etienne Dominique Esquirol [9], hallucinations were described as a perception without an object, a psychic abnormality unrelated to sensory disturbances that was accompanied by the patient’s intimate conviction that the experience was real. Historically, other definitional proposals did not lean in the same direction. For example, Jules Baillarger [10] believed that psychic hallucinations were a “language of thought”; Jeanne-Pierre Falret [11] considered hallucinations a “disorder of reason”; and Augusto Tamburini [12] embraced a mechanistic approach to argue that hallucinations were a product of excitation, “a sensorial epilepsy” [13]. Since the early 1960s, research in neurosurgery and advancements in imaging techniques have fueled hypotheses on what brain areas are affected and suggested that connectivity between them is responsible of AVH. The recent editions of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-8 and ICD-10) define AVH as “disorders of perception,” and the Research Domain Criteria Project (RDoC) maintains that AVH are “a conscious sensory experience that occurs in the absence of corresponding external stimulation of the relevant sense organ and has sufficient sense of reality to resemble a veridical perception.” RDoC practices a multilevel approach and analyzes pathological conditions from the cochlear neurons up to the superior temporal gyrus, with a strong focus on pathophysiology but with no interest in the phenomenology and experience of AVH. The latter cannot be ignored, though. Patients reporting AVH actually have very diverse experiences. As a matter of fact, it has been stressed that “patients often use the term [voices] as a metaphor for experiences that do not have much in common with auditory experiences,” and some experiences are reported as flashes of meaning rather than voice-like. Psychiatrists may operate “with a perceptual model of AVH, whereas the patient has a direct articulation of meaning without mediation of sensible qualities” [14, p. 206]. Thus, the core issue is whether AVH are to be addressed as a perceptual or as a cognitive impairment. The related question is whether they are caused by a disorder of cognition-related brain circuits or by a malfunction of the peripheral sensory apparatus, or perhaps both. AT makes AVH externally perceivable as something that can be simultaneously experienced by the patient and the therapist. As such, AT seems to start from the notion of AVH as something that can be addressed on the level of perception so as to subsequently affect the level of cognition. Making AVH collectively perceivable is believed to be a tool for achieving cognitive outcomes. According to Josef Parnas and Annick Urfer-Parnas, the classical definition of AVH, as a perception without an object, has persisted into the DSM-5, ICD-10, and RDoC. From a perspective of phenomenological investigation, it is evident that AVH are not perceptions, in either a physiological or a descriptive sense. A perceptual experience is always deployed in the intersubjectively shared, external space (…) and is endowed with a temporal thickness or contour. AVH violate all these basic features of perception. Another crucially problematic aspect of the DSM-5/RDoC definition concerns the reality status of AVH. (…) AVH is not an empirical object of this world, given to the patient through the perceptual channels. Rather, the AVH are best regarded as alienated and intrusive fragments of the patient’s own subjectivity [14, p. 212].

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Avatar therapy aims to overcome these very distinctions by trying to make AVH perceivable, external, and, in the end, real. The process unfolds from an entirely and exclusively privately accessible ontological dimension to the establishment of a piece of the world’s furniture. Some pertinent questions are whether we need to uncritically embrace this approach, and whether a phenomenological, non-objectifying approach alone would perhaps do better. The situation presents an epistemological puzzle. AT without a doubt regards its capacity for having a standardized treatment applicable in a range of situations as one of its merits. This affords clear advantages, such that the possibility to compare various cases and achieve a deeper understanding of the condition itself. However, the individual, private experience and everything that may be unique in the manifestations of AVH—and, ultimately, of psychotic disorders—in single cases should not be dismissed too quickly. In other words, while the standardization of treatment needs to be promoted with considerable caution, we should not over-emphasize the incommensurability of subjective perspectives lest we end up with a range of “‘private ontologies’ that would be even more difficult to approach scientifically” [15, p. 220]. AT is supported by views holding that in order to understand schizophrenia one must take into account patients’ interactions with other actors in the social world. All these considerations indicate that assessments concerning AT application are related to the (mostly implicit) view of the status of AVH that one embraces (Fig. 2).

Fig. 2 A therapy session (https://avatar-intervention.ca/avatar-therapy/)

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3.2 What Are We Learning from AT? Other aspects that we believe deserve attention are related to the therapeutic action itself and concern the exact object of intervention and the epistemological gains of this therapy. We have already highlighted that AVH themselves are not a disease, but symptoms of a pathology. AT is structurally complex, and its interventions are performed on several levels. To start with, the software-based development of the avatar entails constructing a fictional entity in the patient-therapist interaction. These actions involve two epistemically asymmetric subjects and a software unit. Secondly, the production of the avatar can also be considered to be a therapeutic act in and of itself. While designing the avatar together with the patient, the therapist treats her and helps her to make her distress explicit and to address it directly, turning it into a shared experience. The setting in which their trialogue is carried out is designed in and through a therapeutic dialogue between the clinician and the patient, a dialogue which may initiate the improvement of the patient’s condition. Thirdly, once the avatar itself starts “talking,” its presence affects the relation between the patient and the therapist by making it “mediated.” Last but not least, the intervention can also be further carried out by means of the recorded trialogue, which is given to the patient to be re-heard later, at home. In principle, this should contribute to acting on the “inner voice” and making it more and more friendly. This procedure raises some essential questions, including what these interventions actually target or, to put it differently, whether the therapy fights the disorder or just one of its many possible representations. The intervention is not performed on the remote causes of the disease—one or another combination of trauma and neurobiological dysfunction—but on the visualized “entity” that the patient perceives as directly causing her distress. While it is assumed that the visual and auditory representation, which is based on the patient’s description and generated by the software, is the best possible proxy for the disorder, it cannot be ruled out that such a representation, rather than being faithful to the patient’s pathological experience, is in fact the product of the patient’s deception of the therapist. It may well be that, while the therapist is working on the objectification of the distress, the patient actually misrepresents it and, in this way, influences the therapist’s understanding of what is going on. Such a realization casts doubts on who is actually manipulated in the process. On the one hand, the patient may be manipulated by a fictional entity operated by the therapist; on the other, the therapist herself may be an object of manipulation. It is challenging to determine with any tolerable certainty whether the patient is only a passive participant, or whether she can (consciously or unconsciously) manipulate the mediated representation of the condition and thus have a part in the procedure as an active agent. Furthermore, if AT is directly performed on the symptoms of the disease, it must be kept in mind that most voice-hearers clearly distinguish between voices and thoughts [16]. It appears that AT operates by making the voice agentic, personified, and characterful [17]. The voice belonging to the patient’s inner world is externalized and, as

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a result, experienced by multiple subjects. However, it is not obvious whether the intervention actually concerns voices or thoughts. Resolving these queries can make a difference with respect to the identification of relevant causal relations, the attribution of causal efficacy to the therapy, and the recognition of genuine healing processes. It is impossible to isolate subprocesses within the treatment and, thus, to isolate causal efficacy relations. The identification of causal relations and, therefore, of actual epistemic gains obtained through AT is far from straightforward. AT offers us the experience of directly observing patients’ interactions with a representation of their voices, which may illuminate some aspects of the patients’ relationship with their voices and of the psychodynamic formulation of the externalization of unacceptable thoughts. The therapy should enable the patient to become aware of the relation between the voices’ criticisms and her own low self-esteem. In principle, this should also make the patient gradually recognize that the voices come from her own self-critical thoughts. The process appears to offer various epistemic gains: the patient learns something about her disorder and her reactions to it, and so does the therapist, while researchers obtain knowledge for the development of a general model of the disorder. Some of the advantages of the therapy notwithstanding, it also comes with limitations that make the further implementation and development of AT problematic. Critical ethical aspects are discussed in Sect. 4. Epistemological puzzles abound as well. For instance, long-term clinical benefits are currently uncertain and would need more structured and extended follow-ups to be convincingly confirmed. Even when effective, the impacts of AT significantly differ from one case to another, which urges caution about using this therapy to standardize treatment. It is not known either in how far inter-individual differences may affect the therapy’s overall efficacy, or why the process is not always effective. It is not clear, for instance, whether the success of AT depends on the relevant others’ different responses to changes in the patients’ attitudes or on different features of the personal patient-avatar relation, or perhaps on the patients’ different awareness and confidence. By making the voice “real,” the therapist actually manipulates the patient’s feelings. As the ethical import of deception is discussed in the following section, at this point it suffices to stress that the therapist takes the patients’ experiences at face value and transposes them onto the visible representation of the persecutor. Whether this is what a clinician really should do is by no mean indisputable. One legitimate concern is that, instead of promoting resistance to the disorder, AT may collude with it, since becoming familiar with the avatar may perhaps perpetuate the symptoms, rather than alleviating them. Furthermore, a personification of a highly intrusive phenomenon is fabricated with a view to diminishing the symptoms, but this provides no insight into the underlying neurobiological mechanisms. If this were one of the targets, other tests would most likely be performed during AT. For example, double-checking through imaging could provide better hints. Martine van Bennekom and colleagues have observed that “[i]f a virtual environment

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is able to activate both subjective symptoms and the neural and physiological substrate associated with a disorder, this can contribute to a more comprehensive and objective assessment of this disorder” [18, p. 5]. However, ascertaining that would be quite problematic, because if the encounter were recorded through imaging, the patient’s awareness, trustworthiness, and behavior would likely be affected. Such a setting would make it much more difficult for the patient to perceive the situation as a credible proxy of her distress. In the end, avatar therapy not only challenges our modeling assumptions and theoretical approaches to psychiatric disorders, but it also questions our practical management of pathological conditions, raising concerns about a range of ethical issues related to what the avatar actually stands for and what role deceit plays both in the patient-clinician relation and in the very conception of the patient’s epistemic role—that is, of the epistemic role played by the patient as a subject endowed with individual distinctive features.

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Ethical Issues in Avatar Therapy

Most works on AT to date have not paid enough attention to the ethical concerns the therapy may occasion. In this section, we analyze and discuss the main ethical conundrums related to this application of virtual reality tools in therapeutic contexts.

4.1 A New Old Challenge The ethical challenge in applying AT first of all involves the traditional questions of applied ethics. Avatar therapy has to be seen in relation to the purportedly universal and publicly recognized moral principles and values of democratic societies, with the controversial precautionary principle based on the notion of responsibility being among those most relevant. However, the application of this principle is known to entail a severe tension between its revolutionary reversal of the burden of proof with regard to the risks of new practices and the reasonable degree of certainty demanded by the scientific community. The precautionary principle is well captured in the Resolution of the European Council of December 2000, which insists that this bioethical principle should gradually come to hold in environmental protection and public health on the global level. It should be normative “where the possibility of harmful effects on health or the environment has been identified and preliminary scientific evaluation, based on the available data, proves inconclusive for assessing the level of risk.”2 Starting in the 1970s, the new ethical, epistemological, and methodological mindset attributing prominence to the principle of responsibility has demanded that innovation should be able to demonstrate its rationality with regard to its

2

https://www.europarl.europa.eu/summits/nice2_en.htm#an3 [Annex III, 7].

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possible consequences for social health, the environment, etc. Before this ethical principle was recognized as normative worldwide, citizens had had to prove the causal connection between the adverse events (potentially) afflicting them and the innovation involved. We cannot provide an account of the philosophical and cultural background of this higher level of practical argumentation; we should nevertheless remember the pivotal part that the German philosopher Hans Jonas had in that process. His views continue to be central to bioethical discussions, and the impact of his masterpiece Das Prinzip Verantwortung. Versuch einer Ethik für die technologische Zivilisation (1979) and its applied elaboration Technik, Medizin und Ethik: Zur Praxis des Prinzips Verantwortung (1985) on the theory and praxis of this ethical principle must be acknowledged. Another traditional ethical question relevant to AT has to do with the patientdoctor relationship, a relationship that spans the extremes of paternalism and abandonment. In this respect, a crucial role is played by the heavy ideological load inhering in the main concepts at stake, such as the concept of pathological condition in connection to the mind/body problem and the concept of health as such and as changing. Moral responsibility and respect for the patient, which entails always treating the patient as an end in itself, are two complex notions that are directly implicated in clinical settings and call for constant reconsideration in view of the evolution of contexts and the progress of medical science. In addition to these general perplexities, avatar therapy poses a specific ethical challenge that involves lying. Importantly, the structure of lying is multidimensional, and this makes it imperative to analyze the various ethically relevant facets of lying.

4.2 The Ambivalence of Lying In the context of AT, lying is a trinary ethical problem. Before considering the different facets of lying, such as its implications, consequences, and moral status, a short caveat is in order. In moral universalism, lying as a conduct of action, not just as a single lie, is regarded as wrong. Kant’s moral doctrine [19], which embraces what Thomas Nagel [20] has called a “from nowhere” perspective, holds that: The shortest way, however, and an unerring one, to discover the answer to this question whether a lying promise is consistent with duty, is to ask myself, “Should I be content that my maxim (to extricate myself from difficulty by a false promise) should hold good as a universal law, for myself as well as for others?” and should I be able to say to myself, “Every one may make a deceitful promise when he finds himself in a difficulty from which he cannot otherwise extricate himself”? Then I presently become aware that while I can will the lie, I can by no means will that lying should be a universal law. For with such a law there would be a universal law. For with such a law there would be no promises at all, since it would be in vain to allege my intention in regard to my future actions to those who would not believe this allegation, or if they over hastily did so, would pay me back in my own coin. Hence my maxim, as soon as it should be made a universal law, would necessarily destroy itself [19, First Section].

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From a moral point of view, it is clear that the intention of agents is what matters most. An action can be judged to be wrong only if the intention behind it is to deceive the other party, and it involves a betrayal of trust in others. Emphatically, avatar therapy does not fit this description. Our argumentation is not underpinned by ideas of personal morality; rather, it focuses on the external field and the public sphere of action. Given this, the critical-transcendental appraisal of lying is not an adequate framework in which to consider avatar therapy. Lying in the avatar scenario takes place on different levels, and below we consider them critically in three major respects.

4.3 An Als Ob Scenario and a Sui Generis Dialogue The artificial avatar-patient relation produces an als ob (as if) situation, which is virtual, not real. More precisely, it is a real situation that is at the same time fictional. The therapeutic interaction unfolds in a real dialogue between two subjects: the patient (a person) and the avatar (a fictional entity, a fictional “person”). This cannot but have implications for bioethical and legal questions, such as informed consent. One of the major issues certainly is to what extent the patient can be informed about the inner dynamics of avatar therapy without compromising its therapeutic efficacy. No quick fixes can be expected, as this factor is pivotal to the functioning of this specific psychiatric therapy. The patient’s thorough awareness of the artificiality of the dialogue with the avatar can interfere with the identification process, with the imaginative capacity, and with the increase in the patient’s consciousness of her condition. If the therapeutic situation is explained in a clear and understandable way, the chances of success of the therapy are likely to be reduced, if not lost altogether. Informed consent is premised on the clarity and completeness of information. Some degree of deception inevitably gets in the way here. Dialogue between a human being (a patient) and an avatar (a fictional entity) is not a real dialogue, but a variety of pseudo-communication; or, if following Jürgen Habermas communication is taken seriously as a social interaction process, such a dialogue is not communication at all. Habermas argues that communicative reason is not an immediate source of prescriptions. It has a normative content only insofar as the communicatively acting individuals must commit themselves to pragmatic presuppositions of a counterfactual sort. That is, they must undertake certain idolizations—for example, ascribe identical meanings to expressions, connect utterances with context-transcending validity claims, and assume that addressees are accountable, that is, autonomous and sincere with both themselves and others. (…) Communicative reason thus makes an orientation to validity claims possible [21, pp. 4–5; see also 22].

At the same time, if we think in Aristotelian terms, communication is the constitutive and defining dimension of the human being and also of a democratic, that is, political, community, as Hannah Arendt has taught us. Memorably, in The Human Condition, Arendt foregrounds the importance of being (of attempting to be) in

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a mutual relationship in which people can regard each other in the same way. In Arendt’s words, we confirm the relevance of “the specifically political forms of being together with others, acting in concert and speaking with each other” [23, p. 162]. In AT, the kind of “communication” that takes place in the therapeutic context does not include the moment of recognizing the other as a person; moreover, it neither occurs between equals nor involves emotions and feelings. Nonetheless, as Habermas stresses, it “cannot rule it out that knowledge of one’s own hereditary features as programmed may prove to restrict the choice of an individual’s way of life, and to undermine the essentially symmetrical relations between free and equal human beings” [24, p. 23]. Along these critical lines, the avatar-therapeutic scenario is a form of a lie. It is “false” communication, cold and empty. It is “non-human” speech. Does this mean that AT is a therapeutic “third wheel”? The question is further complicated by the fact that what takes place in AT is not a dialogue between two subjects (a person and an avatar), but a conversation of three subjects: the patient (a real subject), the avatar (a fictional subject), and the therapist (a hidden or masked subject). There is also a medium that essentially modifies the relationship among the three. The third participant in the interaction must be taken into account because of the ethical implications of its role. It must be considered whether this interposition creates refractions that change the dialogical dynamic, and whether this modification of the dialogical framework impacts the claim of transparency and authenticity of the dialogue itself. Despite the therapeutic motivation, the notion of individual autonomy as the complete personal sovereignty of care encourages a critical thematization of this (required) opaqueness. This is a third variation of lying implicated in avatar therapy, which can be allowed after a critical test of moral legitimacy. To sum up, the shadowed communicative interaction and the hierarchical dimension of the dialogue linked to the hidden participation of the therapist are meaningful and potentially (even if inadvertently) manipulative. These factors are relevant with regard to the authority of the therapist and the content of her speeches. Since the patient is dependent on the therapist, questions such as who the therapist exactly is, how well the therapist knows the patient, how the therapist’s authority affects the patient’s imagination and feelings, and what clinical competence the patient owns are very significant from a moral perspective. Therefore, they need to be addressed if a feasible and reasonable therapeutic approach is to be promoted.

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Conclusion

The preceding sections stress that AT produces epistemological and ethical challenges, and that those are closely intertwined. The co-design of an avatar and the pursuit of the “trialogic” therapy call for a deep epistemological exploration of the disorder targeted by the therapy, the status of the avatar, and the entire process through which the patient is treated and her hallucination are reduced. The unique

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features of the therapy and the epistemic processes it entails need to be thoroughly understood in order to bring into focus its ethically problematic aspects as well. At the same time, a detailed examination of ethical concerns breeds a more precise understanding of AT as a tool for gaining insights into the disorder.

5.1 Clinical and Epistemological Concerns Inquiries into the trialogue shed light on how avatar therapy operates, but not on what etiological mechanism underlies the condition it addresses. The way in which the avatar is enacted is grounded on how the voice is understood by the patient, rather than on our current understanding of the disorder as a whole. As explained above, persistent auditory hallucinations are considered to be one of the symptoms of schizophrenia. The knowledge gleaned from AT cannot be applied to prevent it and has a very limited diagnostic use. It contributes somewhat to our understanding of possible recovery strategies, rather than to grasping the role of AVH as symptoms through which the etiology of the disorder itself can be unraveled. Further research is thus indispensable to determine to what extent AT is actually a promising option for tackling multisensorial features of auditory hallucinations and whether AVH should in fact be tackled at all. Caution in this respect is suggested by the cases in which voices have ended up as the patient’s main social connection and an escape from tedium and loneliness [4]. Another circumstance to consider is that the patient may reckon the perceived voice as “a part of me,” in which case the therapy can influence variations of personal identity in a highly problematic way. Van Bennekom and colleagues aver that “[t]he introduction of virtual reality (VR) creates the possibility to simultaneously provoke and measure psychiatric symptoms. Therefore, VR could contribute to the objectivity and reliability in the assessment of psychiatric disorders” [18, p. 5]. This is a disputable claim as it is not really obvious whether VR helps in the assessment of disorder, or rather presupposes it. It has been observed that “VRT primarily focuses on how patients relate with their voices by targeting self-esteem, emotion regulation and acceptance, rather than challenging beliefs about voices” [25, p. 11]. Thus, AT yields knowledge on specific accounts and representations of the experience of the disorder, rather than on the disorder as such. Last but not least, further studies are needed to better establish whether the cognitive/behavioral responses elicited by the avatar are actually qualitatively different from responses elicited by standard cognitive therapies. This is all the more urgent as critical concerns have been raised over the actual effectiveness of AT [26], and, more generally, it is still to be conclusively determined whether it addresses the serious symptoms of the disorder itself, or, rather, one of their possible representations [27].

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5.2 (Provisional) Moral Conclusions We can offer two tentative responses to the critical remarks about lying in an avatar therapeutic scenario as formulated above. One of them concerns both the artificial avatar-patient relationship and pseudo-communication between the patient and the avatar. The way in which the avatar is constructed is pivotal both to communication between the patient and the therapist and to the patient’s awareness of the therapy. If both are to be preserved and/or fostered, the patient and the therapist must be committed to participating in the development of the avatar and identifying with it. If they do, the avatar-character will reflect the assessments and the choices of both the patient and the therapist. The process will take time and unfold incrementally, making the shared action an opportunity for preventing and/or redressing the lack of communication. The other response concerns the hierarchical dimension of the dialogue between the patient and the therapist. In this respect, attention must be paid to the content of dialogues and to the limits to and the boundaries of pressure, solicitation, and suggestion that this special relationship involves. This can be achieved by observing deontological guidelines on the specific responsibility related to the standard of impartiality and respect for others. One last ethical consideration, though transversal, is specifically related to the construction of the avatar. It is the question of fairness, which is the bedrock of every application of the therapy. In contemporary societies, competences, intellectual capabilities, and social and economic positions are dramatically unequal. Patients are very different from each other. This observation must be a starting point of any intervention, for instance, supporting patients and their families involved in their own health and care in thoughtful and wellinformed ways. Finally, in general but also with specific regard to avatar therapy, the principle of fairness must be observed, given unequal access to healthcare in our society. This goal should be pursed, once again, by joint epistemological and ethical reflections. They clearly show that the alleged objectification of persistent auditory hallucinations and, together with it, attempts to make the experience of pathological symptoms sharable by the patient and the therapist are not actually “neutral” from an epistemological and an ethical standpoints. The design and the use of AT rely on a range of assumptions, can lead to theoretically different outcomes, and suggest various ethical conundrums, thus probably raising more questions than they can answer. Core Messages . The digital representations (avatars) of persecutory hallucinations have been increasingly used in treating persistent persecutory auditory verbal hallucinations. . Avatars are voiced by the therapist and engage the patient in a dialogue, progressively reducing the stress experienced by the patient. . Avatar therapy aims to objectify the hallucinations and make the experience of the symptoms of the disorder sharable by the patient and the therapist.

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. Avatar therapy is underpinned by a range of assumptions and produces an array of epistemological and ethical puzzles.

References 1. Craig T, Rus-Calafell M, Ward T, Leff J, Huckvale M, Howarth E, Emsley R, Garety P (2018) AVATAR therapy for auditory verbal hallucinations in people with psychosis: a single-blind, randomised controlled trial. Lancet Psychiatry 5:31–40 2. Leff J, Williams G, Huckvale M, Arbuthnot M, Leff A (2013) Computer-assisted therapy for medication-resistant auditory hallucinations: proof-of-concept study. Br J Psychiatry 202:428– 433 3. Leff J, Williams G, Huckvale M, Arbuthnot M, Leff A (2014) Avatar therapy for persecutory auditory hallucinations: what is it and how does it work? Psychosis 6(2):166–176 4. Ward T, Rus-Calafell M, Ramadhan Z, Soumelidou O, Fornells-Ambrojo M, Garety Ph, Craig T (2020) AVATAR therapy for distressing voices: a comprehensive account of therapeutic targets. Schizophrenia Bull 46(5):1038–1044. https://doi.org/10.1093/schbul/sbaa061 5. Craig T (2019) AVATAR therapy: a promising new approach for persistent distressing voices. World Psychiatry 18(1):98–99 6. Romme M, Escher S, Dillon J, Corstens D, Morris M (2009) Living with voices. PCCS Books, Ross-on-Wye 7. Corstens D, Longden E, May R (2012) Talking with voices: exploring what is expressed by the voices people hear. Psychosis 4(2):95–104 8. Moskowitz A, Corstens D (2007) Auditory hallucinations: psychotic symptoms or dissociative experience? J Psychol Trauma 4(2):95–104 9. Esquirol E (1838) Des maladies mentales considérées sous leur rapport medical, hygiénique et medico-légal. Librairie de l’Acadèmie Royale de Médecine, Paris 10. Baillarger J (1846) De l’influence de l’état intermédiarie à la veille et au sommeil sur la production et la marche des hallucinations. J-B Baillère, Paris 11. Falret J-P (1853–1854) Mémoire sur la folie circulaire, forme de maladie mentale caractérisée par la reproduction successive et régulière de l’etat maniaque, de l’état mélancolique, et d’un intervalle lucide plus ou moins prolonge. Bull Académie De Médecine 19:382–415 12. Tamburini A (1880) Sulla genesi delle allucinazioni. Rivista Sperimentale di Freniatria 6:126– 154 13. Ey H (1973) Traité des hallucinations. Masson, Paris 14. Parnas J, Urfer-Parnas A (2017) The ontology and epistemology of symptoms: the case of auditory verbal hallucinations in schizophrenia. In: Kendler K, Parnas J (eds) Philosophical issues in psychiatry IV. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp 201–216 15. Hoff P (2017) Comment on ‘The ontology and epistemology of symptoms: the case of auditory verbal hallucinations in schizophrenia.’ In: Kendler K, Parnas J (eds) Philosophical issues in psychiatry IV. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp 217–222 16. Hoffman RE, Varanko M, Gilmore J, Mishara AL (2008) Experiential features used by patients with schizophrenia to differentiate ‘voices’ from ordinary verbal thought. Psychol Med 38:1167–1176 17. Alderson-Day B, Jones N (2017) Understanding AVATAR therapy: who, or what, is changing? The Lancet Psych, 23 Nov. https://doi.org/10.1016/S2215-0366(17)30471-6

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18. van Bennekom MJ, de Koning PP, Denys D (2017) Virtual reality objectifies the diagnosis of psychiatric disorders: a literature review. Front Psychia, 5 Sept. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt. 2017.00163 19. Kant I (2008) Fundamental principles of the metaphysics of morals [1785] (trans: Kingsmill Abbott Th). Cosimo, New York 20. Nagel T (1986) The view from nowhere. Oxford University Press, Oxford 21. Habermas J (1981) Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns, 2 vols. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 22. Habermas J (1998) Between facts and norms: contributions to a discourse theory of law and democracy [1992] (trans: Rehg W). MIT Press, Cambridge MA 23. Arendt H (1998) The human condition [1958] (introd: Canovan M). The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 24. Habermas J (2003) The future of human nature [2001] (trans: Rehg W). Polity Press, Cambridge 25. Dellazizzo L, Potvin S, Phraxayavong K, Dumais A (2020) Exploring the benefits of virtual reality-assisted therapy following cognitive-behavioral therapy for auditory hallucinations in patients with treatment-resistant schizophrenia: a proof of concept. J Clin Med 9(10):3169. https://doi.org/10.3390/jcm9103169 26. Aali G, Kariotis T, Shokraneh F (2020) Avatar therapy for people with schizophrenia or related disorders. Cochrane Datab Syst Rev 5:CD011898. https://doi.org/10.1002/14651858. CD011898.pub2 27. Marloth M, Chandler J, Vogeley K (2020) Psychiatric interventions in virtual reality: why we need an ethical framework. Camb Q Healthc Ethics 29(4):574–584

Raffaella Campaner is Professor of Philosophy of Science at the Department of Philosophy and Communication Studies, University of Bologna, and Life Member of Clare Hall College, Cambridge. Her research addresses topics in the general philosophy of science and in the philosophy of medicine, more specifically, the philosophy of cancer, epidemiology, and psychiatry. Her interests include philosophical approaches to scientific explanation, conceptions of causation, and scientific models. Her recent publications include Filosofia della scienza (with M.C. Galavotti, Egea, Milan, 2017), Varieties of Causal Explanation in Medical Contexts (Mimesis International, Milan, 2019), and Explaining Disease: Philosophical Approaches to Biomedical Research and Clinical Practice (Springer, Dordrecht, 2022).

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Marina Lalatta Costerbosa is Professor of Philosophy of Law and Bioethics at the Department of Philosophy and Communication Studies and Member of the Bioethics Committee (2016–2021) of the University of Bologna. Her recent books are Lo spazio della responsabilità. Approdi e limiti delle neuroscienze (ed., Il Mulino, Bologna, 2015), Il silenzio della tortura. Contro un crimine estremo (DeriveApprodi, Rome, 2016), Orgoglio e genocidio. L’etica dello sterminio nella Germania nazista (with A. Burgio, DeriveApprodi, Rome, 2016), ¿Legalizar la Tortura? Auge y Declive del Estado de Derecho (with M. La Torre, Tirant Lo Blanch, Madrid, 2018), and Il bambino come nemico. L’eccezione humboldtiana (DeriveApprodi, Rome, 2019).

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Humanity’s In-Betweenness: Towards a Prehistory of Cyborg Life Steve Fuller

We are but whirlpools in a river of ever-flowing water. We are not the stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves. Norbert Wiener [1, p. 96]

Abstract

This chapter considers several dimensions of humanity’s “in-betweenness,” starting from the historical roots of the idea in Western theology, philosophy, and science. A fundamental distinction is highlighted between “human” as a continuous property and as a discrete entity. The former focuses on the human as a state of being into and out of which something might pass, whereas the latter focuses on being human as a state that something is or is not at a given moment. Both conceptualizations of the human bear on the construction and significance of the Turing Test, which aims to distinguish a human from a computer simply based on responses to questions posed by a human. Usually, the Turing Test is seen as selecting the computer as non-human, but it may be redeployed to select the computer as human. This latter prospect is dubbed

The author would like to thank the Käte Hamburger Kolleg in Aachen, Germany, where he spent academic year 2021/2022. Specifically, he wishes to thank Aleksandra Lukaszewicz, Ana Maria Guzman Olmos, Amanda Boetzkes, and Cheryce von Xylander for various provocations that influenced the shape of this piece. Sections 3 and 4 extend two blogposts related to a workshop I organized at the Kolleg in May 2022, entitled ‘Getting the Measure of Humanity’: https://khk. rwth-aachen.de/2022/01/17/2086/2086/ and https://khk.rwth-aachen.de/2022/05/10/3243/3243/. Section 4 also draws on Fuller [2]. S. Fuller (B) Department of Sociology, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Michałowska (ed.), Humanity In-Between and Beyond, Integrated Science 16, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27945-4_4

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“Turing Test 2.0” and explored in the rest of the chapter, especially in terms of the figure of the cyborg, which has passed from cybernetics through science fiction to the lived experience of an increasing number of beings. Implied in Turing Test 2.0 is “judgement” on how a candidate might count as human. Here, foundational questions about the ontology of art are applied to understand the requisite sense of judgement involved. In the modern period, these have tended to undermine any strong connection between a work’s origin and its value. In the spirit of Turing Test 2.0, they oppose “cishumanity,” namely, the notion that one must be born human to be human. Keywords

Turing test Cybernetics

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Cosmopolitanism

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Introduction

The epigraph from the great cybernetician Norbert Wiener echoes the cosmology of the ancient Stoics, who first floated the idea that “humanity” is, as transhumanists say today, “morphologically free” [1, 3]. This suggests that the human may appear in many guises, not simply as Homo sapiens, let alone as the body of one’s birth. What matters is how the stuff is organized, not the stuff itself. Indeed, it is not unreasonable to think of “human” as a style of being in the world, whose ultimately abstract character enables people to perceive cartoons and even moving stick figures as “human.” I will not pursue this aspect of the issue in this chapter, only pointing out that the work of the sociologist Georg Simmel [4] and his psychologist granddaughter Marianne [5] provides a background aesthetic context for the inclusion of cyborgs and other non-Homo sapiens in a more “cosmopolitan” understanding of humanity. In any case, the conception of the human as morphologically free, suggested by Wiener, implies that one might “transition” into–and out of–humanity. The idea of irreversible transitioning out of humanity (aka death) will not be dealt with here, but I have considered it in detail elsewhere [6, Chap. 3]. However, all the other aspects of humanity’s morphological freedom will be considered in what follows. The intellectual direction of travel in this chapter is to treat “human” as a fluid predicate on both Stoic and Abrahamic grounds, which extend into modern secular society as “Humanism.” In this context, several senses of humanity’s “in-betweenness” are explored, resulting in the vindication of the cyborg as a legitimate extension of the human. A historically complicating factor is Linnaeus’ successful consolidation the human into a particular animal species, Homo sapiens, which has functioned normatively in determining what counts as “human,” not least in the much vaunted Turing Test. Against this tendency, I make the case on a variety of grounds for a substrate-neutral “Turing Test 2.0.”

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Humanity as Always Already in a State of In-Betweenness

Humanity’s “in-betweenness” (German: Zwischenszustandenheit) is both familiar and ambiguous. When adherents of the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) adhere closely to their sacred texts, humanity is a state of fallen divinity that is expressed as animality. Instead of singularly enjoying God’s privilege, humans are now competing with other creatures for scarce earthly resources, in which we are bound to lose without the grace of God. In this context, inbetweenness refers to the distance that we need to overcome if we are to regain that original privilege. Metaphors of light (i.e., near God) and dark (i.e., far from God) capture this sense of distance, an idea which in the long arc of intellectual history connects Plato to the Enlightenment. In Christian theology, this perspective is associated with St. Augustine’s eschatology, an intergenerational quest that in the modern era came to be secularized as progress [7]. Those influenced by this strand of Christianity tend to regard the human condition as per se a source of anxiety, as we fret over doing “the right thing,” given our inheritance of the bad judgement that Adam originally showed by eating the forbidden fruit. This has often led to a general suspicion of established authorities, not least the Church, as retardants to spiritual advance. Thus, the history of Christianity is replete with heresies, schisms, and various institutionalized divisions, especially after the Protestant Reformation. Many historians and philosophers have diagnosed this general approach to human in-betweenness as a kind of metaphysical self-loathing that persists in the modern political tendency towards revolutions that aim to rebuild the world from scratch, which Voegelin [8] aptly associated with Gnosticism. But as Max Weber astutely observed, this general dissatisfaction with the world is equally the source of the “spirit of capitalism,” which in turn licensed an endless sense of material renewal, which Joseph Schumpeter, with a nod to Marx, later called “creative destruction.” However, there is a less radical and perhaps more widely held strand of human in-betweenness in the Abrahamic tradition, which followed Aristotle’s comprehensive theological integration in the twelfth century, first in Islam and then in Christianity. Its high watermark was Thomas Aquinas, who presented the essence of the human as half-animal and half-God, without specifying a particular animal species. That would only come in the mid-eighteenth century, with Linnaeus’ classification of humans as apes with souls, aka Homo sapiens. Aquinas was clearly drawing on Jesus Christ as an exemplar for humans to emulate. Jesus presumably had the optimal mix of animality and divinity by virtue of being the human face of God. Although Jesus could perform godlike miracles, at the climax of his ministry he suffered from the anxiety associated with humanity’s fallen state and, of course, ultimately died like an animal on the cross. Yet, he was also resurrected and somehow recovered his divinity. This ambiguous legacy fueled debate over the extent to which emotions such as compassion, clearly manifest in Jesus, were essentially divine or simply an animal-based feature of God’s human face. Arguably, this affective side of Jesus—which enabled him to relate to people so easily—was

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a liability that might explain his moments of wavering from his divine task. Amidst this tangle of complexities, what it might mean for humanity to be “redeemed” remains rather vague. Do we become perfect humans, or is the imperfection that constitutes humanity removed and we are revealed to be one with God? These two alternative theological accounts of humanity’s in-betweenness can be easily recast in secular terms that point to how the West understood the human both before and after the rise of Christendom. The former, focused on Augustine, takes “humanity” to name a property that exhibits degrees along a continuum from depraved (less) to divine (more) humanity. The latter, focused on Aquinas, takes “humanity” to name a discrete entity, albeit one whose alloyed nature renders it unstable. This entity becomes fully naturalized by Linnaeus as Homo sapiens, as an upright ape specimen replaces the unique Jesus as the exemplary human [9]. The difference in the historical timing of Augustine and Aquinas matters at this point. Augustine lived during the fall of the Roman Empire, when “humanity” still traded on its classical associations with educability, close to what is still called cultured. Indeed, the North African Augustine was himself a product of this system. In the modern era, this project was increasingly associated with the “civilizing mission,” an enterprise that has crossed the religious-secular and perhaps even human-nonhuman divide, especially if one considers the efforts over the past three hundred years to “humanize” apes, most notably by teaching them language. In contrast, Aquinas lived when Christendom was already well established, and the Popes were seen as having descended from Jesus’ anointment of Peter. Indeed, Aquinas himself was a papal emissary. In this context, embodying the life of Jesus in one’s person was crucial, since binary judgements would be made whether the self-presented individual should be recognized for who they claimed to be: were they to be trusted or not as a “man of God”? Translated into a secular form, this way of thinking encourages clear boundaries between human and nonhuman, of the sort championed in more recent times by the Turing Test. It is worth stressing here that the binary “yes-or-no” approach to judgements about the human need not be essentialist, though that was probably how Linnaeus and those whom Peter Singer dubs “speciesist” today would think about the matter. On the contrary, modern philosophy–especially after Kant–has tended to keep the two issues (i.e., what it means to be human and what counts as human) separate, if not opposed. This is clearest in the difference between predication and identification, which Wittgenstein stresses in his writings on rule-following, that is, the difference between what it means to be (or “follows from being”) an X versus whether a specific individual counts as an X [10]. It amounts to decomposing what is normally called essentialism, such that what would normally be attributed in composite form to an unaccountable “nature” now becomes one or more accountable agents—possibly distributed across the human and the divine— who determine both what it means to be human and whether a candidate counts as human. This is the position that recent analytic philosophy, especially after Michael Dummett, has called antirealism [6]. It honors Wittgenstein’s insight by realizing that the relevant decisions are made in different contexts. But whereas

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Dummett [11] appears to have regarded God as the ultimate predicator, Wittgenstein delegated the task to what he called culture. In normal political terms, the predication-identification distinction is best understood in terms of legislation visà-vis adjudication, particularly when the latter is understood as the administration of the laws. To summarize this part of the argument, the in-betweenness of humanity has been subject to two metaphysical interpretations: (1) the human as a continuous property; (2) the human as an unstable entity. Both involve a question making the cut (the original sense of “decision”) of when a being is human, or at least human enough. Interpretations (1) and (2) approach the matter somewhat differently, as (1) allows for a candidate to undergo a process of humanization, typically through education; and (2) involves a binary judgement (“in” or “out”) based on the properties possessed by a candidate at the moment of decision, as in a border control check. Once this metaphysical distinction is granted, there remains the distinction between what qualifies something as human (predication) and whether a candidate is so qualified (identification). These two sets of distinctions are relevant for how one thinks about the Turing Test as a model for making decisions about what counts as human, given the complexities involved with cyborgs as candidates. So far, I have not addressed the role of evolution in the understanding of humanity. Needless to say, it further complicates matters. Most obviously, evolutionists do not recognize anything like Adam’s Fall as the origin of the human narrative. There is no sense of a decline from an initial ontological privilege in the evolutionary account. On the contrary, both Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and Charles Darwin see evolution as proceeding from one or more cosmic accidents, though Lamarck’s first microbes appear endowed with a greater sense of purpose than Darwin’s. But more profoundly, only Lamarck’s explicitly progressive version of evolution recognizes “humanity” in the concept’s normative fullness, that is, as referring to the superior creature in nature. Unfortunately (for humans), Lamarck’s is the version of evolution that Darwin’s ultimately defeated. Moreover, it is worth recalling that when Linnaeus named humans Homo sapiens, he was writing as a special creationist. Indeed, for the past 150 years biological science has combined a taxonomic system designed by a creationist who had an essentialist view of species (Linnaeus) with an explanatory theory designed by an anti-creationist who had an anti-essentialist view of species (Darwin). This syncretism must count as one of the strangest of arranged marriages in the history of modern science. It has been the source of endless conceptual difficulties since the mid-twentieth century molecular revolution in genetics, simply given the overwhelming genetic overlap, even between the most morphologically different plant and animal species. To be sure, this has provided scientific grounding for animal rights and other ecologically oriented movements but has hardly helped to clarify humanity’s standing in evolution. For his own part, Darwin believed that enhanced cerebral frontal lobes in humans—often proposed as the unique marker of our species—implied a capacity to retain, nurture, and act upon ideas that less enhanced species might treat as transient fancies that did not contribute directly to survival in the perceived

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environment. So, the same powers of mind that inspire us to comprehend the cosmos also drive us to conquer each other and the planet, the overall result being what is now ambivalently called the Anthropocene. The suggestion, which has informed much scientifically led misanthropy in the modern period, is that whatever might be exceptional about humanity—understood in a way that is tractable to naturalistic methods—is also likely to be dangerous not only to ourselves but to all species. Even the term “anthropomorphism,” which was previously associated with the incorporation of animals into the human community, came to be seen as an obstacle to a proper understanding of animal minds. With that premise in mind, Julian [12], a key player in joining Mendelian genetics and Darwinian natural history to produce the “modern evolutionary synthesis,” argued intriguingly that humans should interpret their radical deviation from the norms of nature as a sign that we were well placed—if not destined—to bring order to the otherwise disordered evolutionary process. Specifically, we might tame the chance element in natural selection by a range of interventions, from the eugenic production of offspring to the maintenance of a sustainable ecosystem. I raise Huxley’s vision, which he dubbed evolutionary humanism, because it involved a sense that humans would need to discipline themselves at the same time as they disciplined the Earth. His techno-optimistic vision aimed to address humanity’s dual “fallen” and “progressive” character. To theologians, this vision might appear to be an upgraded version of the Pelagian heresy, which held that humans had within themselves everything they needed to bootstrap themselves back, without God’s help, into divine favor by building a “Heaven on Earth.” Indeed, if we take Huxley’s coinage of transhumanism seriously, an “Earth in Heaven” might even be in the offing [13, Chap. 1]. Here it is worth recalling that Huxley (along with a fellow Neo-Darwinian, Theodosius Dobzhansky) was instrumental in getting the works of the heretical Jesuit scientist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin translated into English after Teilhard’s death in 1955, which marked their removal from the Roman Catholic Church’s Index of Forbidden Books. Teilhard wrote of the prospect of humanizing the cosmos, which recalled Kant’s “cosmopolitan” aspirations for humanity, both harking back to the universal life force (pneuma) of the ancient Stoics and pointing forward to modern projects, such as the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, if not something like Star Trek’s United Federation of Planets [10].

3

The Quest to Find the Human in the Other: Cosmopolitanism as Aesthetic Judgement

Are there necessary and/or sufficient conditions for a being to be embodied as human? This may sound like a strange question, because we have become accustomed to the simple equation: Human = Homo sapiens. For example, the natural way to interpret talk about animal rights or machine rights today is in terms of granting rights in some sense to beings not embodied as Homo sapiens. When put

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this way, the proposal is easily interpreted as requiring a kind of anthropomorphism that may do a disservice to both the humans and the nonhumans involved. But alternatively, and more radically, we could mean to extend the status of “human” to animals and machines. The latter interpretation, while counterintuitive at first glance, would be truer to the uneven legal application of “human” in the history of Homo sapiens. After all, we are still struggling to accept all members of Homo sapiens as “human,” even though “humanity” has been attributed to animals, machines and even extraterrestrials down through the ages. While this point might be taken as a moral indictment of Homo sapiens, it may equally be regarded as revealing the historical vagueness of “human” as a predicate, which has persisted even after Linnaeus’ coinage of Homo sapiens to name the human animal. It was at that moment that most modern intuitions about “humanity” started to crystallize. However, Linnaeus’ seemingly simplifying move has arguably only complicated matters. Consider the two following countervailing developments: (1) “Anthropology” was coined by Kant [14] at the end of the eighteenth century to name the science of Homo sapiens, whose species uniqueness has since come to be increasingly challenged by Darwinians wanting to absorb humans into the more general study of animals. In the balance hangs the fate of the social sciences as separate from the natural sciences. (2) At the same time, a vast cross-disciplinary search has been launched to find something distinctive about upright apes that might make them “human,” or more to the point, Homo sapiens as already “human.” The quarry has often been defined in linguistic or genetic terms, and sometimes in both. The results have so far been inconclusive, to say the least. This checkered history in the modern study of the “human” suggests that there may be advantages in returning “human” to the status of a vague predicate. As observed in the previous section, early appeals to “humanity” in both Greco-Roman and Abrahamic cultures generally implied educability, resulting in what Pierre Bourdieu called habitus, which is in turn ultimately about comportment: how you carry yourself in the world. In very broad terms, the Greeks and Romans focused on self-comportment, whereas the Christians stressed comportment towards others [15]. This helps to explain the survival of dignity and recognition as normative concepts throughout the modern Homo sapiens-centered discussions of humanity. However, the key metaphysical point is that “humanity” is presented as something that one transitions into. It is not naturally given, but it is available as an opportunity to seize. Hence the centrality of education in (at least) the Western imagination in both ancient and modern times: it is the process by which anyone can become human. It is also why the “humanities” have been historically central to the university curriculum. The various exclusionary narratives that have evolved around Homo sapiens over the past 250+ years suggest that Linnaeus’ coinage has served to restrict– rather than extend–our understanding of humanity. In this context, the word

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cishumanity has been coined to characterize what has become our default Linnaean view: specifically, that to be human is to be born as Homo sapiens [6]. The neologism is modelled on the usage of transgender activists, who use “cisgender” to refer to those who identify one’s gender with the sex of one’s birth, as opposed to the manner of one’s self-presentation. The use of “cis-” in this context has aroused controversy, because it draws attention to the privileging of origins—in this case, being born in the “right” animal species—over achievement in the determination of one’s standing in the world. Of course, this is a familiar theme from the long history of human attempts to escape social discrimination based on such factors as class, religion, race, and gender. Yet once we take seriously the proposition that humanity is something that one is not born into but rather must achieve, the focus shifts to the criteria of humanity. Criteria first became philosophically luminous in the hands of the Stoics, whose worldview was informed by the belief that decisions must be made against the backdrop of a fundamentally indeterminate world. The sole question is the basis on which decisions should be made; hence the need for criteria. In terms of modern philosophy, this position captured at once a deontological ethics and an antirealist epistemology. In other words, you must set the principles of judgement—otherwise, there are no principles—and then you abide by whatever follows from that decision. Kant’s greatness came from tackling the question of the “you” in its clearest and most comprehensive form. However, the self-styled cosmopolitanism (a Stoic coinage) of his moral and political writings was arguably compromised by his debt to Linnaeus in the Anthropologie. In terms of criteria for humanity, the “you” is the one who decides who else belongs. In this context, I have proposed a “Turing Test 2.0” [10], which is not simply a better version of Alan Turing’s original text. In an important respect, it in fact reverses Turing’s intent (Fig. 1). Whereas the original Turing Test was about selecting out the computer from the human, its upgraded version would select in the computer–or any other being–if

Fig. 1 A question that either party might ask in Turing Test 2.0 (Graph by Marek Nawojski)

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it meets the criteria for “being human,” regardless of its material origins. Turing is normally understood as having proposed his test by imagining that it should be possible for a human to determine whether a human or a machine has responded to a question, simply based on the response. The task is then to construct a test that avoids what statisticians call false positives and false negatives, so that all and only humans are identified. However, it turns out that Turing modeled his test on the “imitation game,” a parlor game in which blindfolded players decide whether a man or a woman provide the response. In that context, the female player wins if the male player fails to guess her gender. What makes this set-up a game is that the female player has a reasonable chance of winning. Now, suppose the female player fools the male player most of the time. Does it mean that the rules of the game need to be changed? If so, how? Otherwise, it may simply mean that there is no significant cognitive difference between men and women. Mary Wollstonecraft’s original arguments for women’s equality with men were in this vein [6]. In any case, the imitation game, qua game, is clearly designed to challenge both the tester and the tested parties—in the spirit of Turing Test 2.0 [13, Introduction]. In so doing, it establishes the Turing Test on a footing closer to that of Kant’s categorical imperative, since your confidence in the principles that constitute the criteria would be sufficient to judge on behalf of the entire set of beings with which you identified, and you would (all) be willing to live with the consequences. This version of the Turing Test would certify a sense of “ontological citizenship” binding both the judging and judged entity in a common humanity. The resulting world would be one where The League of Humanity liberated the robots in R.U.R. and the replicants could pass the Voight-Kampff test in Blade Runner. Of course, it still leaves open the exact rules of the game for Turing Test 2.0, though it appeals to the games-based sense of fairness that Rawls [16] originally identified with justice [17, Chaps. 2, 11]. Interestingly, most of the philosophical discussion around the significance of the Turing Test has not officially cast it in terms of “human” vs. “machine,” pitting “intelligent” vs. “non-intelligent” instead. Searle’s [18] Chinese Room thought experiment is the obvious case in point. Yet, at stake for Searle is whether the Chinese Room (aka computer) “understands” what the Chinese person asks it. In effect, he continues to blur any distinction between “human” and “intelligent.” Indeed, the intuitiveness of the thought experiment turns precisely on our knowing how the Chinese Room works, which is markedly different from how humans would operate. (For good measure, Searle imagines himself, a Chinese illiterate, as a guy in the Chinese Room providing the translations in the stipulated dictionarystyle mechanical fashion.) To be sure, there have been more genuine efforts to provide a “measure of all minds” that do not beg the question in favor of Homo sapiens embodiment [e.g., 19]. In any case, the query whether the human must be the measure of all minds inevitably lead us back to Kant. In this context, Kant was drawn to the concept of judgement, which he interpreted in terms of the then-emerging science of aesthetics. Aesthetics positioned the human as a being called to integrate diverse and often contradictory sensory inputs into a coherent whole in the name of “autonomy,” which was exercised

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through judgement, a faculty informed by reason. What modern philosophy calls epistemology and ethics reflect Kant’s idea that human judgement forms two rather different, but coexistent, wholes as part of its “worldview,” another term from the aesthetic lexicon [10]. The trajectory out of Kant to the German idealists, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche was largely about trying to achieve a higher, more synthetic aesthetic vision of the world, which typically involved what Nietzsche called a transvaluation of the way we see the world from either a strictly epistemological or a purely ethical standpoint. Nietzsche’s somewhat ironic conclusion, already intimated in Kant, is that such a transvaluation would supplant the human with some other kind of being, which we might call transhuman or posthuman today. For Nietzsche, the sense of judgement that defines the human is not focused externally on the ultimate cosmic order, but internally on the endless, perhaps even Sisyphean task of managing—if not reconciling—what we know and what we want. In this respect, Nietzsche continues to secularize Kant’s original theologically inspired vision of humans as fallen creatures. From this standpoint, the act of passing judgement on another’s humanity—as in the Turing Test—poses a challenge. It is outward looking, but it treats the larger world—or more precisely, a candidate alien being—as a canvas on which to project the human; yet the human remains itself a bundle of contradictions, rather than a template that can simply be imposed. Recent aesthetic theory offers an interesting angle on this dilemma. Goodman [20] famously proposed that art might be divided into works that could be forged (because they constituted a unique completed object) and those that could not be forged (because they could be completed in many ways). He had in mind the distinction between a painting or a sculpture, on the one hand, and a musical score or a dramatic script, on the other. Goodman called the former “autographic,” the latter “allographic.” Against this intuition, Danto [21] proposed imagining that two artists generated paintings that appeared the same to the observer. One (the “original”) is an actual painting by Rembrandt, executed in his distinctive way, and the other (the “copy”) looks the same but was produced using Jackson Pollock’s quite different method (“that splat,” as Danto dubs it). Goodman might claim that subtle differences between the two paintings could always be found, based on which one painting might be judged superior and the other perhaps a forgery. However, Danto argues that Goodman’s judgement would probably be based on suspecting that the two paintings had been produced at different times and by different means. For Danto, if you like one, you should like the other. If anything, knowing that they were produced differently should enhance your aesthetic experience and not detract from it. Danto’s point was clearly designed to undermine the idea of forgery. Indeed, he might even be seen as trying to justify the “copy” as superior to the “original,” especially if the “genius” of the Rembrandt painting is linked to its unique craftsmanship. After all, the uniqueness of the craftsmanship is demystified, if not undermined, if a visually indistinguishable work can be produced without copying Rembrandt’s method. By Danto’s logic, the copy might even be valued more, given the prior improbability of its result, given its Pollock-like method. Such a prospect only appears strange to someone who has not thought about the

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“genius” of mass-producing items that previously only appeared as the products of artisanry. Unlike Goodman, Danto insisted that aesthetic judgement involved treating not only the future but also the past of a candidate work performatively. Just as we potentially learn something new about music or drama with each new performance, we can also unlearn ideas about the “unique craftsmanship” of a painting or a sculpture upon realizing that it can be (and could have been) brought about differently. This sense of temporal symmetry dissolves Goodman’s autographic/allographic distinction. Of course, aesthetic judgement is then more squarely placed on the shoulders of the judge and, in that sense, becomes more “subjective.” Indeed, Danto’s championing of Andy Warhol’s Brillo Box as art led many critics to claim that Danto had dissolved the concept of art altogether. Nevertheless, Danto seemed to realize that Warhol had indeed demonstrated that the Brillo Box possessed an aesthetic value, as if it had not been created for commercial reasons, or that its aesthetic value preceded rather than followed its commercial use. The deep point about Warhol’s recontextualization was that it broke with the path-dependent “cis” mentality, which claims that art can only arise from recognized works or techniques of art, or even from strictly artistic motivations. In the end, art is simply what is recognized as art, and that recognition is always a work in progress. I have made a similar case regarding knowledge, treating the university as an analogue to the art gallery, in which students learn connoisseurship [22]. With Danto’s argumentation applied specifically to Turing, the question is whether entertaining a comparably free—“morphologically free,” as transhumanists put it—conception of the human undermines the very concept of humanity? Nietzsche, who believed that it might yet remained agnostic about the consequences, was only thinking about how Homo sapiens might be transformed in the future. There is no reason why we could not, á la Danto, also discover “humans” who never were Homo sapiens. Moreover, the idea of a morphologically free “human” comes with/raises the practical question of whether a more open conception of what passes as human is actually sustainable in a world with finite resources in many different senses. Kant’s ideal of cosmopolitanism suggested an indefinitely expanding circle of humanity, which he associated with collective self-improvement through sustained interaction with “alien” others [10]. Without denying the attractiveness of this ideal, its realizability remains an empirically open question, as non-stereotypical candidate “humans” come forward for recognition. The obvious test case is the cyborg, a being that normally begins its life as a human (or at least an organism) and then acquires silicon components that significantly transform its powers.

4

The Cyborg as in Between Humanity’s In-Betweenness

Wiener [3] founded cybernetics as an interdisciplinary science based on what he took to be an isomorphism in the means by which humans, animals, and machines

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maintained their autonomy against their changing environment. Indeed, Wiener thought of this isomorphism in mathematical terms, which implied that in principle a human, an animal, or a machine could serve as a model for any of the other kinds of beings. We are most familiar with this idea as Artificial Intelligence (at least in its classical phase), in which the machine serves as a model of the human. However, biology has already accommodated this conception through the idea of the model organism, formally introduced by Thomas Hunt Morgan, who established the first population genetics laboratory at Columbia University in the early twentieth century. Thus, the humble, but fecund, fruit fly has hosted many generalizations about heredity across a range of animal species, including Homo sapiens, for both good and ill. Morgan was influenced by his former colleague Jacques Loeb, whose own comprehensively mechanistic view of life inspired his University of Chicago student John B. Watson and successive generations of self-styled animal and human behaviorists. Another notable strand of the prehistory of cybernetics is the appropriation of thermodynamic–more specifically, general-equilibrium—models from physics in economics, which began in the final quarter of the nineteenth century. These models had spillover effects in other disciplines, not least Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis. Perhaps of more direct relevance to the history of cybernetics was the work of Vilfredo Pareto, a political economist with a background in civil engineering, who ambitiously tried to build an entire theory of society around the idea of general equilibrium, which he believed was naturally achieved over time, often against the intentions of the historical agents themselves. Unlike Hegel, who had likewise believed that such a “cunning of reason” operated over the entirety of history (whenever that ends), Pareto envisaged societies as closed systems, which he equated with organisms. Herbert Spencer already had a version of this view, but lacking the relevant mathematics it seemed purely speculative. Through the biochemist Lawrence Henderson, who translated Pareto into English, this way of thinking made its way to Harvard’s Medical School by the 1920s, where it dovetailed with large philanthropic projects (especially by the Rockefeller Foundation) designed to stabilize worker productivity in a period of social upheaval, partly caused by political turbulence, but more importantly by the creative destruction of markets by ceaseless innovation. A Henderson protégé who was a transitional figure to postwar cybernetics was Walter Cannon. He coined the term “homoeostasis” to update the vision of the mid-nineteenth century founder of experimental medicine, Claude Bernard, who had defined life itself in terms of the interface maintained between an internal and an external environment, which we call, respectively, physiology and ecology. Death occurs when the interface dissolves. This insight is the source of the cybernetic notion of “system boundary,” the maintenance of which constitutes the integrity of a properly functioning (“autonomous”) organism [23]. After the Second World War, the political and financial focus on what became cybernetics shifted from the private foundations to the federal government (especially the CIA) as part of the emerging Cold War effort. Here another Henderson protégé, Talcott Parsons, tried to turn Harvard’s social science

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faculty into the hub for systems theory, which served to transform the emerging cybernetic worldview into an interdisciplinary unit. To cut a long story short, a variety of fields, from operations research to artificial intelligence, were fostered in this context, even though Parsons’ original dream of a cybernetic social science was never fulfilled. However, it continues to live in the minds of the followers of Niklas Luhmann, one of Parsons’ visiting German students. In turning from cybernetics to cyborgs, it is worth recalling the crucial role that mathematics has played in levelling ontological distinctions between humans, animals, and machines. Of course, various moral and political arguments for levelling such distinctions can be advanced, based on metaphysical ideas of existence, value, and rights. Bruno Latour and Donna Haraway have championed this project. However, without the requisite mathematics in place, it is difficult to effect the relevant translations across embodiments to make it all work. It is fine to say that humans, animals, and machines are all equal as a metaphysical gesture. But in practice, such a declaration is difficult to implement if one does not understand the implications, for example, for energy use in an environment with scarce resources and the conditions under which such energy is to be supplied, funded, maintained, and monitored. The ground for these judgements is prepared by the mathematics of the situation, which define the relevant exchange relations and determine what is taken to be equivalent to what, when two differently embodied beings make claims over the same resources to sustain their existence. The Romanianborn U.S. economist Georgescu-Roegen [24] pioneered this study, which is now called ecological economics. This question further opens into the still underexplored field of cyborg law, which has so far focused on issues related to harm but over time is likely to reshape altogether what it means to be subject to equal treatment under the law [25]. In this regard, Wiener’s original contributions may be understood as potential principles of a “cyborg economics.” But from the broader horizon of the history of science, we might think of Wiener as the Kepler of cybernetics, understood as a field that has yet to find its Newton. What I mean is that Wiener figured out the basic equations that govern humans, animals, and machines at the most abstract level, without ever solving how these multiple embodied beings could coexist in one world. That is the work to be done by cybernetics’ answer to Newton, whose singular achievement was to unify the motions of earthly and heavenly bodies under a common set of laws that overcame their differences as phenomena to organize all physical reality in a common world-system. From the standpoint of completing this cybernetic vision, cyborgs are both simplifiers and complicators. Cyborgs demonstrate in quite individualized (hybrid) ways the fundamental unity of human, animal, and machine. They might even be seen as symbols of the achievability of the cybernetic vision in its full-blown Newtonian sense. This is the simplifying part. The complicating part is that before the cybernetic world-system is achieved, many cyborgs will have been brought into the world, challenging the conventional metaphysical separation of human, animal, and machine. Put crudely, the politics and the economics of the situation are running ahead of the knowledge needed to judge the feasibility of various actual and proposed cyborg-oriented

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technologies. While much of the relevant research happens in legitimate medical and engineering settings, often related to the remediation of physical disabilities, much of it is also happening in DIY mode—often under the cover of art—and in regimes that depart from Western bioethical norms (e.g., Russia and China). Taken together, it is hard to determine exactly what is being done and has been done, let alone, a reliable record of outcomes. Nevertheless, as cyborgs in all their diversity become more visible–and attractive–a moral claim for elective cyborganization is likely to become more prominent, whereby disability will no longer be necessary to provide the pretext for a radical functional transformation of the body of one’s birth. Transhumanism is a convenient banner under which to capture this emerging attitude. Indeed, we may be beginning to return to the bioethical sensibilities of fifty or more years ago . It is worth recalling that the Yale neuroscientist Delgado [26] once predicted—in a hopeful spirit—that the “psychocivilized” society of the future will feature both externally worn and internally planted monitoring devices to regulate our wellbeing. Delgado himself was known at the time for demonstrating how a matador could remotely control the actions of a bull implanted with electrodes. However, as post-Nuremberg sensibilities about human experimentation as the source of unnecessary suffering combined with an emerging animal rights sensibility in the 1970s, Delgado-style psychocivilizing experiments were increasingly confined to the restoration of normal functioning in the otherwise disabled [27]. In contrast, Fuller and Lipinska [28, Chap. 4] have proposed a self-styled proactionary legal regime that would counter this sensibility, providing a normative justification for a more adventurous approach to cyborg-oriented experimentation. Interestingly, Delgado’s hopeful prognosis did not clearly distinguish between what Mann [29] would later call Type I (wearables) and Type II (implantables) cyborganization. The distinction is in fact quite profound at both a metaphysical and a psychological level. Twentieth century comic book superheroes offer an interesting angle from which to view the cyborg types. The two most popular superheroes–Batman and Superman–can be understood as Type I and Type II cyborgs, respectively. In biological terms, Batman’s various wearables, from cape to car, constitute an extended phenotype, whereas Superman’s extraterrestrial ancestry and repeated exposure to radiation constitute an altered genotype. This difference results in rather contrasting psychological profiles. To be sure, both have troubled relationships with “ordinary” humans, even when they self-present as humans. However, Batman is notable for the mental preparation that Bruce Wayne, often presented as brooding, needs before he inhabits the relevant wearables, whereas Superman typically needs to restrain himself when dealing with humans outside of a heroic context, especially in his guise as Clark Kent. This difference points to alternative ontological default settings for cyborgs. Most people would probably say that Batman is an enhanced human, whereas Superman is a non-human being. One has the sense that the former needs to scale up from humanity and the latter to scale down to humanity [13, Introduction]. A noteworthy feature of both superheroes is that, while each in his own way suffered childhood trauma and so might be considered psychologically damaged,

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neither is physically disabled, unlike those who typically become cyborgs. This is also where we see an emerging division between those who like Mann (a Type I cyborg) still regard themselves as human and those who like Neil Harbisson (a Type II cyborg) regard themselves as a non-human entity, with which he associates the name “cyborg” [30, Chap. 4]. There are undoubtedly many issues at play in the two cyborg cases, but in what follows I will focus on the ontological ones. As Lukaszewicz and Fortuna [31] have shown, when the human is taken as the standard of personhood, the cyborg (which was represented by Harbisson himself in their study) is regarded as slightly “less” of a person, in the sense of scoring somewhat less in terms of the two Aristotle-inspired dimensions into which personhood was decomposed for purposes of their study: agency and experience. One can perhaps see why Harbisson might want separate cyborg rights. More fundamentally, the finding raises the question of whether the human should be taken as the standard of personhood. Lukaszewicz herself thinks that it should not, so on that principled basis she supports Harbisson’s claim to a distinct kind of personhood. Moreover, she proposes to achieve this via Turing Test 2.0, an idea she borrows from me. Yet my aim in proposing the test is to extend the status of humanity to beings not born as humans—in other words, to negate any sense of cishumanity, such that in principle any entity might transition into humanity if they pass Turing Test 2.0. The difference between our two uses of Turing Test 2.0 is significant. However, let me first mention the similarities. In both our cases, Turing Test 2.0 is an inversion of the original Turing Test, which was about designing a protocol to distinguish a man from a woman—and later a human from a machine–based simply on identity-concealed responses to questions. Turing’s point was that this task was harder than it seemed. Over the past seven decades, many artificial intelligence and cognitive science researchers have tried to rise to the challenge, with decidedly mixed results. Already in the 1960s, it was discovered that people in need of psychological counseling easily attributed humanity to ELIZA, a computer program that used a relatively primitive algorithm to provide responses to patients’ concerns. Arguably, Blade Runner’s Voight-Kampff Machine represents the filmic apotheosis of all these efforts. In contrast, Lukaszewicz and I would turn the Turing Test into a kind of citizenship test for alien beings. Put bluntly, the point of Turing Test 2.0 is to enable the replicants to pass as humans, as viewers are finally led to believe about Rick Deckard himself, the character played by Harrison Ford, who is entrusted with tracking down replicants in Blade Runner. At stake here is the domain of ontological citizenship to which a candidate entity would be entitled by virtue of passing Turing Test 2.0: humanity or personhood? This rather deep matter cannot be resolved here, but it is where Lukaszewicz and I part company. Our divergences, which are not yet fully articulated, revolve around four considerations when thinking about the question: (1) The modern framework of legal rights is anchored in the individual human as the paradigm case of personhood. Whenever one grants rights to, for example, animals, machines, or corporations, their personhood is defined in relation to

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the paradigm case, even if negatively (e.g., rights of wild animals to sanctuary from humans). (2) If Turing Test 2.0 is to qualify a candidate entity for personhood rather than humanity, then over time it should be possible to develop a version of the test that could be administered by non-human persons who have already been incorporated into ontological citizenship. (3) The concepts of humanity and personhood started to be seen as so distinct, only once humanity was identified with—or, as I would suggest, reduced to— Homo sapiens in the mid-eighteenth century. Even well into the nineteenth century, it was common to attribute humanity to animals and even hypothetical extraterrestrial beings. The main problem has been that not all members of Homo sapiens have been treated as human, and this problem still persists today. (4) The underlying metaphysical dynamics of humanity and personhood are rather different. Humanity has historically been a criteria-driven concept, originally tied to self-comportment in the classical world and the treatment of others in the Christian world. The educability of candidate humans has been a strong feature of both; hence the prospect of “transitioning” to humanity. In contrast, personhood is much closer in spirit to what Simondon [32] called the technicity of concept. The intuition here is that personhood is subject to multiple material outworkings (operations, in Simondon’s terms) in the world, each of which is legitimate in its own right without needing to be derived from the others.

5

Conclusion

Much of the alien character of cyborgs comes from their standing as beings situated somewhere between the human, the animal and the machine. Yet, “inbetweenness” is nothing new to humans. Cultures influenced by the Abrahamic faiths have positioned humans between the divine and the animal, reflecting both our fallen nature and our potential for redemption. Modern doctrines of progress and, to a lesser extent, evolution are largely secular versions of this Abrahamic view of the human as a creature always in transit. In that case, it does not make sense to limit the predicate ‘human’ to beings of a specific ancestry, namely, an offspring of a member of Homo sapiens. Indeed, such a conception of what I call “cishumanity” dates only to the mid-eighteenth century and is currently subject to deconstruction along several dimensions. In several key respects, this deconstruction resembles the one to which original/copy binary has been subject in recent aesthetic theory. Ultimately, this line of argument suggests the need for a substrateneutral ‘Turing Test 2.0’ that treats “passing as human” as equivalent to “being human.” However, this still leaves open the question of cyborg personhood, since not all cyborgs wish to be classified as humans, even if they were born of humans.

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Core Messages . Talk about the “human” has always equivocated between a property that is potentially possessed by any entity in degrees and a specific entity that one either is or is not. . Linnaeus’ identification of the human with a specific animal species–Homo sapiens–temporarily resolved the matter in favor of an entity-based approach to the human. . However, the Turing Test reopened the matter, insofar as it allowed, at least in principle, the prospect that one could qualify as human without possessing a Homo sapiens body. . I have proposed a “Turing Test 2.0,” which welcomes non-Homo sapiens passing as human, instead of seeing that prospect as problematic. . This revision in how I understand the Turing Test would satisfy the sort of cosmopolitanism that has been behind Stoic, Abrahamic, and Kantian thinking about the “human,” which would in turn make it easier to assimilate cyborgs as human.

References 1. Wiener N (1989) The human use of human beings (Orig. 1950). Free Association Books, London 2. Fuller S (2022) From cybernetics to cyborgs and the problem of cishumanity. In: Michałowska M (ed) Crossing the border of humanity: cyborgs in ethics, law and art. Proceedings of the international online conference, December 14–15, 2021, Medical University of Łód´z, Poland, pp 14–20 3. Wiener N (1961) Cybernetics, or communication and control in animal and machine, 2nd ed (Orig. 1948). MIT Press, Cambridge MA 4. Simmel G (1991) The problem of style (Orig. 1908). Theory Cult Soc 8:63–71 5. Heider F, Simmel M (1944) An experimental study of apparent behavior. Am J Psychol 57(2):243–259 6. Fuller S (2019) The metaphysical standing of the human: a future for the history of the human sciences. Hist Hum Sci 32:23–40 7. Löwith K (1949) Meaning in history. University of Chicago Press, Chicago 8. Voegelin E (1952) New science of politics. University of Chicago Press, Chicago 9. Fuller S (2022) The mind-technology problem. Postdigital Sci Educ 4:247–252 10. Fuller S (2022) Kant after Kant: towards a history of the human sciences from a cosmopolitan standpoint. In: McCallum D (ed) The Palgrave handbook of the history of the human sciences. Palgrave, London, pp 29–55 11. Dummett M (2006) Thought and reality. Oxford University Press, Oxford 12. Huxley J (1953) Evolution in action. Harper & Row, New York 13. Fuller S (2019) Nietzschean meditations: untimely thoughts at the dawn of the transhuman era. Schwabe, Basel 14. Kant I (2008) Anthropology from a pragmatic viewpoint (Orig. 1798). MIT Press, Cambridge MA 15. Fuller S (2020) The unity of humanity. In: Thomsen M, Wamberg J (eds) The Bloomsbury handbook of posthumanism. Bloomsbury, London, pp 171–182 16. Rawls J (1958) Justice as fairness. Philos Rev 67(2):164–194

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17. Fuller S (2020) A player’s guide to the post-truth condition. Anthem, London 18. Searle J (1980) Minds, brains and programs. Behav Brain Sci 3(3):417–457 19. Hernandez-Orallo J (2017) The measure of all minds: evaluating natural and artificial intelligences. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 20. Goodman N (1968) Languages of art. Bobbs-Merrill, Indianapolis 21. Danto A (1974) The transfiguration of the commonplace. J Aesthet Art Critic 33(2):139–148 22. Fuller S (2019) Against academic rentiership: a radical critique of the knowledge economy. Postdigital Sci Educ 1:335–356 23. Fuller S (2014) The higher whitewash. Review of J Isaac “Working knowledge: making the human sciences from Parsons to Kuhn”. Philos Soc Sci 44(1):86–101 24. Georgescu-Roegen N (1971) The entropy law and the economic process. Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA 25. Wittes B, Chong J (2014) Our cyborg future: law and policy implications. Brookings Institution, Washington DC 26. Delgado J (1969) Physical control of the mind: towards a psychocivilized society. Harper and Row, New York 27. Horgan J (2005) The forgotten era of brain chips. Scientific American (1 October). https:// www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-forgotten-era-of-brai. Accessed 12 Jan 2022 28. Fuller S, Lipinska V (2014) The proactionary imperative. Palgrave, London 29. Mann S (2001) Can humans being clerks make clerks be human? Informationstechnik und Technische Informatik 43(2):97–106 30. Lukaszewicz Alcaraz A (2021) Are cyborgs persons? Palgrave, New York 31. Lukaszewicz A, Fortuna P (2022) Towards Turing test 2.0—attribution of moral status and personhood to human and non-human agents. Postdigital Sci Educ 4:860–876 32. Simondon G (2017) On the mode of existence of technical objects (Orig. 1958). Univocal, Minneapolis

Steve Fuller is Auguste Comte Professor of Social Epistemology at the University of Warwick. Originally trained in history, philosophy and sociology of science, Fuller is the author of 25 books, which most recently have been about visions of a trans- and post-human future (or ‘Humanity 2.0’) and the future of knowledge and the university in light of the post-truth condition. His latest books are Post-Truth: Knowledge as a Power Game (Anthem, 2018), Nietzschean Meditations: Untimely Thoughts at the Dawn of the Transhuman Era (Schwabe, 2019) and A Player’s Guide to the Post-Truth Condition: The Name of the Game (Anthem, 2020). For academic year 2021–2022, he was a senior research fellow at the newly established Käte Hamburger Kolleg at RWTH Aachen, Germany, dedicated to theme of ‘Cultures of Research’.

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“The Universe of the Person is the Universe of Man?” Expanding the Schelerian Concepts of Philosophical Anthropology and Personhood into the Twenty-First Century Susan Gottlöber

The questions: ‘What is man?’, and ‘What is man’s place in the nature of things?’ have occupied me more deeply than any other philosophical question since the first awakening of my philosophical consciousness. Max Scheler [1, p. 9; Eng. trans. p. 3]

Abstract

In contemporary debates around human nature and its relation to technology and to other animals, the philosophical approaches of early 20th-century philosophical anthropology and personalism are often dismissed as embracing a problematic traditional stance, including on issues such as anthropocentrism or a binary perception of the human world. This chapter argues that these objections can be effectively overcome since philosophical anthropology can be grounded on phenomenology and is closely involved with both the natural and the social sciences (especially biology, but also psychology and sociology), and as such offers a promising basis for exploring questions on human nature and personhood. Loosely drawing on the thought of Max Scheler, this chapter shows that the Schelerian Philosophical Anthropology and personalism can help remove the strong dichotomies between the human and other animals, without losing what is distinctly human in the process. Likewise, the chapter argues that an extended concept of personhood is one key to dismantling problematic divisions, to (re)integrating humans with other forms of life and the individual with S. Gottlöber (B) Maynooth University, Maynooth, Kildare, Ireland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Michałowska (ed.), Humanity In-Between and Beyond, Integrated Science 16, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27945-4_5

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the social, and to overcoming the biologist bias with respect to gender and the use of technology, all the while underscoring the importance of aliveness in the investigations of human nature. Keywords

Person/Personalism . Life . Spirit/Geist ogy/Phenomenological . (Self-)Consciousness

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Technology

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Phenomenol-

Introduction

There is no such thing as “personalist philosophy”; there are probably as many personalist philosophies as there are personalists. Having gained some prominence in European thought from the turn of the nineteenth century onwards as a reaction to Darwinism and to the emerging dominance of a principally materialist, mechanistic, and scientific worldview, personalism largely fell out of favor in the continental context by the mid-/late twentieth century (with the exception of religious, and especially Catholic-inspired, philosophies).1 The rise of personalism was thus in all probability related to the question of the human being, and it inquired, as the German philosopher and personalist Max Scheler did in 1928: What is the human place in the cosmos?2 Personalism was also in its way a response—and an affirmative one, too—to the question whether the human being did have a special place in the cosmos, though not exactly for the reasons many people might think. As Scheler put it in 1928: One side [of the debate] would reserve intelligence and choice for man and deny them to the animal. This view, in fact, affirms that there is an essential qualitative difference, but locates it at a point where in my opinion it does not exist. The other side, especially the evolutionists of the Darwinian-Lamarckian school, deny that there is an essential difference between man and animal, precisely because the animal does have intelligence. (…) For my own part, I reject both teachings [1, p. 31; Eng. trans. p. 35].

My further reasoning will build on Scheler’s argument regarding a special ontological position of the human being in the cosmos.

1 This is not the place to discuss in detail the causes of this decline. However, the concept of the person was often understood to defy precise definitions, and the fact that it relied on presuppositions that required acceptance at face value not only increased its vagueness but possibly also contributed to the decline of personalism as such. 2 Die Stellung des Menschen im Kosmos was the title of Scheler’s work on Philosophical Anthropology published in 1928, shortly before his death.

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Today, both Philosophical Anthropology and personalism, which make a case for a special place of humankind in the cosmos, may fall into disrepute—in some quarters at least—for their alleged anthropocentrism, with its implications (and, indeed, practice) of environmental and animal abuse. I argue, however, that these implications do not necessarily follow, and that using Philosophical Anthropology and the personalist approach based on Scheler’s phenomenologically inspired outlook can reinvigorate the current debates, which all too often seem determined by the prejudices of their own time, including the opposite extremes of biological determinism and constructivism. All philosophical investigations have their starting points, which is important to acknowledge with a view to both clarifying one’s own perspective and identifying, as much as possible, the limitations of one’s own outlook. In exploring the human being, there are many good reasons to adopt Scheler’s approach (if not his conclusions)— something I do in this chapter—in terms of both the content of his philosophy on a larger scale and his particular way of approaching the human being as such (a point increasingly rediscovered in a number of recent interdisciplinary publications, including in psychopathology [5]): Scheler’s Philosophical Anthropology is essentially interdisciplinary in that while it anchors the human being in biology, it does not reduce humans to it. His rejection of false either/or dichotomies and embracement of both/and are of profound relevance to the current debates; his acknowledgement of the special relationship between philosophy (and metaphysics) and the sciences, as well as of the sciences with each other can initiate rethinking correlations between the different disciplines in a dynamic and reciprocal rather than a static way by, for example, constantly newly evaluating and delineating the objects of inquiry of each discipline3 ; his approach to technology (as it was in his day) embeds it firmly within the human universe; and finally, his concept of the person as such invites far broader interpretations and applications than Scheler himself had in mind. All these aspects additionally tie in with Scheler’s unique take on phenomenology,4 thus taking us beyond the problematic substantial definitions of the human being and of personhood. Finally, looking into the theme from the Schelerian angle offers another advantage in that (unlike many philosophers of his time) Scheler not only engaged with the scientific (biological, psychological, and sociological) findings, but also explicitly emphasized

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Scheler’s theory of knowledge includes a sophisticated reflection on different types of knowledge, the respective sciences, and their interrelations. As I have pointed out recently: “For example, Scheler makes clear that the positive sciences play an eminent role for metaphysics by more and more delineating (eingrenzen) the area (Fragegebiet) of metaphysics, thus not replacing metaphysics but rather liberate it, akin to physics and chemistry ‘liberating’ the biological questions. While there can be linear progress in a number of the positive sciences this is not the case for, e.g., philosophy. Yet, as seen with the example of metaphysics and the positive sciences, the latter have an impact on the former even in terms of identifying the appropriate questions” [6, p. 4, fn 13]. See also [7, p. 234]. 4 Scheler described phenomenology as a new philosophical attitude rather than a science, a “new techn¯e of the seeing (schauend) consciousness rather than a method of thinking” [8, p. 309].

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the historical situatedness of all knowledge. While this does not mean dismissing all previous philosophical thought—we are standing on the shoulders of giants after all—it does mean abandoning the idea of perennial, immutable philosophical insights, and sometimes we would do well to remember that much the same is also true for scientific knowledge. In this chapter,5 I thus aim to explore the relevance and limitations of Philosophical Anthropology and personalism in pondering the questions around the personhood of animals and “enhanced” humanity and for dismantling dichotomies and binary approaches in the investigation of broadly conceived human nature. In doing so, I draw on Scheler’s approach, whereby I focus on his anthropological reflection rather than on his theories of value, embodiment, and intentionality. First, I briefly outline Scheler’s Philosophical Anthropology, underscoring his idea of how technology is embedded in human nature. Subsequently, I explain Scheler’s phenomenological understanding of the person, which I believe provides us with the freedom to think beyond the confines replete in the current debates around personhood. Finally, I assess the relevance of Scheler’s phenomenologically inspired notions of personhood and the human being to contemporary debates. Thereby, I argue that the Schelerian approach offers a third way between the extremes of biological determinism and social constructivism and contributes to refining our reflection on our relationships to other forms of life. Consequently, this chapter not only makes a case for a continued dialogue with philosophies from different cultural and historical contexts, but also argues against those philosophical approaches that depict past philosophies as irretrievably limited and thus they seek to re-invent the wheel, instead of engaging in dialogue, when addressing the philosophical questions of the twenty-first century.

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Rethinking Scheler’s Philosophical Anthropology in the Twenty-First-Century Context To begin with, the word “anthropology” indicates that each [thinker belonging to this paradigm as identified by Joachim Fischer, i.e., Scheler, Plessner, and Gehlen] is concerned with treating, observing, quantifying, and describing various aspects of the human sphere,

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This chapter is partly based on an earlier paper that specifically focused on how the Schelerian approach can be employed to investigate the cyborg and was presented at Crossing the Border of Humanity: Cyborgs in Ethics, Law, and Art [3]. The quote from the title “The Universe of the Person is the Universe of Man” from Emmanuael Mournier’s Personalism (1950) perfectly encapsulates what probably unites most “Western” approaches to personalism [2, p. XV]. I owe thanks to David O Brien, who first pointed out to me the potential of engaging with Max Scheler’s Philosophical Anthropology (in doing which, I follow Joachim Fischer’s suggestion to interpret the projects of Philosophical Anthropology developed by thinkers such as Max Scheler, Helmuth Plessner, and Arnold Gehlen as a paradigm rather than as a philosophical subject and thus use capitalization to distinguish the former form the latter). For Fischer’s approach, see [4]. I would also like to express my gratitude to Patrycja Poniatowska and Monika Michałowska for their helpful comments and suggestions, and to Karen McComb for her kindness in providing me with the image below.

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human living conditions, and man’s relationship to self, culture, and society in the categories he constructs. At the same time, “anthropology” shows that each proceeds from an understanding that, from the nineteenth century onwards, anthropology is also, irrevocably, a biological discipline. Therefore the internal theoretical reference to biology is the pivotal point in Philosophical Anthropology for all three authors [4, p. 154; italics mine].

As has often been pointed out, the question whether there is any human nature— whether there is anything specific that makes us human and sets us apart from the rest of the living world—is one of philosophy’s perennial queries. In this context, the European philosophical tradition has tended to ascribe the central role to reason or nous, also framing the human being as imago Dei. Any specific identifications of this purported “essence” aside, the very direction (for the lack of a better term) of the question matters in and of itself, though this is often overlooked. Scheler observes in what is now considered his main contribution to Philosophical Anthropology, The Human Place in the Cosmos from 1928, that the term “human being” has a “deceptive ambiguity” [1, p. 11; Eng. trans. p. 6]: as homo naturalis on the one hand and as “sharply distinguished from the concept animal” [1, p. 12; Eng. trans. p. 7] on the other. The former stands for a subspecies of mammals and vertebrates, subsumed under the concept of “animal” and only making up a small part of the overall animal kingdom [1, p. 12]. This is, of course, the understanding endorsed and employed by the natural sciences, and especially biology and evolutionary theory. Here, the human being is investigated and understood as a form of life, descending from and aligned with other life forms. Perhaps surprisingly, Scheler does not take issue with this notion; rather, he concurs that the human being did not develop from animals, but rather “was an animal, is an animal, and will forever remain an animal” [9, p. 191, my translation]. The understanding of the term “human being” as “contrasted with” the animal is a traditional one, and it places the human in opposition to other forms of life, in particular to animals. In this sense, “human” is employed as an essenceconcept (Wesensbegriff ). This is the understanding in which Scheler is interested, and which stands in stark contrast to the natural systematic one [1, p. 12]. Today, such a position would by and large provoke the suspicion of “anthropocentrism.” I will revisit these issues later, but it is important to acknowledge that we still rely on these human-animal distinctions in social life, including in legal and ethical spheres. Consequently, it is also important to clarify that my investigation of the Wesensidee Mensch in this chapter is not evaluative, but seeks to be phenomenologically descriptive.

2.1 The Human Being as a Life-Form My investigation draws on Scheler’s phenomenological perspective, which leads to the identification of a range of essential phenomenal features when examining a being in order to establish whether it is alive or has spirit. According to Scheler,

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all living beings—including humans—share a number of phenomenal characteristics that distinguish them from non-living beings. In other words, in order to be recognized as alive, a being needs to display a range of properties that Scheler extensively discusses in “Vom Wesen des Todes” (literally: “On the Nature of Death”), his lectures from 1923/24 published posthumously as “Aging and Death” (“Altern und Tod”). In terms of my discussion below, the key qualities listed by Scheler are: all forms of life are individuated and can die (something that is true even for the forms of life that are known to be biologically “immortal,” such as the freshwater polyp Hydra, which does not age); living beings exist in time, by which Scheler means that life is primarily irreversible and that the totality of the previous phases (rather than just the immediately preceding phase) determines the following ones since, Scheler says, all becoming is reshaping and re-forming [10 esp. pp. 101ff .]. Life is presence (that is, where there is life there is presence, and every living being is a temporal center). Furthermore, any organism is always a whole, which invariably stands in a relationship to its environment, and life always descends from life, which means that organisms always descend from organisms [10, pp. 259–263] (Fig. 1). When specifically addressing the human being-animal relationship in Man’s Place in the Cosmos, Scheler further states that all life-forms (including human

Fig. 1 The hydra, a genus of the Cnidaria phylum, does not undergo senescence, which means its mortality does not increase with age. It is thus considered to be biologically immortal (Photograph: Flatters & Co., public domain. Original source: Marvels of the universe. A popular work on the marvels of the heavens, the earth, plant life, animal life, the mighty deep, with an introd. by Lord Avebury and with contributions by leading specialists, etc., 2 vols. Hutchinson & Co, London 1911–1912, p. 264)

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beings) have life-drives (Lebenstrieb and Lebensdrang). Humans share with higher animals an additional array of faculties, such as associative memory, practical intelligence, the ability to choose, the capacity to perform acts of kindness, willingness to help, reconciliation, and the like. Scheler concludes that, in general, the human being is much closer to other animals, especially in the realm of affective acts, than is commonly understood [1, p. 30]. This emphasis on the human being as a form of life is striking, because it insists that being alive is an essential (rather than just a secondary) feature of being human and establishes a kinship with other life forms, without defining human nature through biology and evolutionary processes alone. Of course, these determinations have both metaphysical underpinnings and ethical implications, neither of them being my main focus here. Most conspicuous is perhaps Scheler’s idea that, as all life forms share in one and the same life-agens (the term Lebensagens has been made prominent by Lebensphilosophie, which was popular in Scheler’s day), or what Scheler calls an Urphänomen (a primordial phenomenon, as borrowed from the great German thinker and poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe), all forms of life also stand in solidarity with each other. This should prompt us to reassess our notion of the environment as instrumental to our survival as ethically problematic. There is a final point here that will become important for my reflection on selfconsciousness and personhood below. In a very technical paper that is focused on the question of reality [11], Scheler intrinsically links the rise of consciousness to being alive (or, more specifically to having drives), which means that only living beings are potentially capable of being conscious or self-conscious. To phrase it differently, human beings, specifically, experience resistance from reality, and this is the central experience of our drives (Triebimpulse), which comes as an inhibition (Hemmung) of our intentionality rather than of our will and is ecstatic rather than conscious. Consequently, human beings (and presumably other life forms) experience reality first of all as “having” rather than “knowing.”6 Only when resistance is experienced is conscious reflection sparked by the thus-obtained evidence that there is something independent of ourselves and unavailable in our immediate experience of the will. In other words, “all consciousness is a result of an antecedent experience (vorgängiges Erleiden) of resisting objects. Thus, the experience of resistance founds consciousness” [12, p. 126; italics original]. If Scheler is right, his observation can provide an illuminating perspective on debates on the consciousness of both animals and Artificial Intelligence (AI). Scheler himself had no doubt that animals were conscious beings, but he rejected the idea of animal self-consciousness (a point to which I will return below) [1, p. 34]. If something must be pitted against the life-drives in order to become an object of

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Scheler argues that we first grasp the reality of something undefined before we perceive its nature or essence with our senses or through thinking: “Wir erfassen das Realsein eines unbestimmten Etwas […] bevor wir sein Sosein [italics original] sinnlich wahrnehmen oder denken” [11, pp. 372– 373]. It also means that, for Scheler, reality is trans-intelligible: “nur das Was des Daseins, nicht das Dasein des Was ist intelligibel” [11, p. 204]. The emphasis is Scheler’s.

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consciousness, being alive is a necessary (although not sufficient) condition of consciousness. This approach, I believe, would take the heat out of multiple debates around AI, transhumanism, or the cyborg. As long as the experiencing subject were alive, it would not matter in the least how much (additional) technology it took to support this form of life. It would further mean that as long as a being could be phenomenologically described as being alive it would not matter either if this form of life were carbon- or silicon-based. At the same time, a big question mark could be put over AI consciousness if unembedded in any form of life (or over uploading one’s self to a computer, for example). As pointed out by Scheler, human beings are a “cul-de-sac” in evolutionary terms since no substantial developments are to be expected in this department anymore, an observation many transhumanists would endorse. The only thinkable “ways out” or “forward” would have to be sought beyond biologically determined evolution in pursuits long promoted by philosophy, in spiritual and religious exercises, and in the like undertakings, though not “advertised” in this way as a rule. Today, these ideas resurface in versions barely related to “spirituality,” such as the technically-inflected concept of self-directed evolution as developed, for example, by Simon Young in Designer Evolution: A Transhumanist Manifesto [13], where the human being, as David O Brien has recently remarked, is no longer a question to be “solved” by philosophers, theologians, or even natural scientists, but rather an “engineering problem” [14]. These attempts typically profess to go “beyond life,” which implies that trying to understand these human developments solely from the life context is bound to disappoint. Scheler’s response—again phenomenologically speaking—is that the human being is not only a form of life but, crucially, a form of life in which the spiritual (geistige) principle started to manifest itself at a certain point in history [15].

2.2 The Human Being as geistig As a concept in the philosophical tradition, Geist—spirit—is certainly out of favor in the more natural-scientific worldview dominant in the so-called West today.7 However, Scheler’s idea to make Geist rather than reason his point of reference has a number of advantages. For one, Scheler regards Geist as a far more inclusive faculty, encompassing acts of reason (such as “thinking of ideas”) along with volitional and emotive acts, such as kindness, love, remorse, awe, blissfulness, and existential despair [1, p. 32]. Thus, Scheler dismantles the traditional body-mind dichotomy and, instead, introduces a new, much broader and phenomenologically describable distinction. This phenomenological approach is especially useful here, because it allows us to

7

It does not help that the traditional translation of Geist as “spirit” has all the wrong connotations in English, including religious and esoteric ones. For this reason, I tend to use the German term.

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treat certain capacities of the human being independently of their presumed origin, including metaphysical explanations. Rather, the focus is on how certain properties appear to us and on how they can be experienced and observed, wherever and whenever they emerge. In this way, what remains is a set of purely descriptive features, whose origin may have a number of explanations, but whose validity is independent of those. For Scheler, these features include the capacities to abstract, to perceive the empty and unified formulas of space and time, to grasp the nature or essences (Sosein) of things and be motivated by them, to establish categories of things and substances, and to perform the act of “ingathering” (Sammlung) and becoming self-conscious [1, pp. 34–41]. According to Scheler, humans are capable of objectifying the things they encounter in the world (including their own inner states, though not Geist itself). Because a being that has spirit is influenced but not entirely determined by the environment, such a being is capable of behaving in a world-open manner, bending back reflectively on its own existence and resisting its drives and the impulses coming from them and from the environment; briefly, it can say “no,” even to reality as a whole [1, p. 42]: “Man then, is a being that can exhibit, to an unlimited degree, behavior which is open to the world. To become human is to acquire this openness to the world by virtue of the spirit” [1, p. 33; Eng. trans. p. 39, italics in the German original]. This is a consequential assertion related, but not identical, to Ernst Cassirer’s famous definition of the human being as homo symbolicus or animal symbolicum [16] (I believe that Cassirer’s description falls under Scheler’s wider understanding of geistig.) It is these spiritual abilities that enable humans to be religious, to “do” science or philosophy, and to dream up worlds that do not exist. They also include the act of ideation, which Scheler vividly illustrates by citing the story of the Buddha, whom three separate encounters—with a sick person, an old person, and a corpse, respectively—make deduce that all life is suffering, a realization pivotal to the Buddhist view of existence [1, p. 40]. The Schelerian concept of Geist boasts flexibility and wide applicability, because Geist is not a substance and cannot be objectified, but manifests itself as pure actuality in the performance of certain acts; it “has its being only in and through the [free] execution of its acts” [1, p. 39; Eng. trans. p. 47], which can then be phenomenologically perceived. Of course, Scheler regarded these features as unique to human existence, but seeing that they are actually related to Geist, and with our recent findings about the self-consciousness of animals and related issues, we are today well capable of considering these spiritual attributes not to be necessarily tied to the human species alone. As already pointed out, Geist needs certain material conditions to be able to manifest itself. Thus, while for Scheler the “manifestation” of spiritual acts was limited to the human species from a certain point of human development onwards (which Scheler does not accurately locate, only noting that the insights of evolutionary theory are helpful here), there is no reason for it to be circumscribed in this way. Applying the phenomenological analysis to beings as such, independently of their species, can cut across established boundaries and introduce new models of differentiation, without losing the distinctions between various types of existence,

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even within one species. For example, not all humans may be capable of performing spiritual acts throughout their lives. Technological supports for humans (and indeed, in the future, potentially for other species or other forms of being) may provide the material conditions for these spiritual abilities to manifest themselves. Meanwhile, studies in animal psychology have amply shown that selfconsciousness—once an exclusively human domain and a key feature Scheler regarded as setting humans and animals apart—is observable in a number of other animals, including orcas, gorillas, elephants, and cleaner wrasses, to name a handful of notable examples. Even ants have been found to display selfconsciousness by passing the mirror-test, and this list can probably be extended if species-appropriate tests are administered [17]. Whether animal self-awareness is at the same level as what Scheler had in mind when he talked about “bending back on oneself” is another question and discussing various types and levels of self-consciousness is a matter of a separate debate. However, what the phenomenological analysis, inclusive of scientific experimentation, makes us clearly realize challenges long-standing philosophical assumptions and supports Scheler’s insistence that we must continually rethink and clarify our questions, and also that we cannot “do” Philosophical Anthropology without being in constant dialogue with the sciences. These insights suggest, in my opinion, two conclusions. One is that if we only sought to differentiate between humans and other animals (and perhaps to prove human superiority), we would now see a good reason to abandon any pursuits based on justifications such as intelligence or self-consciousness altogether. This is in line with the position embraced by evolutionary biologists (evoked by Scheler as well), who have long explained that the difference between humans and other animals in terms of intelligence and the like features is just one of degree. The other conclusion is that if we want to understand the beings around us as similar to and different from us and each other, we can rely on the descriptive phenomenological analysis to better understand the world and recognize other abilities and features we share with other forms of life beyond the features intrinsic to living as such. If we follow, as I would propose, the latter route, we can carry the argument further and address the charge of anthropocentrism by citing the example of the awareness of death and mourning as bound up with exhibiting thanatological responses, an experience traditionally thought of as uniquely human. In fact, research has long shown that both domesticated animals (e.g., dogs) and wild animals (e.g., chimpanzees and elephants) mourn their dead. Animal mourning is as a rule displayed in carrying the carcass of dead offspring or of a social partner, with this behavior decreasing as the decomposition process begins [18]. However, African elephants in Karen McComb’s research have shown behavior exceeding what may be called direct and immediate interaction by standing guard and even paying special attention, such as touching the skulls or ivory of long-dead elephants. On the whole, they have displayed a greater interest in the remains of other elephants than in other objects or the remains of different species [18]. From the phenomenological perspective, such responses, which as McComb [18] has

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pointed out are normally observed in the human species alone, indicate that elephants are furnished with abilities that Scheler would have considered spiritual (such as identifying an object as being a particular thing, here as the remains of an elephant). If we accept this example as evidence that, against what Scheler believed, other animals also “have” Geist (evinced by their performance of what Scheler called spiritual acts), we can conclude that Geist can no longer be used to establish an absolute distinction between humans and other animals (Fig. 2). Of, course, the question often raised in this and similar contexts is whether these animal experiences, including mourning, are actually the same as their human counterparts. I argue that, to begin with, this may be a wrong question to ask. While we obviously first experience self-consciousness, mourning, and other sensations from our own individual human perspective (that is, from the perspective of an individual embedded in a given social/cultural context which is inscribed in the overall human context), it does not need to remain completely self-referential at all times. Nor does it mean that these experiences indicate something like a universal human nature. Daniel Everett and others have provided compelling evidence against such an idea of universal human traits (including Chomsky’s concept of universal grammar), arguing that similarities are only due to an overlap in biological make-up and environment [19]. In the light of the Schelerian argument, our capacity for detachment from our own first-hand experiences enables us to objectify them (and to exercise empathy) so that we can recognize that

Fig. 2 Elephants show greater interest in skulls of their own species rather than of others, a behaviour previously really only observed in humans according to McComb and her team. (Photograph by courtesy of Karen McComb)

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other species share certain experiences with humans but in their own ways. This means that both elephant and human self-consciousness or mourning are varieties of self-consciousness or mourning as a shared experience. The ability to abstract and objectify, coupled with motivation sparked by insights into what Scheler called the nature or essence (Sosein) of things,8 also plays a part when we examine the relationship between human nature and technology.

2.3 Technology in Relation to Life and Spirit Inquiries into the relationship of the human being to other animals and to TwentyFirst-century technology, including AI, robots, and the cyborg mostly either reference the use of tools or treat contemporary technological advancements as extension of the classical tool-making ability, which itself is traditionally viewed as organ extension [20]. Quite in line with this tradition, Scheler considered tools, similar to religion, art, history, and the like, to be the monopoly of the human being [21, p. 19].9 However, some rather unusual aspects of Scheler’s concept of tools (and, by extension, of technology) certainly deserve a closer scrutiny. For one, Scheler did not subscribe to the notion that “tools are (…) extensions of organs” [22, p. 235], an idea as popular in his day as it is now and particularly prominent today in explorations of the cyborg. For example, in Natural-Born Cyborgs, Andy Clark defines the cyborg as a (human) living being whose physical abilities are extended beyond the human biological limitations by various technological means10 : The human mind, if it is to be the physical organ of human reason, simply cannot be seen as bound and restricted by the biological skinbag. In fact, it has never been thus restricted and

8

Of course, the nature of things is an object of a debate of its own, which cannot be part of this paper. At this point, two things will suffice: (1) that the nature of things may simply mean what makes a thing a thing in such a way that we recognize it as this and not any other thing (e.g., a tree, a pen, a chair, etc., and also pain—an example Scheler himself used—pleasure, and so on); (2) that even if this perception proves mistaken, it can still be a strong motivation to act in different ways. For example, one may belief to have grasped something of the nature of the divine and thus be motivated to iconoclastic acts or to act in in an compassionate manner. The same would be true for believing to have recognised the nature of other, not necessarily religious “objects” of our enquiry. What we believe the nature of certain animals to be, to use another example, would impact on how we treat them. Likewise, if we change our beliefs on the nature of a thing, it will very likely effect the way we act with regard to it or even beyond. 9 Of course, in the early twentieth century, a time when research into animal psychology began, thinkers such as Scheler were very much aware that animal used tools. Nevertheless, Scheler argued that the animal-tool relationship differed from the human-tool relationship. This issue lies beyond my argument in this chapter. 10 There is no reason why other forms of life should not be able to be transformed into cyborgs. At this point, however, such a transformation would take a human intervention.

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bound, at least not since the first meaningful words were uttered on some ancestral plain [23, p. 4].

In fact, because it is so difficult (if not altogether impossible) to draw a clear line between the first use of “primitive” tools and the more advanced technology, Clark proposes that the human being has been a “natural-born cyborg” from the very beginning. In Scheler’s view, however, tools “only appear when an organic adaptation has become impossible due to the fixation of a type or essence (Wesen)” [22, p. 235]. This is quite an extraordinary observation for his time and may even be more pertinent when investigating the development of contemporary digital technologies. For Scheler, technology is a phenomenon to be considered somewhat separately from the tool, since technology is a phenomenon originating in the human mind and its ability to combine symbols (Zeichen) and matter which is not the case for tools. Further details would have to be gleaned from Scheler’s value theory, but what matters at this stage is that Scheler links this ability first and foremost to life, rather than to Geist; technology is life-serving and the technologist who contributes to the human being dominating, shaping, and having “power over” nature is one of its embodied exemplars (Vorbild) [24, p. 316; Eng. trans. p. 195]. Nonetheless, abstraction, objectification, and imagination are clearly pivotal to technology, and I would argue that the more advanced technologies are the greater role these faculties play in them. If so, while Geist is rather insignificant in the traditional use of tools, its relevance increases along with the complexity of technology. At the same time, from the Schelerian perspective, most human “enhancements” in the cyborg fall under Scheler’s understanding of the tool and thus under life (i.e., the human being as homo naturalis), rather than affecting the spiritual core of the person; consequently, the concerns that tend to be raised around technological enhancement, bio-hacking, and similar developments as purportedly threatening our “human nature” seem to be unfounded since even directed evolution cannot affect the core of the Wesensidee human being at all. To phrase it differently, there is no reason to believe that being human is at odds with or would be challenged by technological advancements (including relying upon or incorporating technology into human existence); rather, the latter are an expression of the former and should be embraced as long as they foster the development of both life and Geist, rather than stunting either or both.11 These conclusions also open an interesting perspective on the understanding and assessment of developments in digital technologies, specifically those that create new environments and the means to navigate them. Admittedly, Scheler failed to explicate the relationship between intelligence and spirit in his work in detail, even though he repeatedly emphasized the distinction

11

This, of course, raises the interesting follow up question of how to identify what hinders and what fosters life and Geist, respectively. Without going into details, my first assumption would be that what fosters life and Geist could be phenomenologically identified based on an increased feeling of aliveness, both physically and spiritually (including health) and also both physical and mental performance.

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and insisted that some developed animals could display a considerable practical intelligence [23, p. 235]. In Die Stellung des Menschen im Kosmos, Scheler provides us with a brief overview of what he means by intelligence: we encounter intelligence both as rooted in the organism (organisch gebunden) and as serving specific spiritual goals. Intelligence as a part of psychic life is defined by Scheler as practical intelligence, a capacity for self-correcting and choosing among material goods or among members of the same species for procreation; in general, serving one’s drives or satisfying one’s needs. Describing how we can identify intelligent behavior, Scheler states that an organism acts intelligently when it is capable of responding, without trial and error, to a new situation meaningfully (…) of solving the drive-determined problem suddenly and (…) independently of the number of previous attempts [1, pp. 27–28; Eng. trans. p. 29].

Only when serving spiritual goals can intelligence be “raised above cleverness, prudence and cunning” [1, p. 28; Eng. trans. p. 29]. Here intelligence is defined as a sudden insight into a connected context of facts and values within the environment that is not perceived directly now nor was it ever perceived previously so that it is a function of reproduction. (…) [It is] an insight into a state of affairs on the basis of a structure of relations whose basic elements are partly given in experience, partly completed in anticipatory representation [1, p. 27; Eng. trans. p. 30].

When intelligence serves spiritual goals, Scheler emphasizes the aspects of newness and anticipation. It is here, according to Scheler, that intelligence becomes a “prevision of a new state of affairs never experienced before” [1, p. 28; Eng. trans. p. 30]. While one may note similarities between Scheler’s approach to intelligence and traditional practical and theoretical reasoning, Scheler’s linking of practical intelligence to life (where he would also situate problem-solving) and his emphasis on newness are unusual. Capacities such as abstraction, logic, and creativity clearly belong to the spiritual realm. Yet, Scheler offers no accurate explanation of how and at what stage one type of intelligence transforms into the other, which parallels his failure to clarify the above-mentioned relationship of intelligence and Geist. This vagueness does have a knock-on effect on the questions of tools and the creation of technology. However, as I have recently pointed out: what we can say (…) is that we have a fusion between intellectual and spiritual achievements (e.g., scientific) in terms of technology which is already apparent in the achievements and visionary drawings of, for instance, Leonardo de Vinci, but much more pronounced and widespread in the age of information technology [25, p. 30].

This fits in with Scheler’s ideas that science stems simultaneously from metaphysics and handicraft (Handwerk), mixing practical acts and intelligence with spiritual acts, and that the goal of technology is to dominate (and today we could

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say even overcome) nature in order to free both culture and the human being from its limitations [24, p. 316].

3

Rethinking the Person in the Twenty-First Century

3.1 Scheler’s Take on Personalism Scheler’s personalism rests on a complex mix of assumptions drawn from his Philosophical Anthropology, his phenomenologically inspired value ethics, and his often overlooked strong interest in the social aspect of human existence. In this chapter, I have especially focused on one specific aspect of Scheler’s Philosophical Anthropology, namely the interplay between life and Geist. In a next step, it is of interest to see how far Scheler’s concept of personhood can be expanded to be more than an exclusively human trait, which it of course was for Scheler, like for most, if not all, personalists of his time. I argue that, though not envisaged by Scheler, such an enlargement of the universe of the person is indeed possible, precisely because his approach was phenomenologically informed. For my argument, the most important aspect of Scheler’s concept of personhood is that it centers around the fact that, like Geist, the person is not a substance, and thus (again like Geist) cannot be objectified; they exist, indeed, only “outside the entire sphere of all possible ‘objects’” (27, pp. 51f ; Engl. trans. p. 29, italics original). Rather, the person, as the center of Geist and existing only in and through their acts, emerges structured in a very particular order (Ordnungsgefüge) of value guided acts [1, p. 39] as the “concrete unity of all possible acts” [26, p. 50; Eng. trans. p. 29]. In this way, the person is in constant flux, never completely stable but constantly developing and reemerging. While there is a strong emphasis on the person as a spiritual being in Scheler [27, p. 70], life is equally significant. We need to remember that the life-drives literally give life energy to both Geist (which has no energy of its own) and the person and that, as stated above, the reality given to the life-drives is the foundation of all (self-)consciousness. Geist cannot realize itself (sich realisieren) without the energy stemming from life. Rather, Geist is only able to act when embodied, and its ability to impact in any shape or form is dependent on being embedded in a living being. If we look at the interdependence of Geist and life from this perspective, we can see how this approach cuts a across a number of traditional ontic oppositions, such as soul-body and soul-brain [1, p. 62]. But Scheler’s approach to the person also emphasizes the dynamic nature of the person, who is constantly reinstated, so to speak, in their existence through their acts. The logical consequence is the (very Nietzschean) understanding of the human person as constant self-becoming, which becomes very much a feature of Scheler’s later considerations in Philosophical Anthropology, culminating in his idea of a becoming God.

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3.2 Expanding Personhood I am convinced that the indeterminacy of the concept of personhood, as well as its problematic implications, has substantially contributed to the decline of the use of this concept in ethical theory. Yet, what has been perceived as its weakness may in fact prove to be its strength in the current debates as the concept of personhood is ideally suited to overcome a number of false dichotomies with which we are set to grapple. Below, I offer an overview of these dichotomies. 1. Even though Scheler himself held rather traditional views on the gender question, his concept of the person itself is not gendered. If a person comes into being and exists only in and through their acts, and is essentially connected to the life urge in the state of constant becoming, their biological sex has at most a partial impact on their personal identity. There is also no reason why this identity should remain fixed throughout a person’s life. 2. While it is an implicit presupposition on Scheler’s part, personhood the way it is presented by Scheler is not by definition restricted to human beings. Like in my discussions of spirit, Scheler’s concept rather implies that different living beings may display different types of personhoods and partake in spirit in different ways. 3. As already indicated, an individual human being may not remain a person throughout their life, a discussion point that is being evaded in many personalist debates, which often unfold in religious settings. If a person exists only in and through their acts, the question is what happens if an individual cannot act, i.e., act any longer or not yet? A logical conclusion is that this individual is not a person any longer or not yet. This position is adopted, for example, by the controversial philosopher Peter Singer, who also decouples the idea of personhood from the human species [28]. It follows thus that not all human beings are persons and certainly not throughout the entirety of their existence. This conclusion produces problematic issues, yet having problematic consequences does not make any observation more or less true. Rather, I argue, this urges us to abandon the idea that a single concept, such as personhood, can suffice to solve all the quandaries of human dignity, ableist discrimination in law (e.g., disenfranchisement of people with mental disabilities practiced in many countries), and similar concerns. Instead, we are prompted to use multi-disciplinary and multi-perspectival approaches to address the issues of dignity, end of life, and rights. At the same time, we may have to accept that speciesism, despite its problematic ethical implications, may still be an important factor in debates on human rights and other legal questions. 4. Starting from the perspective of Scheler’s Philosophical Anthropology and personhood, we can easily alleviate concerns about human-technological mergers and show them to be unfounded, since neither human enhancement nor the cyborg can possibly have any bearing on what we consider to be the core of either humanity or of the person. On the contrary, transcending one’s biological limitations (and that includes self-directing one’s evolution)—even acting

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against one’s urges and life-drives—is a distinctive feature of a being that has spirit. Scheler’s philosophy, especially in his later work, envisages a “progressive self-salvation and self-deification of mankind” [27, p. 148]. Leaving aside the strong metaphysical connotations that culminate in the vision of a Godin-becoming brought forth by the increasing interpenetration of Geist and life [1, p. 70], the idea that the human being is the locus of this quasi-divine selfrealization is far removed from several transhumanist ideas and ideals. While the possibilities of physical self-creation are probably way beyond anything Scheler could have imagined, nothing in his theory precludes that as long as a mutual increase of life and Geist is the goal; that is, spiritual acts should enhance the feeling of aliveness (and the other way around) rather than taking a toll on or distracting from life.12 Scheler sees this illustrated poetically in the famous line from Hölderlin’s ode “Sokrates and Alcibiades”: “He who has thought most deeply loves that which is most alive” (“Wer das Tiefste gedacht, liebt das Lebendigste”) [1, p. 67]. Judging the ethical implications of such developments and assessing whether they really follow this ideal would be the task of the philosopher, rather than of the engineer or the technician. 5. Finally, it would be interesting to build on Scheler’s idea of the emergence of (self-)consciousness from the experience of reality. If only those beings to which reality is given through its resistance to their life-drives can be conscious, life as such, no matter whether carbon- or silicon-based, is the necessary condition of consciousness. I believe that this consideration can add an interesting angle to the debates on whether AI can achieve (self-)consciousness. Once reality is given to the life-drives of a being, whether this being is or is not able to accommodate what Scheler called spiritual abilities would depend on the material conditions that Scheler left unspecified (but that we can assume to include the brain size and the like properties, for biological forms of life).

4

Conclusion

One of the questions raised at the conference Crossing the Borders of Humanity concerned the anthropocentric bias of Scheler’s approach. Of course, both Scheler’s Philosophical Anthropology and his ethical personalism were anthropocentric, but, as I have tried to show, there was more to them than this. All our philosophical enquiries inevitably begin with ourselves; we are our own existential

12 In his writings on ressentiment, Scheler makes the point that asceticism and ascetic practices in modern times have been misunderstood as being hostile to life by, for example, suppressing the drives or even eradicating them altogether. Scheler speaks of both freedom from oppression by the drives and enhancing life (and personhood), which is unfolding, growth (Wachstum an Fülle), and development [29, pp. 75, 114; Eng. trans. pp. 34, 64]. Because life gives energy to Geist (an idea that only becomes really prominent in Scheler’s later work), the growth of life means more energy for Geist.

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starting point. Yet, as Scheler argued, we can expand and even de-centralize our own perspective through abstraction and objectification, which lie at the basis of all philosophical and scientific explorations. This point is true even if it is debatable whether such an expansion and de-centralization can ever be fully achieved; as a matter of fact, for Scheler, it would not have to be the case; seeking to do so would actually be a misguided enterprise, as all knowledge relations are, to some extent, relations of being. For Scheler, individual subjectivity, inter-subjectivity, and (scientific) objectivity are always interconnected. Indeed, we may never know for sure what it is like to be a bat [30], but we are likewise not really capable of fathoming fully the experience of any other human individual.13 I argue that we are not bound to remain enclosed in our anthropocentric starting point. Arguably, our current state of knowledge indicates that humans are the only beings capable of such a decentralization since it is premised on considerable mental abstraction; this, however, does not have to stay this way in the future. Very likely, Scheler would not have agreed with the idea of extending personhood; after all, the scientific knowledge of his time did not provide any evidence to support it. Our understanding of animal psychology has considerably evolved since then, and yet the idea of non-human personhood remains disputable. I, for one, was not convinced of the concept for a long time. Yet, if we apply Scheler’s concept of personhood to the knowledge offered by animal psychology, especially with regard to basic self-awareness, we will inevitably conclude that personhood is indeed attributable to non-human animals (and possibly, in the future, to siliconbased forms of life accommodating AI). This realization will extend the argument beyond the current debates on legal personhood into philosophy, while acknowledging that discussions around non-human personhood and rights are still practiced from a human point of view. Traditionally, one of the main criticisms raised against both Scheler’s Philosophical Anthropology (especially his concept of spirit) and his personalism has concerned their metaphysical foundations (namely, the theory of primordial phenomena rooted in the “ground of being”). Yet, the Schelerian approach can effectively be used without any specific metaphysical grounding, as both spirit (and life) and the person are identified in a phenomenological manner, which means that all three phenomena can be dissociated from their (metaphysical or other) source. Scheler’s philosophical investigations almost always have an ethical dimension to them. His insistence that spirit without the energy of the life-drives is powerless while life without spirit lacks direction is no exception. For Scheler, the goal of all human development and all finite being is to vivify spirit (Verlebendigung des Geistes) and to spiritualize the drives (Vergeistigung der Drangsale) [1, pp. 55–56]. The beauty of this approach, which is very much also one hallmark

13

We do not have room to develop Scheler’s approach to this question at this point which forms part of his axiology and theory of empathy, a part of his value theory left undiscussed here.

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of Scheler’ later thought and deserves more attention today, is the idea of Ausgleich, which has been translated in a number of ways: adjustment, balancing, or equilibrium, to name but a few. It is an interesting concept that deserves to be considered insofar as it entails both a corrective and a potential for a critical evaluation of one-sided developments, such as transhumanism, biological determinism, and also social constructivism. Using Scheler’s perspective (including his language) as a starting point for further investigations regarding the human being allows us to recognize the connectedness of the human being to other living beings and life as a whole—including sharing abilities such as intelligence or even aspects of personhood. At the same time, it enables us to acknowledge that, for the moment, the human being does have a “special place” in nature (if one were to use Scheler’s wording). In my view, this is not meant in an evaluative way (that is, as implying that human beings are superior to other species), but it conveys the recognition that human beings in their current form can “do” science, create art, be religious, but also destroy, kill and torture for an idea, etc.—in short, engage in different types of pursuits in a way other species do not, all the while acknowledging that the latter have their special ways of being and their own perspectives on the world (I think Jakob Johann von Uexküll’s phrase—which Cassirer uses as his starting point for the animal symbolicum—that every species has its own world captures this beautifully). Scheler’s use of geistig helps us to add another layer to and redirect our analysis by exploring, for example, mental differences beyond the mere quantity of intelligence (Fig. 3). The Schelerian framework can also be used as a basis to engage with the transhumanist movement in both an appreciative and a critical manner. The former attitude, as briefly discussed above, entails embracing technological inventions, bio-hacking, and similar developments, as long as they serve to vivify Geist and spiritualize life. However (and here again the later Scheler follows Nietzsche), this is not to be misunderstood as solely oriented on the self, including selfpreservation. Emphatically, to think of the growth and development of life as serving the self is a gross misunderstanding, and enhancing the self should not be the ultimate goal. “Man is not a work of art and should not be one!” [31, p. 104, see also n. 13, italics original]. To dedicate oneself to something greater than one’s own individuality is central, as is solidarity that unites individual forms

Fig. 3 Scheler’s illustration of the difference between human and animal behaviour in relation to their surroundings, illustrating how human behaviour is by nature expandible in an unlimited manner (i.e., not limited by the environment) [1, p. 33]

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of life. Scheler believed that solidarity was intrinsic to life, because all life forms partook of and derived their forms of life from the life-agens. In Scheler’s view, this solidarity encompassed the death of the individual [32, pp. 200ff .] and seems to have represented Scheler’s endorsement of the idea of a quasi-mythical force of “nature” and the so-called natural limits, even though this notion was somewhat at odds with the potential opened up by Geist, as discussed above. Scheler would probably have scathingly dismissed transhumanist attempts at immortalizing one’s own self; the holding on to one’s own life instantiates the bourgeois-capitalist attitude of ownership, rather than making room for the new. In a nutshell, loosely based on Scheler, both a phenomenologically underpinned variety of Philosophical Anthropology and personalism can help overcome a number of binary assumptions and false dichotomies endemic to conceptualizations of the human being, such as gender binaries, the animal-human exclusive dichotomy, the opposition of human nature and technology, and the collectiveindividual dichotomy. It enables us to use a phenomenologically inspired language to engage with natural-scientific insights and to investigate different avenues when studying human beings and their relationship to other animals, as well as their potential future relationship to AI. To be instrumental in this way, a non-substantialist phenomenological approach to personhood should be dissociated from the human species and then widened to include non-human persons. Besides, Scheler’s idea that (self-)consciousness is predicated on the experience of reality given to the life-drives emphasizes the role of life as pivotal to (self-)consciousness and opens up the debate beyond carbon-based life forms. Finally, while all philosophical enquiries start from an anthropocentric position, the human ability to objectify and abstract from our own existential position (while acknowledging that this position cannot—and should not!—be eradicated completely) means that philosophical explorations can be expanded in a non-anthropocentric manner. Core Messages . Both a phenomenologically founded Philosophical Anthropology and personalism, loosely based on the Schelerian approach, can overcome a number of binary assumptions and false dichotomies regarding the human being, such as male–female, animal-human, human-technological, and collective-individual distinctions. . A non-substantialist phenomenological approach to personhood can be widened to include non-human persons. . While all philosophical enquiries start from an anthropocentric position, the human ability to objectify and abstract from our own existential position means that they can be expanded in a non-anthropocentric manner.

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21. Scheler M (1997) Probleme, Methode, Einteilung I und II. In: Frings FS (ed) Schriften aus dem Nachlaß 3: Philosophische Anthropologie (GW 12), Bouvier, Bonn, pp 16–26 22. Scheler M (1990) Grundlagen der Geschichtswissenschaft. In: Frings MS (ed) Schriften aus dem Nachlaß 4: Philosophie und Geschichte (GW 13), Bouvier, Bonn, pp 167–238 23. Clark A (2003) Natural-born cyborg: minds, technologies, and the future of human intelligence. Oxford University Press, New York 24. Scheler M (1986) Vorbilder und Führer. In: Frings MS (ed) Schriften aus dem Nachlaß 1: Zur Ethik und Erkenntnislehre (GW 10), Bouvier, Bonn, pp 255–344 [Eng. trans. Scheler M (1987) Exemplars and leaders. In: Person and self-value. Three essays, trans. and intr. by Frings MS. Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, Dordrecht/Boston/Lancaster, pp 125–198] 25. Gottlöber S (2022) A new type of person? A Schelerian perspective on the cyborg. In: Michałowska M (ed) Crossing the border of humanity: cyborgs in ethics, law, and art. Proceedings of the International Online Conference December 14−15, 2021, Medical University of Łód´z, Łód´z, pp 26−32 26. Scheler M (1980) Der Formalismus in der Ethik und die materiale Wertethik. Neuer Versuch der Grundlegung eines ethischen Personalismus (GW 2), ed. Frings MS, Francke, Bern, München [Eng. trans. Scheler M (1973) Formalism in ethics and non-formal ethics of values. A new attempt toward the foundation of an ethical personalism, trans. and intr. by Frings MS, Funk RL. Northwestern University Press, Evanston] 27. Henckmann W (1998) Max Scheler. C.H. Beck, München 28. Singer P (1993) Practical ethics. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 29. Scheler M (1972) Das Ressentiment im Aufbau des Moralen. In: Frings MS (ed) Vom Umsturz der Werte (GW 3), Francke, Bern/ München, pp 33–147 München [Eng. trans. Scheler M (1994) Ressentiment, trans. by Coser LA. Marquette University Press, Milwaukee] 30. Nagel T (1974) What is it like to be a bat. Philos Rev 83(4):435–450 31. Scheler M (1995) Philosophische Weltanschauung. In: Frings MS (ed) Späte Schriften (GW 9), Bouvier, Bonn, pp 73−182 [Eng. trans. Scheler M (1958) Philosophical perspectives, transl. by Haac OA. Beacon Press, Boston] 32. Scheler M (1979) Manuskripte zur Lehre vom Grund aller Dinge. In: Frings MS (ed) Schriften aus dem Nachlaß 2: Erkenntnislehre und Metaphysik (GW 11), Bouvier, Bonn, pp 185–222

Susan Gottlöber is Senior Lecturer/Associate Professor in philosophy at Maynooth University. Her main research interests are the philosophy of toleration and the relationship between toleration and rights from the Middle Ages till today, value theory, and philosophical anthropology (especially Max Scheler) with the focus on inter-subjectivity, individuality, embodiment, and human nature in relation to other animals and technology. Recently, she has begun exploring the relevance of Scheler’s philosophical anthropology to contemporary questions.

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Posthumanizing Relaxation in Science-Fiction ASMR Joanna Łapinska ´

Our existence is always bound up with affective and aesthetic flows that elude cognitive definition or capture. Steven Shaviro [1, p. 4]

Abstract

Steven Shaviro has asked what it feels like to live in the early twenty-first century, an era in which the concept of the human as a superior being towering over all others has become obsolete. It may produce a sense of dread about the unknown future, or it may fill us with joyful anticipation. A posthuman sensibility, which is both pro-active toward and affirmative of human and non-human coexistence in today’s world, surfaces in contemporary intermedia phenomena and post-cinematic art forms, such as autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR) videos. The purpose of this chapter is to analyze so-called post-cinematic affect, a specific emotional structure revealed through the science-fiction imagery used in ASMR videos. This structure is co-created through various post-cinematic techniques, which include non-human viewpoints, roles, and perspectives along with fragmentary and non-linear narratives. Science-fiction ASMR seeks to capture the posthuman experience of a reality in which humans, rather than being central, are merely a part of the various “arrangements, attunements and practices of being” (Willis in Fast forward: the

This research was fully funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) (grant number: M 3144-G). For the purpose of open access, the author has applied a CC BY public copyright license to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising from this submission. J. Łapi´nska (B) Department of Theatre, Film and Media Studies, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2023 M. Michałowska (ed.), Humanity In-Between and Beyond, Integrated Science 16, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27945-4_6

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future(s) of the cinematic arts, Wallflower Press, London and New York, p. 87, [2]). In ASMR, this experience does not cause fear, but surprisingly breeds contentment and relaxation. Keywords

Posthuman sensibility . Posthumanism . Autonomous sensory meridian response . Post-cinema . Post-cinematic media

1

Introduction

Produced by the Enlightenment and modernist traditions, the concept of the human as the crown of creation and the supreme being that towers over all other entities in the hierarchy of being has come to face various challenges. New existences, actors, and subjectivities that blur the nature/culture, human/non-human, and living/dead boundaries, and the state of in-betweenness, which violates the anthropocentric order, are ubiquitous in our everyday existence. Posthuman ideas about human and non-human coexistence and identities in today’s reality also reverberate in culture, art, and media. Autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR) culture, which is conquering the digital space, represents one of the most interesting examples of media art where thinking, feeling, experiencing, and the perception of the world are thoroughly posthuman. ASMR, which has enjoyed unwavering popularity for more than a decade now, expresses a peculiar emotional structure that I call, following Steven Shaviro, “post-cinematic affect” [1]. ASMR videos provide an answer to the question of “what it feels like to live in the early twenty-first century” [1, p. 2; italics original]. As I seek to demonstrate in this chapter, the post-cinematic experience in ASMR videos is closely related to posthuman thinking and sensibility, consistently with Holly Willis’ insistence that: The post-cinematic and the posthuman: together, each completes the project of the other, attempting to reckon with experience, identity and subjectivity in a networked culture. As cinema is reinvented as an intermedia form, and as we come to terms with a world in which the human is no longer the centre, artists contribute much to a conjuring of new arrangements, attunements and practices of being through works that call us forth in new ways. [2, p. 87]

In the intermedia phenomenon of ASMR, post-cinema is inseparable from posthumanism, a merger which is showcased both in the content and in the form (poetics and aesthetics) of the videos. The makers of ASMR films employ post-cinematic techniques and perspectives in their artworks, which, as I illustrate, co-create the posthuman image of the world depicted in this culture. In mapping posthuman experiences and post-cinematic transformations, ASMR artists not infrequently draw on well-known pop-cultural images, narratives, and poetics, with science fiction being one of the universes they most frequently visit.

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Below, I analyze several key motifs appearing in ASMR culture, which abundantly draws from the science-fiction cultural imagery. The presence of science fiction in ASMR culture has not been extensively studied yet, which may come as a surprise given the universality and salience of the science-fiction discourse in modern times, as observed by Jameson [3] and Frelik [4]. In my analyses, I subscribe to their view that science fiction is a crucial cultural discourse that introduces and explains the ethical dilemmas, political dependencies, and economic mechanisms of the world at the turn of the century. Science fiction is perceived as such a privileged discourse because it has proven capable of looking at the world as a network: an often incredibly complex and invisible web of connections within which phenomena, events, places, and beings always influence and interact with one another. In science fiction, one begins to recognize the links and vectors of connections and intertwinings pervading our current reality. Therefore, in this chapter I identify the instances of science-fiction discourse in ASMR culture to explore how it dehumanizes and posthumanizes our points of view, and what it tells us about people’s experience of the world in the early twenty-first century. I investigate how the posthuman sensibility emerging from science-fiction ASMR videos is constituted, and what techniques and transformations structure the post-cinematic dimension of this phenomenon.

2

The Posthuman Mode of Feeling

I chose posthumanism as the overarching theoretical perspective in my exploration of science-fiction ASMR, because I share the notion articulated by the contemporary philosopher Francesca Ferrando that posthumanism is currently “the most open and sensitive critical frame to approach intellectual tasks, as well as everyday practices” [5, p. 171]. This indicates a scholarly approach that, by abandoning classically anthropocentric discourses, is sensitive to the exacerbating crisis of the human subject. This approach strives to embrace new forms of thinking about the place of the human and other beings in the world. The essential task of posthumanist scholars lies in developing openness not only to what we experience around us in our daily lives, but also, and perhaps most importantly, to the research material that we, as scientists, examine and that speaks to us. The qualities that posthumanism prioritizes in its attempts to shed a new light on the various phenomena of life include sensitivity to the multiple connections among entities, the acknowledgement that they are part of the nature-culture continuum, and the insight that everything in the world is always composed of some kind of matter. Further in this chapter, I outline the main perspectives that frame my analysis of sciencefiction motifs in ASMR. First of all, I emphasize that both the posthuman way of thinking and a posthuman sensibility are closely linked to post-cinematic experience. Next, I show that post-cinematic affect in ASMR is built through a variety of post-cinematic techniques, which are clearly observable in artworks that rely on the science-fiction convention. The realization that balancing “cognition” and

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“estrangement” is the basis of the science-fiction genre [6] is essential to my further argument. As will be shown, the notion of such an equilibrium also appears in ASMR and plays a significant role in ASMR culture.

2.1 Human Is Not All There Is Since the theory of posthumanism has many facets, strains, currents, and threads, it is worth specifying what exactly one has in mind when using the term. One of the definitions that underlies my reflection on ASMR in this chapter was proposed by Ferrando in her short and apt paper from 2014, simply titled “Posthumanism.” According to Ferrando: Posthumanism is a theoretical frame, as well as an empirical one, which can apply to any field of enquiry, starting from our location as a species, to the individual gaze. Posthumanism addresses the question “who am I?” in conjunction with other related questions, such as: “what am I?” and “where and when are we?”. [5, p. 168]

Ferrando goes on to clarify what issues are pivotal to posthumanism in answering these questions. The starting point is the human subject’s realization that “we exist in a material net in which everything is actually connected and potentially intraacting” [5, p. 168]. Humans are not lonely islands. They do not stand at the top of the ladder of being, watching the subordinate lower creatures. Nor do they belong solely to “culture,” always distinguished from “nature,” but are instead part of the nature-culture continuum the way all other material beings, human and non-human alike, inhabiting the Earth are. According to Rosi Braidotti, the common feature of the posthuman condition is “an assumption about the vital, self-organizing and yet non-naturalistic structure of living matter itself” [7, p. 2]. Vitalist materialism, as Braidotti explains, “constitutes the core of a posthuman sensibility that aims at overcoming anthropocentrism” [7, p. 56]. Such a posthuman sensibility vis-à-vis the world around entails consciously opting for the vital, vibrating, and affective connections among various material entities and scrutinizing their formation and interactions with the rest of the network. On this model, a posthuman sensibility is the sensibility of human beings faced with a crisis regarding their purportedly unique position in the world, yet not treating this crisis as a reason to worry, but, on the contrary, as an opportunity to co-exist more consciously with the non-human Other. This sensibility is pro-active and affirmative, as it “combines critique with creativity in the pursuit of alternative visions and projects” [7, p. 54]. It is primarily expressed in receptiveness to non-human elements, viewpoints, perspectives, imagery, roles, and statuses, and in an attempt to address non-human subjects in cultural and artistic representations. Imagined encounters with the Other—unknown, impenetrable, and unimaginable, but at the same time astonishingly close to us—can be an exquisite opportunity to create “powerful alternatives to established practices and definitions of subjectivity” [7, p. 54].

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2.2 Recognizing the Post-Cinematic We currently live in a post-cinematic age. Today, cinema increasingly appears in new contexts and settings, which Francesco Casetti identifies as “borderline situations” [8, p. 35]. No longer what it used to be, cinema is transforming into what can be called post-cinema: ridden with imperfection, open to new possibilities, and prompting viewers to undertake “a penetrating reading” [8, p. 40] of various “borderline” texts, artworks, and discourses. To recognize cinema’s spilling, sticky, clinging, affective, and ubiquitous presence in such new situations “is a complex and risky task” [8, p. 40], and it takes a peculiar sensibility which, following Willis, I call posthuman [2]. Multifaceted as it is, post-cinema defies definition. It is also a challenge to identify and name all the post-cinematic techniques employed by contemporary creators of media art embedded in borderline situations. Malte Hagener, Vinzenz Hediger, and Alena Strohmaier describe post-cinema as “a multitude of (re-) configurations of film” [9, p. 4], and Dominique Chateau and José Moure add that ambiguity is one of the signature features of post-cinema [10, p. 14]. Shane Denson further argues that, with the transition from analog to digital media environments, moving images have undergone a “discorrelation” from human embodied subjectivities and perspectives, including phenomenological, narrative, and visual ones [11, p. 193]. Therefore, to efficiently navigate the maze of new (re-)configurations of cinema, we need to develop new frameworks and research tools that go beyond the human perspective, if possible. In this regard, it may be fruitful to pay attention to the various non-human mediators within the post-cinematic horizon, including multifunctional screens, interfaces, and sophisticated equipment, such as cameras and microphones, and treat them as accelerators of the metamorphosis of human perspectives and subjectivity. In this context, non-human elements are transformative mediators in the network of human/non-human connections that establish new configurations and parameters of previously impossible perception and agency. Willis identifies the three major post-cinematic techniques involving non-human actors in the contemporary media landscape: (1) a crucially important interface that ceases to be transparent and becomes meaningful; (2) the foregrounding of non-human viewpoints, roles, and perspectives; and (3) fragmentary and non-linear narratives [2]. As will be shown, these techniques are widely applied in the newly emerging media genre known as ASMR, and they contribute to evoking a specific feeling called post-cinematic affect in video viewers-listeners.

2.3 Why Science Fiction? Science-fiction poetics is often adopted by the creators of ASMR videos. The motifs drawn from science-fiction culture are omnipresent both in the content and in the formal layer of the videos, which opulently feature conventional iconic characters and major tropes associated with the genre, including starships, space

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travel, scientists, computers, aliens, and robots [6]. However, the genre of science fiction, especially in its cinematic version, is not defined by these popular themes alone. Rather, it tends to be described as a mirror of our human anxieties: possible extinction, alien invasion, ecological disaster, or nuclear war [12, p. 855]. At first glance, it may seem rather paradoxical to include the science-fiction discourse, which epitomizes human fears, in ASMR culture, whose main object is to make the viewer-listener relax. However, a closer inspection will reveal that science fiction and ASMR indeed have much in common. According to Darko Suvin’s well-known definition, the science-fiction genre is characterized by “the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition” [13, p. 66]. In other words, in science fiction, what is familiar and cognizable to humans at a given historical moment is intertwined with what is uncommon and unknowable. “Novum” is among key terms used by science-fiction scholars. Adapted by Suvin from Ernst Bloch’s notion of “a totalizing phenomenon or relationship deviating from the author’s and implied addressee’s norm of reality” [13, p. 76], novum refers to the “point of difference,” or “the thing or things that differentiate the world portrayed in science fiction from the world we recognize around us” [6, p. 6]. It is precisely this kind of alterity—understood as something different, unusual, and puzzling—that is explored in science-fiction productions. As shown below, science-fiction ASMR videos are also underpinned by this premise. Visuality is another issue that has received increasing attention for some time now, as the image-orientedness and spectacularity typical of science-fiction cultures often overshadows the plots of texts and films [4]. Frelik emphasizes that science fiction can be perceived as a “visual megatext,” which he envisions as “a collective repository of the genre’s optical signs: icons, elements, symbols, and tableaus that circulate, merge, evolve, and become spliced and remixed” [14, p. 228]. In fact, scholars insist that it is visuality, rather than narrativity, that has been the hallmark of both cinema itself and the cinematic leanings of the sciencefiction genre since the invention of moving images. Tom Gunning notes in his acclaimed essay “The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde” that, until around 1906, filmic storylines and plots were mostly incidental, and moving images were primarily intended to demonstrate “the magical possibilities of the cinema” [15, p. 383]. ASMR videos, in which the audiovisual element is axial while the narrative is merely supplementary, revisit this tradition and draw on it to the fullest. Apparently, science-fiction poetics used in ASMR renders the posthuman condition not only through the use of conventional characters and motifs sourced from the capacious gallery of fantastic worlds, but also by affective means, as it throws viewers-listeners into borderline situations and casts them in unusual roles. Putting viewers-listeners in the middle of “affective and aesthetic flows” [1, p. 4] enables them to experience the world in a posthuman way, with cognitive and rational outlooks temporarily pushed aside.

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Relax and Enjoy the Futuristic Tingles

The term “ASMR” designates both “a warm, tingling, and pleasant sensation starting at the crown of the head and spreading down the body” [16, p. 1] in response to certain audiovisual and interpersonal stimuli (“triggers”) and “a thriving online video culture” [17, p. 1] that has been winning the public around the world for more than a decade now. The extraordinary popularity of ASMR videos, which are mainly published on YouTube, is fostered by the peculiar universality of their audiovisual messages and the irrelevance of the linguistic layer, since what matters in them is the tingle-inducing sound of the spoken words, rather than their meaning. The audiovisual techniques used by ASMR creators are intended to help the viewers-listeners of the videos to “instantly unwind and relax” and “get a good night’s sleep at last” [18, p. xi]. Successful relaxation is premised on specific shivers, called “tingles,” which are felt on the skin in response to the stimuli provided by various types of ASMR videos. The science-fiction subgenre is a very popular ASMR video variety, where videos extensively rely on science-fiction conventions. For the purpose of this research, fifty ASMR videos featuring science-fiction themes, publicly available on YouTube channels, were analyzed. These videos were described and classified by popular science-fiction motifs employed in them. The following sections of this chapter focus on the frequently recurring motifs identified in my study, which only represent a sample of a much larger catalog of science-fiction trappings used in ASMR videos. For example, I do not address “Fixing You” ASMR videos, where the viewer-listener is cast as a broken robot to be repaired by an artist playing the role of a futuristic mechanic, which I have discussed elsewhere [19]. The selectiveness is deliberate as the purpose of this chapter is not to identify all the science-fiction motifs in ASMR culture, but to qualitatively analyze the most typical ones which are relevant from a posthuman and post-cinematic point of view. Apparently, the employment of science-fiction motifs in ASMR is linked to the experience of the contemporary crisis of the human subject, which results in attempts to approach the world around us in a posthuman—that is, more open and sensitive—way. ASMR culture is marked by the production of “post-cinematic affect,” which is focused on the fluidity and transience of impressions evoked by given stimuli and on their material and physiological provenance. The sensations viewers-listeners feel in their bodies appear to be caused by biological and cultural factors; they arise in the body in response to a mixture of stimuli in the setting where cognition and estrangement are balanced (Fig. 1).

3.1 Relaxation Specialists in Sleep Clinics Sleep is one of the most important elements intrinsic to ASMR culture. Researchers have found that ASMR videos are primarily used by viewers-listeners to facilitate relaxation and falling asleep [16, 20]; other reasons include coping

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Fig. 1 An ASMR artist produces “tingly” sounds (Photography by Karolina Grabowska, Pexels)

with conditions as varied as depression, anxiety, insomnia, headaches, and chronic pain [21]. Not coincidentally, so-called clinical roleplays [21] are among the most popular ASMR roleplay videos, or content “designed to capture (…) ‘real-life’ experiences” [22, p. 31], where ASMR performers engage in ritualized and stylized professional encounters. In these videos, the ASMR artist on the screen enacts a medical professional or a scientist, such as a sleep specialist, committed to helping the patient to manage some health issues. Giving the viewer-listener undivided attention, the ASMR artist uses a variety of techniques to help them, usually directly addressing “the patient” from the screen in a warm and reassuring voice. In the science-fiction subgenre, such roleplay videos feature characters from the world of the future, as indicated by their appearance, behavior, language, and the surroundings filled with often computer-generated futuristic imagery. ASMR videos in which a futuristic specialist takes care of our restful sleep are exemplified by ASMR Sleep Clinic in Outer Space—The Future of Sleep Technology [Sci-Fi] [23] posted on asmr zeitgeist, a YouTube channel with more than two and a half million subscribers as of November 2022. The off-screen female voice in the first seconds of the video belongs to the computer operating system of a sleep lab. The soothing voice invites us inside the lab, where a male figure in a white uniform appears a moment later, introducing himself in a whisper as Z-0288 (however, we are encouraged to familiarly call him “Michael”): “your personal holographic sleep technician for tonight.” Translucent Michael—after all, he is a hologram—prepares us for a relaxing session in a sleeping pod, which is meant to cure our insomnia. He connects sensors to our body and then runs tests

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to see which stimuli will work best on us; at this point, we hear the sounds of pouring water, scratching various materials, and the like. After a while, the setting changes: we are now inside our personal capsule. We lie comfortably in a white bedding, and our legs, curled up under the quilt visible at the bottom of the screen, move gently from time to time. A “personalized” relaxation session begins, during which someone’s hands on the screen in the rear of the capsule tap, squish, and scratch various objects, such as plastic cups, cling film, and a cat-shaped silicone toy, producing pleasant sounds. The session lasts about twenty-five minutes. Towards the end of it, a holographic cat appears on our bed, purring while we sleep. The author of this video draws on the visual megatext and well-known motifs of science fiction, putting the conventional icons and characters of the genre on the screen. The action takes place in a spacecraft that serves as a futuristic sleep clinic, equipped with sleeping pods. The title of the video indicates that we are somewhere in outer space. The protagonists are technological and posthuman beings: Michael, a holographic sleep technician, and Rachel, a virtual assistant only furnished with a voice. Sporting his professional uniform and telling a pseudo-scientific story about the advanced sleep technology used in the lab, Michael is a variation on the mad scientist character, one of the most hackneyed icons of the science-fiction genre [6]. We do not see much emotion in his face, as most of the time he only wears a professional smile. Consequently, there may be something both friendly and disturbing behind this mask. In the twelfth minute of the video, Michael reappears, this time on the monitor in our sleeping pod, but now half of his face is outside of the frame. With his eyes no longer visible, he is only a piece of virtual flesh in the form of a mouth speaking to us. Until the end of the video, we will not see a human face again. Instead, other parts of the disembodied body will appear in our room, including hands manipulating various objects to produce soothing sounds intended to induce relaxation. The ensemble of posthuman characters is completed by the image of a viewerlistener situated simultaneously in front of their computer screen and in a sleeping pod. The human shape outlined under the quilt belongs to a patient of the futuristic clinic conjured up in the story, who allows a scientist to conduct experiments. At the same time, the patient is a viewer-listener of the video who steps into this world by using headphones, which serve as a cord plugged into a bio-port in the body. Resembling the solutions used in countless science-fiction stories, such as David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ (1999), the connection enables the viewer-listener to fully immerse in the experience. Futuristic technology is omnipresent in the video: the sleep capsule glows with dozens of diodes of various devices (it is a wonder, by the way, that so much light does not interfere with sleep), and Michael uses a touch interface to communicate with the lab’s computer system. Interestingly, the camera’s point of view at this moment resembles the cybernetic point of view, which is often utilized in science-fiction films. This gives the impression that the viewer-listener can be either a cyborg endowed with “superior vision enhanced by technology” [24, p. 111] or a prisoner in a confined space surrounded by nonhuman mediators, such as the interfaces Michael uses to input data. In both cases,

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the point of view, rather than being human, is one that makes it possible to see the world in a non-human way. Not only seeing is at stake, though, since listening is also altered as our sense of hearing is extremely sharpened to catch even the quietest of sounds.

3.2 Soothing Encounters with Aliens Visions of a posthuman future in ASMR videos do not fill the audience with dread. This distinguishes ASMR from the catastrophic and dystopian mood that dominates in cinematic science-fiction productions, which as a rule frighten the audience with the annihilation of humanity and warn viewers against the pernicious influences of technology [12, 25]. In ASMR, technology benefits humans, and an individual’s transformation into a posthuman being is not portrayed as “the horrific harbinger of the long twilight and decline of the human species” [25, p. 2]. Similarly, the encounters with aliens pictured in ASMR videos do not evoke fear expected to be felt when facing a non-human Other, but kindle the feeling of comfort and relaxation. The most common tropes used in ASMR videos featuring extraterrestrials, many of which are roleplay videos, include abductions by aliens and tests conducted both by and on non-humans. In such videos, the viewer-listener can be cast either in the role of an abducted human or as an unidentified extraterrestrial being. In the former case, the character on the screen is an alien running tests on the human, and in the latter the ASMR artist enacts a human scientist or a medic studying the alien. The efficient juggling of human and non-human roles and points of view in videos has become standard in ASMR culture, and this device contributes to promoting a posthuman experience for the viewer-listener. When one is cast in an unusual role, it takes a kind of posthuman vigilance to obtain a good grasp of the situation: one needs to remain alert to all elements, both human and non-human, in the frame and to all other signals from the screen. Published on the Starling ASMR YouTube channel, YOU ARE AN ALIEN ASMR MEDICAL EXAMINATION | Starling Files: EPISODE 1 a.s.m.r. roleplay is an excellent case in point [26]. In its opening frames, the female FBI agent on the screen approaches the camera, strokes it gently, and whispers to the microphone with a half-smile: “Here you are, beautiful creature!” She looks closely at something behind the camera (by implication, an alien figure or the viewer-listener of the video) and then reaches for a thick book with descriptions of extraterrestrial beings, trying to identify the mysterious creature. The viewer-listener is not entirely sure what to expect of this unusual moment; they must remain alert to comprehend what is happening. This scene exemplifies the balancing of cognition and estrangement in science-fiction ASMR, as the viewer-listener recognizes certain typical elements of science-fiction culture, but can never rule out that something unexpected will happen the next moment. Subsequently, the FBI agent briefly describes the crash of a spacecraft and the rescue of its sole pilot, with the viewerlistener being this individual. In the subsequent step, the agent carries out medical

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Fig. 2 In ASMR videos, the viewer-listener is often an object of close examination (Photography by teksomolika, Freepik)

tests on the pilot’s hibernated, immobilized body, using various objects, such as metal spatulas and rubbery substances (Fig. 2). Once again, we are presented with a set of conventional icons familiar from the science-fiction universe: an alien, a spaceship, and an experimenting (mad?) scientist. The visual paraphernalia of the setting complement the narrative. A poster with a flying saucer and warning signs of possible environmental contamination can be seen on the wall behind the woman, while the tabletop is littered with bottles, vials, pipes, beakers, and test tubes. We are invited to imagine ourselves inside a typical futuristic laboratory. What is unusual is that we are supposed to feel satisfaction from being immobilized and experimented on. This sensation stands in contrast to the plethora of horrifying cinematic and literary depictions of humans imprisoned and tested by extraterrestrial beings. The other situation, one in which an alien studies humans, is staged in ASMR | Alien Uses You As Classroom Visual Aid (You Are Frozen!), a video posted on The White Rabbit ASMR YouTube channel [27]. Here, the ASMR artist plays the role of an alien teacher who shows an unusual creature—an Earthling—to the students in her classroom. The lesson becomes a pretext for spinning a story about the bizarre human race, whose members “come in all sorts of shapes and sizes” [27]. This type of encounter with difference and the difficulty of representing the Other are thematized in several celebrated science-fiction texts [6]. In an additional twist, the video crafts an interesting situation in which it is the human who is treated as an alien. As a result, what we experience is, again, a mixture of estrangement and

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cognition. Our surprise at the reversal of the roles of the alien and the Earthling intermingles with our recognition of the iconic alien encounter situation a staple in the science-fiction universe. However, the atmosphere of horror or anxiety that usually accompanies such representations is not to be found in the video. The teacher’s warm and affectionate story about an intriguing foreign race epitomizes the artistic rendering of a pro-active and affirmative posthuman sensibility. The situation orchestrated in the video is a borderline situation in which discorrelation from the human embodied perspectives occurs. Specifically, the human being discussed in the lesson is not shown on the screen; the only evidence of their being there is the teacher’s subjective description of their body parts, including eyes, ears, hair, mouth, and nose, which are gestured at off-camera. As the imagined and dismembered human body is diffused in the whispered description, we, the viewers-listeners of the video, dissolve into a pleasant sense of relaxation.

3.3 Leave It All Behind and Drift Through Space Ambience videos are another example of ASMR videos that heavily draw on the science-fiction cultural imagery, while exhibiting the performance of the peculiar affective structure that is a posthuman sensibility. Videos of this type entirely deprivilege the narrative and give pre-eminence to the affective. Experiencing affective bafflement when thrown into certain circumstances without any explanation, the viewer-listener of an ambience video has to rely on their sensory rather than cognitive responses. Moreover, such videos altogether eliminate the human element from the visual sphere of the reality they fashion. Human characters appear very rarely in ambience ASMR videos, which implies that humans are but a marginal concern for the universe. Some ASMR videos of the ambience subgenre mobilize science-fiction poetics. One of such videos is entitled Rain Sounds in Cyberpunk City | ASMR | SCI-FI SPACE | Ambience sounds for Relaxing, Sleeping, Focus; it was published on the Relaxing Feed YouTube channel [28]. The one-hour-long video shows a city of the future at night, bathed in rain and artificial lamplight. Above the city, we spot vehicles flying by. The sky flares up with lightning from time to time, and ropes hanging from the ceiling of an abandoned hangar swing in the wind. The soundtrack combines the sounds of the city, the sounds of the storm, and soft music into a whole that has a soothing effect on the viewer-listener of the video, who can either relax and fall asleep or concentrate on an activity, such as reading or studying (Fig. 3). Another example is provided by a three-hour-long video entitled SciFi/Ambience: Interstellar Passenger Shuttle, posted on the Frostglow ASMR YouTube channel [29]. In this video, we traverse space as passengers of an airplane to the accompaniment of a relaxing cabin noise and the hushed voices of the flight crew talking to each other. Not much happens during the three hours, and the visuals change very little. We sit in our seat on the plane, surrounded by

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Fig. 3 A journey through space is a common topic in ambience ASMR videos (Photography by Pixabay, Pexels)

a multitude of screens, including round windows through which we can see the movement of cosmic stardust, and a TV screen mounted on the seat in front of us, which displays some futuristic moving images. In both ambience videos, no people appear on the screen. Both the space of the megacity of the future and the space of a cosmic passenger shuttle seem depopulated and deserted. Unlike people, sounds are omnipresent in ambience ASMR videos. It is believed that ambient music can create an atmosphere that helps one to study [30]. Ambient sounds have a comparable effect and can help people to focus while performing various activities [31]. There are several reasons for the ubiquity of science-fiction poetics in ambience ASMR videos. The visual and auditory megatext of science fiction is a goldmine of images of infinite spaces, uninhabited areas, the soothing noises of interstellar travel, and poignant cosmic silence. The fact that the cosmos is silent and infinite, and that humans are only a tiny element, in it can paradoxically have a soothing effect on the audience, allowing them to shed the burden of being human as the crown of creation. This awareness dovetails with posthuman thinking and enables one to open up to new arrangements and practices of being with others. The discourse of science fiction perceives the world as a complex web of interconnections and attempts to suggest solutions to various dilemmas [3, 4]. By marginalizing the narrative, ambience videos indicate that the human urge to construct meaningful and logical stories, with a well-defined beginning and ending, is not always enough to experience the world. When one

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sits down in front of a computer screen and turns on an ambience ASMR video, one should reject the typically human expectations of meaningfulness, rationality, and logic. Instead, one needs to accept that the video may last even more than three hours, and that one will learn nothing from it. As the cognitive is eschewed, we must embrace the affective as our lens. As a result, we allow ourselves to feel relaxed facing the meaninglessness and humanlessness of the video. We drift through space feeling like a part of an affective and aesthetic flow. Perhaps this is when we grasp the peculiarity of the emotional structure that is post-cinematic affect.

4

Conclusion

Being relaxed is understood as the state of being free from tension and anxiety. By being ready to relax and choosing ASMR video to this end, one opens up to an experience designed to bring one into this state. One knows that experiencing relaxing tingles is always a bit of a coincidence, because one can never know for sure whether the stimuli in a given video will work for one’s body. This notwithstanding, one takes the risk and opens oneself to a new experience. Tingles felt on the skin tangibly attest to one’s being part of the world of matter. Feeling tingles is always beyond a person’s rational, cognitive control; the sensation proves that a vital, vibrating connection has been established between the person and another element in the network of relations. In this sense, the relaxation promised by ASMR is posthuman; it puts humans on an equal footing with other components of the world, abolishing the human sense of having complete control of their own experience. In ASMR culture, posthumanism meets post-cinema. In the twenty-first century, post-cinematic intermedia forms are the site of experimentation with posthuman experience. Post-cinematic structures provide the impetus for rethinking “new arrangements, attunements and practices of being” [2, p. 87] in today’s reality. In science-fiction ASMR, this impetus is fueled by combining the familiar and the novel, by creatively reworking iconic motifs in surprising ways. The dehumanization and posthumanization of viewpoints, the juggling of human and non-human roles and perspectives, the insertion of non-human, technological mediators into the center of human experience, the dispersal and fragmentation of bodies in a network of affective connections—these are but a sample of factors that contribute to the formation of contemporary posthuman subjectivity in ASMR. The realization that humans have lost their unique position in the world can breed a sense of crisis and insignificance. However, ASMR demonstrates that it can be otherwise, as humans may turn the loss into an opportunity to rethink their place in the world, in the network of interrelations with other beings. Humans are stepping down from the pedestal, but this does not mean that they are disappearing; rather, they are proactively and optimistically opening up to what lies ahead.

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Core Messages . Posthuman sensibility manifests itself in contemporary intermedia phenomena and post-cinematic art forms, such as autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR) videos. . Post-cinematic techniques in ASMR videos, including the use of non-human viewpoints, roles, and perspectives, along with fragmentary and non-linear narratives, contribute to the mapping of posthuman experience. . An emotional structure called “post-cinematic affect” is revealed through the science-fiction imagery used in ASMR videos. . Accepting that humans are only one element of a vast network of interconnected beings does not fill ASMR culture with anxiety, but is a source of relaxation for the viewers-listeners of ASMR videos.

References 1. Shaviro S (2010) Post-cinematic affect. O-Books, Winchester, UK, Washington, USA 2. Willis H (2016) Fast forward: the future(s) of the cinematic arts. Wallflower Press, London and New York 3. Jameson F (1991) Postmodernism, or, the cultural logic of late capitalism. Duke University Press, Durham 4. Frelik P (2017) Kultury wizualne science fiction. Wydawnictwo Universitas, Kraków 5. Ferrando F (2014) Posthumanism. Kilden J Gender Res 2:168–172 6. Roberts A (2006) Science fiction. Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, London and New York 7. Braidotti R (2013) The posthuman. Polity Press, Cambridge, UK, Malden, MA, USA 8. Casetti F (2015) The Lumière galaxy: seven key words for the cinema to come. Columbia University Press, New York 9. Hagener M, Hediger V, Strohmaier A (2016) Introduction: like water: on the re-configurations of the cinema in the age of digital networks. The state of post-cinema: tracing the moving image in the age of digital dissemination. Palgrave Macmillan, London, pp 1–13 10. Chateau D, Moure J (2020) Post-cinema: cinema in the post-art era. Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam 11. Denson S (2016) Crazy cameras, discorrelated images and the post-perceptual mediation of post-cinematic affect. Post-cinema: theorizing 21st-century film. Reframe Books, Falmer, pp 193–233 12. Lubelski T (2003) Encyklopedia kina. Biały Kruk, Kraków 13. Suvin D (1988) Positions and presuppositions in science fiction. Macmillan Press, London 14. Frelik P (2016) Gazing (back) in wonder: visual megatext and forgotten ocularis of science fiction. Sci Fict Stud 43(2):226–236 15. Gunning T (2006) The cinema of attraction[s]: early film, its spectator and the avant-garde. In: The cinema of attractions reloaded. Amsterdam University Press, pp 381–388 16. Poerio GL, Blakey E, Hostler TJ, Veltri T (2018) More than a feeling: autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR) is characterized by reliable changes in affect and physiology. PLoS ONE 13(6):1–18 17. Gallagher R (2016) Eliciting euphoria online: the aesthetics of ‘ASMR’ video culture. Special Guest-Edited Iss: Aesth Online Videos 40:1–15 18. Young J, Blansert I (2015) ASMR (idiot’s guides). Alpha Books, Indianapolis

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19. Łapi´nska J (2021) Posthuman and post-cinematic affect in ASMR ‘fixing you’ videos. In: Living and thinking in the postdigital world. Theories, experiences, explorations. Universitas & University of Warsaw—Faculty of “Artes Liberales”, Kraków, pp 153–167 20. Barratt EL, Davis NJ (2015) Autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR): a flow-like mental state. PeerJ 3(e851):1–17 21. Ahuja A, Ahuja NK (2019) Clinical role-play in autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR) videos: performance and placebo in the digital era. J Am Med Asso 321(14):1336– 1337 22. Smith N, Snider A-M (2021) The headphone. The Bloomsbury handbook of the anthropology of sound. Bloomsbury Academic, New York, pp 27–42 23. Asmr zeitgeist ASMR sleep clinic in outer space—the future of sleep technology [sci-fi]. https://youtu.be/aeg58Voclr0. Accessed 9 Nov 2022 24. Smelik A (2017) Film. The Cambridge companion to literature and the posthuman. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp 109–120 25. Dinello D (2006) Technophobia! Science fiction visions of posthuman technology. University of Texas Press, Austin 26. Starling ASMR YOU ARE AN ALIEN ASMR MEDICAL EXAMINATION | Starling files: EPISODE 1 a.s.m.r. roleplay. https://youtu.be/PGY_ahyxRZQ. Accessed 9 Nov 2022 27. The white rabbit ASMR ASMR | Alien uses you as classroom visual aid (you are frozen!). https://youtu.be/AYkWOSNPO_E. Accessed 9 Nov 2022 28. Relaxing feed Rain sounds in cyberpunk city | ASMR | SCI-FI SPACE | Ambience sounds for relaxing, sleeping, focus. https://youtu.be/zlHISDs2HtQ. Accessed 9 Nov 2022 29. Frostglow ASMR ASMR sci-fi/Ambience: interstellar passenger shuttle. https://youtu.be/Xo6 6bYb_C-Q. Accessed 9 Nov 2022 30. Purdy K (2014) The best sounds for getting work done. https://lifehacker.com/the-best-soundsfor-getting-work-done-5365012. Accessed 9 Nov 2022 31. Mehta R, Zhu R(J), Cheema A (2012) Is noise always bad? Exploring the effects of ambient noise on creative cognition. J Cons Res 39(4):784–799

Joanna Łapinska ´ holds a Ph.D. in Humanities in the discipline of Cultural Studies, and an M.A. in Film Studies. She has authored multiple papers in collected volumes and journals, and To kocha! Zwi˛azki miłosne ludzi i maszyn w filmie science fiction (2020), a study of love relationships between humans and machines in science-fiction films. Her research interests include contemporary cinema, the theories and practices of posthumanism, affect theory, and the new practices of intimacy. She is currently involved in an FWF Lise Meitner postdoc project on “ASMR as a New Intimacy Practice in Western Culture” at the Department of Theater, Film and Media Studies, University of Vienna (Austria).

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Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

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Human and Non-Human Persons in not Inhuman Civilization Aleksandra Łukaszewicz

[A]n experience of the pharmakon (…) a becoming and a development that we are now facing on a global scale, and that we experience through the profound changes taking place in the psychic apparatus as a result of the technologies of mind and spirit that today serve to destroy the spirit. Bernard Stiegler [1, p. 65]

Abstract

When thinking about the future of humanity and our world of existence, one realizes that it is ridden with serious individual and planetary challenges that are produced by technologies, as they reconfigure the human person and his/her/its world structurally, psycho-physically, socially, and on the level of consciousness, mind, and spirit. As a result, the overall space of transindividuation is changed, and other-than-human forms of self-identification are fostered. Technology can produce beneficial or harmful effects, because, as Bernard Stiegler has shown, it has characteristics of the pharmakon. Consequently, it is of vital importance to ponder in what direction the process of technological reconfiguration should be channeled, where our current debate should head, and by what values we should be guided. Ethical questions are also important in the field of contemporary post- and transhuman explorations with their various ways of conceptualizing the human and understanding what “human,” “humanistic,” and “humane” mean. Accepting the evolutionary passage from human persons

A. Łukaszewicz (B) Institute of History and Theory of Art, Polish Society for Aesthetics, Academy of Art in Szczecin, Szczecin, Poland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Michałowska (ed.), Humanity In-Between and Beyond, Integrated Science 16, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27945-4_7

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to different kinds of persons, I argue that a society consisting of various kinds of persons, not only humans, may be less inhuman and even more humane. Keywords

Technology . Posthuman . Moral status . Ethics

1

Introduction

When thinking about the future of humanity and our world of existence, one is realizes that it is fraught with challenges. Belief in development for its own sake that brings more commodities to more people proved untenable in the face of the environmental and economic crisis that preceded the outbreak of the COVID19 pandemic, internationally imposed lockdowns, and the current war in Ukraine. This belief was extensively criticized in the humanities, and eventually it could not but be abandoned. Bernard Stiegler, a philosopher of technology, has thematized this crisis through references to Paul Valéry [2] and Edmund Husserl [3], pointing out that the onset of modernity heralded a crisis of trust, of fidelity, and of knowledge, and that the modern era as such is marked by profound disorientation, which spawns an “immense crisis of the mind or spirit (…) [that] encompasses all dimensions of the spirit: of everything that sublimates” [4]. Nevertheless, development goes on in warfare technologies, biotechnologies, neuro-technologies, and media technologies even though the former trust in progress has long been ousted by severe doubt. The experience of the twentieth century has made it evident that technologies are used for killing, controlling, and subjugating people at least as much as they are employed to heal, give more opportunities, and enhance freedom. Although technologies bring positive and negative effects, they are not to be blamed for harmful actions that are sometimes performed with their use; nor are they to be praised for the positive outcomes achieved by their means, because responsibility falls with the users of technologies [5]. Technologies are then pharmaka in the sense evoked by Stiegler, who himself relies on Plato’s criticism of writing as the pharmakon, which the Sophists used to spoil the Athenian youth. Writing is a technique, a mnemotechnic exteriorization of memories, observations, and thoughts, which renders them manipulable according to one’s interests. It can serve various aims, because it is a technique whose ethical status is not defined before its use. Stiegler recognizes that “the digital stage of grammatisation—the first stage of which was the alphabetic writing of Plato’s epoch”—is not different in this respect, and that “[l]ike every technique and every mnemotechnique, cultural and cognitive technologies are pharmaka: at once poisons and remedies” [4, p. 32]. He goes on to insist that the épistémè of the twenty-first century must be based on the digital domain [4, p. 33], which

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is not limited to media and communication technologies alone,1 because contemporary technologies in medical, chemical, pharmaceutic, and military research are largely digitalized as well. Digital technologies cross other technological fields and transversely intersect with other currently developed and used technologies. Exploring technologies merely in terms of their positive or negative effects is an insufficient perspective. Additionally, or instead, we should consider the current concomitant reconfigurations of individuals and of the social and material environment—which is a space where transindividuation processes are realized and which is powered by the technologization of the world. This environment is a dense—social, cultural and material—space were individuation—that is, the process of forming a stable personality separate from one’s parents and others around—takes place in and through relations with various others, rather than in isolation, being “always at once psychic, collective and technical” [4, p. 33]. The technological reconfiguration of individuals and the technological reconfiguration of the environment are closely interconnected and locked in reciprocal interaction. The technological reconfiguration of individuals involves their organisms, consciousness, and everyday practices, and that of the world unfolds on the levels of structure, psycho-physical constitution, and consciousness, which results in a redrawing of the overall environment of the Earth as a material, cultural and social space. This process also goes the other way around, meaning that the technological reconfiguration of the environment affects individuals, as technological affordances are absorbed into their bodies and change their forms of functioning. Notably, Stiegler’s depiction passes over the material aspect, since he focuses on the socialization and transmission of knowledge conceived as immaterial: “relational digital technologies (…) must be understood as transformational technologies—not of matter but of that ‘material’ from which the social fabric is woven” [4, p. 29]. Advocating for “the spirit” rather than “the mind” and for apodictic knowledge rather than know-how, Stiegler is a faithful heir to the Enlightenment, putting rationality and abstract ideas before the experience of material reality. This deficit is redressed by the insights and frameworks proposed by other theorists, starting from Bruno Latour’s Actant-Network Theory [6], to the discussion of the agency of assemblages [7], to contemporary emphasis on the importance of locating the “cognitive centers” of assemblages [8]. All these approaches stress the material aspect and acknowledge various biological, technological, and mental actants co-acting in a dynamic and changeable network of intra-actions [9, p. 141].

1

The positive effect of media and communication technologies lies in connecting people, while their negative ramifications include the fact that states and corporations harness them to remotely control ever increasing masses of the global population (in some countries, such as China, the digital surveillance of society is tighter, while in others, for example in many countries in Africa or South America, the presence of digital surveillance is less pronounced). Another charge against media and communication technologies is that they change the modes of knowledge production, information exchange, and claims of validity or rather credibility. However, change, even if inevitable, need not necessarily be negative.

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In his influential book Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to ActorNetwork Theory and other writings, Latour argued that non-human elements should be included in the social studies, and criticized traditional social research for remaining all too often “without object” [6, p. 82]. He demonstrated that technical objects act in social spaces, whereby his argument did not return to technical determinism [6, p. 70], but instead drew a complex image of causality behind the facts occurring in the world. He juxtaposed the sociology of the social (limited to human social relations) [6, p. 238] and the sociology of associations of various—human and non-human—actors to highlight the need to investigate technologies, objects, and their temporary and changing interactions not merely as an isolated realm, but also in conjunction with other actors, including humans. These insights have been picked up and developed by posthuman studies, further dismantling the concept of a responsible agent in view of the realization that, as put by Jane Bennett, “an actant never really acts alone” and that “[i]ts efficacy or agency always depends on the collaboration, cooperation, or interactive interference of many bodies and forces” [7, p. 21]. However, if one endorses the idea of the distributive agency of assemblages, which according to Latour comprise diverse actants, it is impossible to attribute any specific responsibility or rights to anyone, because responsibility is dispersed and there is no single center of agency. Similar implications ensue from Karen Barad’s inspiring work in “agential realism,” which is “a holistic ontology grounded in quantum physics” that blurs “the distinctions—between the social and natural sciences” [10, p. 4]. Criticizing modernist views, Barad states that various elements of existence are entangled in dynamic intra-actions, outside of or prior to which there is no “independent, selfcontained existence” [9, p. ix]. Nevertheless, recently, attempts have been made in posthuman reflection on assemblages to identify an ethically and socially responsible agent, a bearer of responsibility and rights. For example, the existence of an effective, albeit provisional and changeable, cognitive center of decision that initiates actions of assemblages, has been recognized by Katherine Hayles in her concept of “cognitive assemblages” [8]. Observations on temporary human and non-human interactions involving objects possessed of some limited, relational, and temporal power afford a better understanding of material, social, and psychic transformations, but they leave out individual responsibility, which is a prerequisite of any ethics. Nevertheless, they help to draw an image of the social space including human and non-human actors, where the individuation process unfolds, producing effects for individuals and the collective alike, invariably intertwined with material technologies and objects.

2

Reconfigurations of the Transindividuational Space and Subjectivity

The structure and material aspects of technologies and bodies have a significant part in the overall reconfiguration of the transindividuational space by means of

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transformational technologies that trigger different forms of individuation. Forms of individuals’ mental construction and forms of social practices are technologically influenced and, at least in part, intentionally directed by corporations, which manage the contemporary world in lieu of puppet governments and seek to breed a certain kind of a person: the controlled and monitored consumer. The mental constructions (such as hyperlinking that replaces reasoning and fosters hybrid and changing identifications) and forms of social practices (such as immersion in social media) are anchored in individuals’ beliefs and habits, which encompass the material moment of existence besides the interpretative moment. The relation between mental constructions and social practices was clearly presented, for example, in Michel Callon’s analysis of car production and consumption in France in the 1970s. Callon studied the work of car engineers from Electricite de France (EDF) on the development of an innovative electric car to show that social practices, environmental issues, and technological discoveries were inseparably combined. The car engineers promoted a specific vision of the transformation of society from the industrial to the postindustrial stage, which gave them the reason to champion the development and implementation of electric cars. Their work was motivated by the pressure of social movements [11, p. 266] and also required cooperation on the material level, a factor that eventually prevented the implementation of the engineers’ venture. Today’s transindividuational space contains computers, servers, and electricity as important actants, all of which influence the entire acting network of the forms of self-identification, psychic constitution, and consciousness of the part of the global population that functions in two dimensions of reality: the material/physical one and the digital/online one. Ubiquitous in developed countries, this kind of existence can be called hybrid [12], as it intertwines the physical and digital levels of reality, both of which are social spaces where people construct objects and ideas, present themselves, act, and communicate being interconnected with each other. To come into being, digital reality requires some material objects, and physical reality is often managed digitally through software and applications, which are sometimes introduced through legal regulations and sometimes installed by individuals of their own accord. The online and physical layers of reality tend to be internally organized in different ways in different parts of the world, depending on the level of technological advancement. This diversification has been highlighted and is investigated by the researchers in the EU-funded project called Communities and Artistic Participation in Hybrid Environments (CAPHE) [13]. These are hybrid spaces in which subjectivities and relations among them are constituted and reconfigured. The individual rational subject is not the only possible or imaginable subject, because it is an outcome of a specific, culturally embedded process which is distinctive to the Western world. It is not the foundation of all individuation processes as such. The individuation process, or Bildung as an individual’s cultural and social formation, is impacted by various bio- and technological actants that invite specific approaches and uses, resulting in changes in the individual’s beliefs, practices and self-identification forms.

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Sometimes technological affordances encourage incorporating technology into one’s body, so that bio- and technological actants merge with material bodies. Some of these interventions are therapeutic, but others are undertaken without any medical reasons. The boundary between the therapeutic use of technology for restoring one’s lost abilities and/or perceptions and the use of technology for enhancement and the creation of new perceptions, knowledge, and communication channels is not clear and provokes a lot of discussion. At stake in this debate are the notions of the normal and the pathological, which cannot be objectively defined in a finite way [14], because in most cases “there isn’t a single ‘natural’ level of a given human disposition or capacity. There is considerable natural variation. Some people have more, some less” [15]. The normal and the pathological cannot be scientifically determined, because “there is no biological science of the normal. There is a science of biological situations and conditions called normal,” as Georges Canguilhem [16, p. 228] puts it. “Normal and pathological have no meaning on a scale where the biological object is reduced to colloidal equilibria and ionized solutions” [16, p. 110], but situations and conditions are anyway conceptualized as normal or pathological without any purely scientific meaning [16, p. 23]. Technical manipulations on the material structures of people’s bodies are not only about influencing physiological processes, but also about influencing people in their personal existence as psycho-spiritual, self-aware, and acting subjects. This is exemplified by Neil Harbisson and Moon Ribas, who have had implants put into their bodies whose operations indirectly cause changes in their self-identification, understanding of the world, and relations with humans and other species [17]. The physiological and technological aspects of their bodies are actants in the process of their individuation and in the general network of transindividuation (Fig. 1). As a result of interrelated developments, a new form of identity and subjectivity is emerging in today’s social space permeated with warfare technologies, biotechnologies, neuro-technologies, and media technologies. This subjectivity cannot identify itself (nor can it be defined) by reference to the species-specific body of a homo sapiens individual. Although the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights makes eligibility for human rights dependent on one’s belonging to the homo sapiens species [18], this perspective is already outdated and needs to be revised in view of, for example, technologically modified bodies supporting different kinds of perception, forms of communication, and modes of self-identification [19]. Reflection on reconfigured subjectivity must take into account complicated and dynamic patterns of transindividuation space and “thing-power” [7]. Such a view leads to the description of subjectivity that Rosi Braidotti proposed in her famous and influential book The Posthuman, with subjectivity depicted as nomadic, hybrid [20], and rooted in “[a] radically immanent intensive nomadic body [that] is an assemblage of forces, or flows, intensities and passions that solidify—in space— and consolidate—in time—within the singular configuration commonly known as an ‘individual’ (or rather: di-vidual) self” [21, p. 19]. While Braidotti’s vision

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Fig. 1 Concert on earthquakes, internal body sounds and sound portraits; Neil Harbisson, Moon Ribas, and support, Queens Museum, New York, 8 October 2016 (Photo by Aleksandra Łukaszewicz, from the author’s archive)

pictures subjectivity as fluid, it needs to be brought down to the ground and examined in terms of specific cases of subjectivity formation not based on homo sapiens, with recourse to a theoretical framework where the rational individual subject is replaced by a cognitive assemblage cooperating with and within other organic and technical, mental, and spiritual assemblages. Braidotti herself revisited the issue in Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics, where she addressed the themes of becoming a woman and of becoming the other [22]. Valuable though this contribution was, it was insufficient, because by dismissing the concept of the human, Braidotti in the same move dismissed responsible individual agency. Such agency is not necessarily bound up with the human, but may well reside in another kind of person, one embodied differently than in the homo sapiens body [23] and defined otherwise than within the Cartesian dualistic framework. What “the human” means has caused confusion over millennia and prompted fierce discussions on human nature. The human is viewed in relation to humanity (from the Latin humanitas), “which covers three meanings: the biological existence of the species, the broader sense of the various moral concepts of Enlightenment humanism, and the idea of humans’ inherent ability to have compassion for other humans” [24, p. 101]. The first meaning, reflected in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, is rather obsolete due to an array of material and functional changes in bodies belonging to the homo sapiens species. The second and third definitions refer to, respectively, humanistic and humanitarian values associated with the human. All these meanings are to a large extent rejected by Braidotti and her followers.

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Braidotti’s rejection of the human is precipitate and causes problems with defining the posthuman [23]. Discarding the idea of the human altogether makes it difficult to conceptualize agency, responsibility, and the foundation of ethics, including posthuman ethics. What Braidotti does is framing the human as a white, individualistic, rational, agentive male furnished with (certain) power and (certain) properties and then denouncing the thus-conceived human. Her next step is to reverse all these characteristics and envision the human as a multiple and visionary female of color sharing agency with others [21]. I may applaud this move and share Braidotti’s disgust with and distrust of the patriarchal organization of the world, but entirely abolishing the idea of the human erases the individual, who, while immersed in a network of relations and being a possibly changeable nexus in it, needs a possibility to ascribe and possess rights and duties along with a possibility to hold her/him/itself and others responsible. Without this, neither social functioning nor epistemic or ethical coherence is viable. The vision of the posthuman as defined though co-acting assemblages precludes attributing specific responsibility to anyone. From this perspective, Braidotti’s ethical reflection on sustainability [21] is to a large extent pointless. This is because she fails to explain why we should do anything in the first place if there is no one to be either praised or blamed for one or another thing that has occurred in the world due to multiple influences of various material and immaterial factors. The need of agency was noted by Katherine Hayles, whose book Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious (2017) argued for the recognition of cognitive assemblages including animate, inanimate, technological, and social elements and possessing cognitive centers in charge of the system as a whole. Even though her appraisal was based on the Automated Traffic Surveillance and Control System (ATSAC) in Los Angeles, the same properties can also be found in other systems, such as “public health systems, automobile traffic, and emergency and security networks” [25, p. 98]. ATSAC exemplifies “productive collaboration between human conscious decisions, human conscious recognition of patterns by both operators and drivers, and the technical cognitive nonconscious of the computer algorithms, processors, and databases” [8, p. 123]. Hayles treats those as cognitive assemblages in which “technical nonconscious cognition works with human capabilities to affect the lives of millions of urban inhabitants” [8, p. 121] and considers them morally responsible for this influence even if “moral agency is distributed among humans and nonhumans; moral actions and decisions are the products of human-technology associations” [26, p. 53].

3

The Possibility of Non-Human Persons and Moral Agents

Thematized as Valéry’s crisis of the mind, Husserl’s crisis of sciences, and Stiegler’s crisis of the spirit, confusion about the human, his/her/its knowledge and the ethical and social order, is perceived by Braidotti as a crisis of the humanities [27]. She tries to overcome it by passing from the human to the posthuman, as she blames the human for all the evil on the Earth. Admittedly, she defines the

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human in very narrow terms that can at most be traced back to about 2500 years ago, while the human has existed on the Earth for at least 100,000 years. In this perspective, the modern—Cartesian and Kantian—understanding of the human can only be approached as a provisory idea, a contestable notion. The human is more and less than and different from one historical definition. Before we develop the posthuman, we should examine the concept of the human in a period longer than 2500 years. The realization that animate and inanimate matter, ideas, practices, knowledges, and institutions—that is, material, cultural, technical, and spiritual aspects of existence—are interconnected, an insight articulated in various posthuman writings [7–9, 20, 28, 29] that emphasize the “ontological inseparability of intra-acting agencies” [9, p. 206], urges us to ponder the current reconfiguration of the world, in which technology is not just an instrument, but rather both the agent and the object of change. Such considerations should be further developed, because contemporary, not always human, persons that are moral agents and patients are inflected by technology. Crucially, moral agents and patients form a foundation for ethics. An attractive perspective was drawn by the recently deceased Joseph Margolis, who transposed the definitional question from the human onto the human person described as a social, encultured, enlanguaged, self-aware, and conscious being that developed in the course of nature-culture evolution from members of the homo sapiens species [30]. The focus on the person who is embodied in a particular form allows envisioning multiple forms of embodiment in which persons can function. Consequently, as I argue in my book Are Cyborgs Persons? An Account of Futurist Ethics [23], we may easily apply a post-Darwinian evolutionary perspective and think of human persons, cyborg persons, hybrid persons, robotic persons, and possibly also other persons active in social space. Persons in social and cultural space are also moral subjects, though their forms of embodiment may vary (morphological freedom is championed by the Transhumanist Party in the U.S. and stipulated in the Transhumanist Bill of Rights2 ); they interact with other actors in the transindividuational space and bring in their modes of perception, cognitions, and communication, including other-than-human ones. The subject of moral consideration is regarded as possessing agency and experiencing things (that is, as an agent and as a patient in Aristotelian terms); this view has been espoused in the cognitive sciences since a research study carried out by Heather M. Gray and colleagues [31]. Their famous experiment comprised 2040 U.S. participants, who were asked to compare pairs of 13 characters according to 18 attributes and 6 personal judgments. The characters to be compared were humans (e.g., a 5-month-old infant, an adult woman, a human in

2

Its current version is 3.0. Version 1.0 was written by Zoltan Istvan and presented to the Capitol on 14 December, 2015. Version 2.0 was developed by members of the U.S. Transhumanist Party and adopted via electronic vote on 25–31 December, 2016. Version 3.0 was drawn up by members of the U.S. Transhumanist Party and adopted via electronic vote on 2–9 December, 2018. For details, see https://transhumanist-party.org/tbr-3/.

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a vegetative state, a test subject), animals (a frog, a domestic dog, a wild chimpanzee), a dead woman, God (defined as the creator of the universe and the ultimate source of knowledge, power, and love), and a robot. The participants were shown pairs of figures together with their brief descriptions and photographs. The attributes included, among others, susceptibility pain, personality, awareness, morality, memory, and reflectivity. Personal judgments were related to liking the characters, the possibility of inflicting suffering on them, protecting them from destruction, making them happy, punishing them by death, and the possibility of them having a soul. The characters were grouped by Gray and colleagues along the axes of experience (e.g., hunger, pain, personality, awareness) and agency (e.g., self-control, morality, planning, reflection). This arrangement explicitly demonstrates that moral status is conferred based on our perception of the other as capable of intentional actions and of suffering, and that this status is not limited to human persons alone. Animals’ ability to suffer prompted Peter Singer to acknowledge them as moral patients, that is, subjects of moral consideration, similarly to young children [32]. However, besides subjects of moral consideration, there are agents that bear responsibility for their actions and have not only rights but also duties. Such agents are those that morally consider patients. These agents are also not necessarily human, because some human persons technologically and functionally enhance their embodiment and, as a result, cease to be human persons, nonetheless remaining citizens or legal persons. At the same time, a differently angled debate has been developing since the 1980s, with the moral agency of some animals at its core. Steve Sapontzis insists that an act, whether instinctual or conditioned, can be a response to moral good or evil, without necessarily entailing a meta-ethical level of discourse: “Although many animals possess sufficient sensitivity and intelligence to recognize virtues and to do virtuous deeds, they seem to lack the ability to lead a fully moral life dedicated to the attainment of an ideal” [33, p. 44]. This encourages recognizing various intermediary degrees of moral agency, which need not be either complete or none at all, but can also be partial, because “[a]lthough beings—human or not—lacking highly rational capacities may not be able to be moral philosophers or even full-fledged moral agents, they may still be able to be ethical or participate in virtue” [34, p. 4]. Similar insights were yielded by a study that Paweł Fortuna and myself carried out in 2021. Our respondents (322 Polish men and women) were asked to state what mental powers they believed different agents: a human person (Ken Feingold), a cyborg person (Neil Harbisson), an art-making robot (Ai-Da), a social robot (Pepper), an art-making chimpanzee (Lucy), and a painting algorithm (Aaron), had on the scale of agency and experience (see Fig. 1). Our comparison of their attributions indicates that “an entity’s moral status is fluid and subject to contextual influences; (…) not binary, but (…) gradable, contingent, and transitional.” This implies that a moral status can also be acquired or lost [35] (Fig. 2). Besides the increasingly frequent recognition of non-human agents as moral subjects—patients and, to a degree, agents—some non-human beings, such as dolphins in Indiaand orangutans in Argentina, have been granted legal personhood. In

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Fig. 2 Adjusted character factor scores on the dimensions of mind perception (Graphics by Paweł Fortuna, from the author’s archive)

May 2013, the Ministry of Environment in India officially recognized dolphins as “non-human persons” boasting (individual and social) personalities, highly developed forms of communication and a sense of morality. This legal decision entails that dolphins must not be held in captivity for entertainment, and that they have certain rights. This is in agreement with the Declaration of Rights for Cetaceans: Whales and Dolphins, which was announced by the Helsinki Group in May 2010 [36]. Also, in 2014, orangutans obtained the status of “non-human persons” in Argentina [37], starting with Sandra, a 29-year-old female orangutan from the zoological garden in Buenos Aires, being granted rights in recognition of her intelligence and sensibility. (As the AFADA—Argentina’s Association of Professional Lawyers for Animal Rights—lawyer Paul Buompadre claims, the court’s statement opens the door for conferring personhood on all other great apes and other sentient beings, too [38]). Other interesting cases of recognizing the personhood of non-humans include the android Sophie, constructed by Hong Kong-based Hanson Robotics and granted citizenship by Saudi Arabia in 2017, and discussions around ensuring certain legal rights for algorithms (similar to those enjoyed by corporations) [39]. The prime example is of course found in Neil Harbisson himself with an antenna implanted into his brain, whose individuation process involves technology integrated with and operating in his body. Stiegler writes that in the context of transformational technologies of transindividuation, a new type of psychic and collective individuation could emerge, constituting the basis of a process of the adaption

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of becoming, and fighting against every attempt to merely “adapt” the psychic and the social to this technology [4, p. 38].

While such individuation proceeds in the psychic and collective dimension, it also inevitably hinges on the materiality of the technologized environment as a coactant. Harbisson, who identifies himself not as a human but as a cyborg, is an excellent case in point. Having had a UK passport with a photograph of himself with an antenna since 2004, Harbisson is claimed to be the first officially recognized cyborg [40], as his different-than-biological embodiment is represented in the legal document that certifies Harbisson’s status as a legal person and a UK citizen. The antenna is not a prosthesis but a new bodily organ that supplies him with new perceptions of the environment, since it enables Harbisson to hear color and light frequency through bone conduction and to receive sound e-mails directly to his head. Functioning with such an organ and its software changes Harbisson’s system of beliefs about the world and reconfigures his relations with others, not only with humans but also with other species. Such re-drawn relationships can appear when perceptual experiences are shared by a cyborg (rather than a human) and an animal, such as when Harbisson together with a cat focuses on infrared light, which is invisible to people [17]. Harbisson’s subjectivity is not a human one; it is transformed on all the levels listed above, from Stiegler’s notions of psychic, collective, and technical dimensions to the material and organic strata co-acting with those. This is an effect of transformational technologies.

4

A Person or a Human? Humanistic or Humane?

The reconfiguration of subjectivity is bound up with the reconfiguration of the environment and of living organism, which mutually influence each other. Technologies used by agents that constitute the social space transform them, making them not only human, but also non-human as a result of the absorption of operating, often digital and/or virtual, technologies into living human bodies. However, there is no consensus either on how to refer to such agents or on how to classify them, amidst a plethora of divergent views and competing terms. This discursive vacillation is epitomized in my discussion with Steve Fuller on whether we should retain the concept of the human even within the Humanity 2.0 perspective and extend it onto more beings, without founding it on the biological substratum, or whether we should talk about different kinds of persons, that is, persons embodied differently than the human and having other mindsets and worldviews [23]. Fuller argues for preserving the concept of the human in view of its ideological history rooted in the classical world and Christian tradition, where it was a “criteria-driven concept” based on the educability of candidate humans [41, p. 19]. I argue for a more open legal concept of a person and a moral agent, because talking about cyborg persons, hybrid persons, and animal persons would be much easier, more specific, and less dominating than talking about all the others as “humans” incorporated into our moral community. On this issue, Fuller sides with Stiegler, who

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insists that inherent technicity leading to transcendence is a defining characteristic of the human, so that all other kinds of beings emerging from the human are humans as well. However, this perspective seems too reductionist and imperious to me. There is no agreement on the categories for recognizing a responsible agent, a person, or a citizen, and this lack must be urgently redressed, because agents, persons, and citizens we encounter are not always and not necessarily embodied in a homo sapiens body. This situation calls for inventing a certain test, one that might be called Turing Test 2.0 in reference to Alan M. Turing’s initial experiment [42]. The question is what criteria should be adopted for granting a being the status of a person (or of a human, depending on one’s terminological preferences), that is, what characteristics or abilities a being should display to be eligible for this status. Such attribution must not be based either on the material, biological organism of a homo sapiens individual or on equating a citizen and a consumer, which is characteristic of consumer societies (which are slowly coming to an end, with the depletion of resources, the decline of the global economy, the war spreading in Europe, and the restrictions imposed in the wake of the COVID-19 outbreak). The recognition of personhood or humanness must be grounded in a set of values. Analogically, the reconfiguration of epistemic, social, and material systems should be oriented on a set of values, because individuals are entangled in all these systems. The values directly or indirectly expressed in the writings of posthuman theorists vary from humanistically conceived human values stemming from the tradition of classical thought to humane values understood in a humanitarian way and sensitive to suffering-prone beings. Humanistic and humane values are two sets of values espoused in the two important fields of posthuman studies known as, respectively, transhumanism and posthumanism. Francesca Ferrando writes: The label “posthuman” is often evoked in a generic and all-inclusive way to indicate any of these different perspectives, creating methodological and theoretical confusion between experts and non-experts alike. Specifically, “posthuman” has become an umbrella term to include Posthumanism (Philosophical, Cultural, and Critical); Transhumanism (in its variants as Extropianism, Liberal Transhumanism, and Democratic Transhumanism, among other currents); New Materialisms (a specific feminist development within the posthumanist frame); the heterogenous landscape of Anti-humanism; the field of Object-Oriented Ontology; Posthumanities and Metahumanisties [28, p. 1].

The major difference between transhumanism and posthumanism lies in their different attitudes to the heritage of the Enlightenment [28, p. 3]. Posthumanist thought altogether dismisses the legacy of the Enlightenment to create a reverse image of reality based on openness and interdependence [20]. For its part, transhumanist thought continues the Enlightenment tradition, albeit transformed and historically corrected, and cultivates its basic values of rationality, individual freedom, and a drive to perfection [43]. It follows humanistic reflection and stresses the importance of education [43] and self-transcendence by means of inherent technicity aimed at achieving a certain ideal of excellence. In the humanistic and

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transhumanist perspectives, education is the groundwork for the formation of the human, as learning, both institutionalized and non-institutional but socially channeled, is instrumental in the formation of a self. Humanistic education is founded on the freedom of rational inquiry, and transhumanist reflection develops this view. According to the transhumanist thinker Steve Fuller, “Humanity” thus became the name of the project by which Homo sapiens as an entire species engaged in (…) ontological self-transformation. The idea implied here, achievable perfection, is the source of modern notions of progress, ranging from scientific realist attitudes that “the true” is something on which all sincere inquirers ultimately converge (regardless of theoretical starting point) to more general notions of progress, whereby “the true” itself is held to converge ultimately with “the good,” “the just,” “the beautiful,” etc. in some utopian social order [43, p. 81].

This ideal of perfection has been religiously conceptualized as the return to the lost divine condition that can be experienced on the moral, cognitive, and/or bodily levels. This view was especially embraced by heresies, such as Arianism and Pelagianism [44, pp. 44–61; 45, pp. 275–321], but it has more generally found traction in Protestantism, though not in Catholicism, preoccupied with sin and guilt as it has been [46]. Arianism’s central pursuit was to reclaim the divine nature of humans by disciplining the mind and freeing it from bodily limitations, while Pelagianism denied that human nature had been corrupted by Adam’s sin and stressed that humans were born with a capacity to perfect themselves by acting morally and striving towards salvation [44]. Fuller associates the Pelagian heresy with various “materialist” projects of transforming and reshaping the material conditions of human life to extend our mental powers and possibly restore the perfect state of the Earth. Georg Theiner shows that the traditional perception of technologies as tools for perfecting oneself and the world goes back to John Scotus Eriugena’s notion of “mechanical arts” as “as a means for recovering the corporeal respects of our divine likeness which were lost as a result of the fall” [45] and Roger Bacon’s idea of technology as contributing to the human quest for salvation. The desired perfection mirrors the supreme characteristics ascribed to God: omnipotence, omniscience, and ultimate goodness, which correspond to bodily, cognitive, and moral enhancements made possible by contemporary media-, bio-, and neurotechnologies.

5

More Human or Less Inhuman

While one can intentionally use technologies to perfect oneself, one must also accept the risks spawned by free, institutionally uncontrolled interventions into one’s organism. The perfection one pursues is usually physical or cognitive, but it can supposedly also be moral. Fortuna builds on Dana Klisanin in his recent book on positive cyberpsychology [47] to address cyber-kindness and digital-altruism as new kinds of benevolence engendered in functioning with digital technologies and within them [48] and to explore the possibility of technologically enhancing

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human virtues: wisdom and knowledge, courage, humanity, justice, temperance, and transcendence. These capture 24 human-beneficial traits as systematized by Christopher Peterson and Martin E. P. Seligman [49] (e.g., curiosity, creativity— wisdom and knowledge; bravery, persistence—courage; kindness, love—justice; prudence, self-control—temperance; gratitude, appreciation of beauty—transcendence). Moral improvement integral to the humanistic view overlaps to some extent with the other understanding of the human values, as humane rather than humanistic. Humane values also go back to ancient thought, but are embedded in philosophies of non-European cultures, such as China and India. For example, Buddhism shows the universal interconnectedness of everything that exists and foregrounds the attitude of care [50]. Such a mindset emerged far later in the Western world, including Europe, and can be discerned in Saint Francis’ approach in the Christian Church and then in David Hume’s [51] and John Stuart Mill’s [52] utilitarian ethics aimed at eliminating suffering from the world, a model that opened the door for considering animals philosophically as moral subjects and is upheld in contemporary posthuman views. In developing her posthuman vitalist ethics based on the affirmative approach [53], Braidotti has sought to found a materialist, collective, vital, embodied, and relational ethics, which can be regarded as humane, although it lacks an agential component, a decision-making and responsibilitybearing element. The affirmative approach to nature, the Earth, the collective, and being as such results in thinking of a just and peaceful future. Another contemporary ethical approach to the “intimate technology,” which reconfigures biological, technological, cultural, and social modes of existence along with consciousness/spirituality, comes from the field of political science and politics of innovation. It was proposed by Rinie van Est, a Dutch political scientist researching digital society and democratic information society, who advocates the “humane use of human-like machines” [54, p. 67] by people becoming cyborgs. He recognizes the liminal problem of how far “people should be free to self-realize via improvement through technology” [54, p. 63] and identifies serious challenges to the concept and experience of freedom posed by technologies, which can be used, for example, to spy on the public (as revealed by Edward Snowden who showed that the U.S. National Security Agency systematically employed its computer program PRISM [Planning Tool for Resource Integration, Synchronization, and Management] to intercept telephone and Internet data, paying millions to companies, such as Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo, to obtain access to the information). With these insights, van Est focuses on the humane values that should guide us in the social process of technological reconfiguration, which he understands as justice, kindness, openness, and other positive qualities. Stiegler’s take on the terminological problem of values is not to address either humanistic or humane values, but, instead, to stress the need to be a non-inhuman being [1, pp. 83–84], which combines some of the positively defined values from the two sets. The constitution of individual subjectivity may be based on a human or non-human substratum. Stiegler’s concept of individuation suggests that the human being is co-constituted by technology, and that as a result of technicity,

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there is no essence to being human [1, p. 261]. Consequently, a non-human emerging from a human is a human in his/her/its essence understood in an agential way as transcending any set of conditions and beliefs. However, an individual’s technological reconfiguration may initiate the individuation process—as it did for Harbisson—leading to his/her/its self-definition as a cyborg person and not as a human person. Such a reconfiguration does not necessarily defy the prevailing set of values, which Stiegler describes by negation as non-inhuman. It is so, because both human and nonhuman persons may be adjectivally human or inhuman, that is, they can pursue transcendence and agency, and partake in some ethical community.

6

Conclusion

The impact of warfare, media, communication, bio-, and neurotechnologies affects not only the materiality and structure of organisms, but also individuals’ wellbeing, behavior, sense-based interaction with the environment, and ways of relating to others. These influences unfold on the levels of individual individuation, society, and culture, invariably involving material elements in the processes at hand. These processes must not be just analyzed; they must also be guided on the basis of certain values, which are usually referred to as “human” values. However, in the literature (especially in posthumanism), there is a confusion about and debates on “(the/a) human,” concerning both what it is/means and whether it should be understood as an adjective or as a noun. In dispelling this confusion, we may rightly ask (1) how we should refer to ourselves, whether as humans, posthumans, agents, or persons; and (2) what we mean when we use “human” as a predicate. The term “the human” has long been embedded in religious, natural, and cultural discourses, which define the human in opposition to animals and things. Today’s experiences, developments, and observations challenge such an idea of the human by showing its close affinities with both the animal and technological worlds. This urges us either to extend the concept of the human onto non-human beings (as proposed by Fuller and Stiegler); or to abandon the term “the human” for the sake of the indisputably unclear term “the posthuman”; or, finally, to use the word “human” rather as an adjective to depict the homo sapiens embodiment or values traditionally regarded as human: humanistic or humane. In my view, instead of struggling over how we should define the posthuman, we would be better advised to think of “human” as an adjective rather as a noun. This may help us to abandon metaphysical essentializations and consider specific characteristics or values that we decide to cherish and promote. Core Messages . Technologies have a significant part in individuation (the formation of a stable personality), as they transform social and material transindividuational spaces, where the processes of individuation take place.

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. In hybrid spaces intertwining physical and digital realities, subjectivities and relations among them are constituted and reconfigured. . The understanding of the human as an individual of the homo sapiens species or as conceived of by Descartes and Kant is outdated, but the rejection of the notion of “human” as such is precipitate. . From an evolutionary post-Darwinian perspective, we may think not so much about the human (as a noun), as rather about human and non-human persons, such as cyborg persons, hybrid persons, and robotic persons as experiencing, active, and responsible. . While recognizing the diversity of kinds of persons, we should choose specific human values—humanistic or humane—to pursue and act by.

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44. Fuller S, Lipi´nska V (2014) The proactionary imperative; a foundation for transhumanism. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, New York 45. Theiner G (2021) The extended mind: a chapter in the history of transhumanism. In: Hipólito I, Clowes RW, Gärtner K (eds) The mind-technology problem: investigating minds, selves and 21st century artefacts. Springer, pp 275–321 46. Fuller S (2007) Science vs religion. Intelligent design and the problem of evolution. Polity Press, Cambridge, Malden 47. Fortuna P (2021) Optimum. Idea cyberpsychologii pozytywnej. PWN, Warszawa 48. Klisanin D (2011) Is the internet giving rise to new forms of altruism? Media Psychol Rev [online] 3(1) 49. Peterson C, Seligman MEP (2004) Character strengths and virtues. A handbook and classification. Oxford University Press, New York 50. Peetush A (2018) The ethics of interconnectedness: Charles Taylor, No-self, and Buddhism. In: Davies GF (eds) Ethics without self, Dharma without Atman. Springer, Cham, pp 235–251 51. Hume D (1975) Enquiries concerning human understanding and concerning the principles of morals. Clarendon Press, Oxford 52. Mill JS (1859) On liberty. Parker, London 53. Braidotti R (2017) Generative futures: on affirmative ethics. In: Radman A, Sohn H (eds) Critical and clinical cartographies. Architecture, robotics, medicine, philosophy. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, pp 288–308 54. Van Est R, Rerimassie V, van Keulen I, Dorren G, (2014) Intimate technology. The battle for our body and behaviour. Rathenau Instituut

Aleksandra Łukaszewicz Professor in Humanities in the field of Culture Studies, holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy, specializing in philosophical aesthetics and the theory of culture and art. Vice-President of the Polish Society of Aesthetics. Recipient of awards and grants, including a Ko´sciuszko Foundation grant for research on art, culture, and aesthetics in the work of Joseph Margolis, and a grant to support her book project on the theory of cyborg persons from the perspective of the metaphysics of culture: Are Cyborgs Persons? An Account of Futurist Ethics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021). Coordinator of two international research consortiums: TICASS (2017–2021) and TPAAE (2020–2023) that carry out projects funded by the European Commission under the MSCA-RISE H2020 program dedicated to visual communication and visual literacy, and to art and art education from a transcultural perspective. Coordinator on behalf of the Polish Society of Aesthetics (as a partner in the research consortiums) of the Communities and Artistic Participation in Hybrid Environments (CAPHE) project (2022–2026).

8

The eXtended Uni/Meta/Verse (XV) and the Liminal Spaces of Body, Ownership, and Control Steve Mann

This beach was of course built in the form that nature would take it… you can throw stones into the lake which is what the children particularly love doing, and of course, the lake always brings them back. Michael Hough, landscape architect of Ontario Place

Abstract

The “vironment” is the liminal space and boundary between the environment (our surroundings) and the invironment (ourselves). Examples of vironments include clothing, “wearables” (wearable computing technologies), and veyances (conveyances versus deconveyances), such as wheelchairs, rollerblades, bicycles, e-bikes, cars, paddleboards, and boats. Manfred Clynes, who coined the word “cyborg,” held that his favorite example of “cyborg” was a person riding a bicycle. A person navigating a vessel is also a cyborg. The word “cyborg” is short for “cybernetic organism,” and the word “cybernetic” originates from the Greek word κυβερν ητ ´ ης (“kybern¯et¯es” = “helmsman” or “rudder,” the same root word as in “governor” and “government”). In this way, we define “cyborg” as a closed-loop feedback (cybernetic) symbiosis between human and machine in which the machine is a vironment. The world’s first cyborgs existed more than a million years ago, long before the invention of the wheel and clothing, predating the emergence of homo sapiens. Being the first vironments, vessels

S. Mann (B) University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada e-mail: [email protected] URL: http://WaterHCI.com; http://Mersivity.com; http://OpenXV.org MannLab Canada, Toronto, Canada © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Michałowska (ed.), Humanity In-Between and Beyond, Integrated Science 16, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27945-4_8

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hold a special place in cyborg history, at the nexus of water, humans, and technology. Humans and technology form a liminal cyborg space, and humans and water also form a liminal space. The beach is, in a sociopolitical sense, where we are at the liminal state of undress between clothed and naked, at the social boundary between lacking and demonstrating proper decorum, and at the territorial boundary between public property and private property, where security guards or private property owners often clash with beachgoers over rules, rights, and responsibilities of land ownership versus the navigable waters of maritime law. More generally, the bath, whether it be the beach or the bathtub, or public pool, or spa, is the liminal space between cyborg and non-cyborg, where we shed our vironments and vestments and become one with the waters. Taking to the waters, which most often requires the shedding of our clothes and other technologies, brings us back to a primordial state, akin to the way we were in the womb. The new field of Water-Human–Computer Interaction (WaterHCI) began 54 years ago (1968) as an exploration of this liminal space where technology meets cyborg/non-cyborg liminality. Some of the technologies we have developed over the last 54 years extend the human mind and body in the liminal space between reality, the metaverse, and society, thus defining a new entity we call the eXtendiVerse, (XV) and it is no coincidence that its last seven letters spell “diverse.” Keywords

Water-Human–Computer interaction . Cyborgs Metaverse . eXtendiVerse . Veillance . Veyance

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Humanistic intelligence

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Introduction: Vestments, Veyances, Virtuality, and the Vironment

The eXtended uni/meta/Verse (XV) is a social (shared) eXtended Reality (XR) space. Its reciprocal is called Body-Ownership-Control (BOC) Space. In this chapter, these two concepts (XV and BOC Space) are presented in the context of humans, the elemental medium (in the sense of elemental media as conceptualized by John Durham Peters in The Marvelous Clouds), water, and technology, and their liminal spaces [1, 2]. Liminal spaces exist in the environment around us, as well as between us and the environment. A beach is one of the best examples of the former liminal space. Beaches are often hotly contested spaces, defining geographical boundaries between land, which tends to fall under land ownership laws, and navigable waters, which are often more free (less owned). A beach is where the three states-ofmatter—solid (“earth” for the most part, i.e., the ground, whether it be pebbles or sand), liquid (water for the most part), and gas (air)—meet along a line (the coastline). One example, pictured in Fig. 1, is Teachbeach at Ontario Place, which is located within the downtown core of the City of Toronto, in the province of

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Fig. 1 Beaches are physically, geographically, socially, and politically liminal spaces at the boundary of “earth,” (i.e., sand or pebbles) water, and air (the three states-of-matter: solid, liquid, and gas), as well as the boundary between public and private property. Here, adjoining Ontario Place, a province-owned private corporation, is downtown Toronto’s only beach, which is also Toronto’s cleanest beach. While “NO SWIMMING” signs are posted on the adjoining land, Ontario Place in fact neither owns the water, nor has any jurisdiction over it, thus having no legal right whatsoever to enforce what people do beyond its geographical boundaries. In the photo, a guard from the security company Neptune attempts to be the God of “NO SWIMMING”

Ontario, Canada. Ontario is home to Lake Superior, the world’s largest freshwater lake by surface area. The Great Lakes hold about 80% of North America’s freshwater, and in fact about 21% of the world’s freshwater, so it has been argued that Ontario is the “water capital of the world,” and that, as far as cities go, Toronto being the capital of Ontario is, as a city, the world’s water capital [3]. Ontario Place is a venue in Toronto that was designed as a kind of public cottage for people who did not have their own cottages. It consisted of an amusement park (now abandoned) and futuristic aquatic buildings, which I affectionally call the “OPods.” Each OPod is anchored by four central columns that extend 105 feet off the lake, and are fixtured into concrete caissons deeply buried into the lake bed, while also being suspended from above by steel cables. Some form of barrier was needed to protect the OPods from the harsh effects of being in the open water. The barrier was provided by three artificial islands. One of them, the West island, became a popular spot for swimmers, where a beach formed unintentionally, never becoming official. Over time, the lake has deposited pebbles on the beach, and since there is no sand and the mainland is remote, the water is crystal-clear there. In a sense, ideal beach conditions (the cleanest, clearest water, shelter, solitude, etc.) arose here for a number of reasons. Besides the purity and clarity of the water, the

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beach faces South, so it is sheltered from the noise of the city and boasts a natural microclimate that is calm and warm. As a number of the buildings at Ontario Place became abandoned, the Ontario government established a private corporation called Ontario Place Corporation to maintain the space which is often rented out for private functions. However, swimmers have continued to use the beach there, and a large community has grown around this space. Interestingly, the official Ontario Place website states: “Swimming is not allowed anywhere at Ontario Place.” “NO SWIMMING” signs are posted throughout, and security guards are present to tell people not to swim. However, the lake is not part of Ontario. Lakes are generally under the purview of the Port Authority (municipal) or of federal agencies. Thus, the Province (Ontario) has no legal jurisdiction over the water. Consequently, over the years, there has been a steady tension between the officials of the Ontario Place Corporation and the swimmers. For example, on 1 July 2020, when a number of swimmers were in the water and a guard came by to demand that they come out of the water, one of them said: “What are you going to do, give me a fine?” and just stood her ground. The guard called for backup, and more guards came, but the swimmers refused to get out of the water. As the guards had no legal jurisdiction, they left after some time [personal observation made by the author]. In this way, the swimmers won an important landmark battle. On another occasion, the Corporation rented out the parking lot for a concert and also decided to close the entire 155 acres (approx. 60 hectares) of parkland, which the parking lot serviced. At this time, the author and a number of others resolved to swim to the beach from the mainland, which meant getting there without passing through the heavily guarded bridges and foot paths. Initially hostile when the swimmers arrived at the beach, the Ontario Place staff became very polite as they realized that the swimmers were wearing video cameras recording and live-streaming the entire interaction. It is widely held that the beach, up to the high water mark, is public property, and that it is fair and reasonable to access it from the water. Nobody can own the beach! On a defining third occasion, the lake was “closed” to vessels for the annual air show, with boats not allowed into the part of the lake around downtown Toronto. However, a number of paddlers (including the author) were able to paddle in the water, close to the shore. None of the police or other personnel attempted to stop us. Paddleboards are an example of a liminal veyance. Legally, paddleboards have been defined as “vessels” so that paddlers can be required to carry a lifejacket, a whistle, a rope, and the like, as safety equipment. But, mathematically, a paddleboard is not a vessel since it is, as a rule, a convex hull incapable of holding water. This legal limbo can work both ways, though. This is exemplified by the case of a paddleboarder in a “NO SWIMMING” area. Because a person can never be “in” a paddleboard, there is a loosely defined idea of being on or near the board. Since much of paddleboarding involves falling off the board and swimming back to the board, the legal designation “vessel” actually works to allow swimming in a “NO SWIMMING” area. Also, anywhere that vessels are allowed, swimmers must also be allowed if they are with a paddleboard. In this way, one official narrative (paddleboard = vessel) works to reverse another official narrative (“NO

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SWIMMING”). Thus, we have constructed the concept of Minimum Viable Vessel (MVV) [4], a sociopolitical analog to the philosophical concept embodied in the ship of Theseus paradox. The MVV is, in a sense, a reciprocal to the Cyborg Rights movement outlined in the Code of Ethics on Human Augmentation [5], as the struggle is now going on for the right to entry (into the lake) with no cyborg prosthesis (i.e., without a vessel), while the original fight is for the right to wear cyborg technology. In this way, we now realize that “cyborg rights” need to be two-sided and secure the right to choose the amount of technology, that is, the right to choose to be or not to be a cyborg. The right to swim is, in a sense, an inverse cyborg right, meaning that vessels are almost always allowed in the water, but people—that is, non-cyborgs—are not. For example, to get to Toronto Island, one needs to either “pay the ferryman” or be a yacht owner or otherwise have access to a vessel. This is a form of discrimination against non-cyborgs, since a place is designated from which non-cyborgs are barred. Interestingly, when swimming from Ontario Place to Toronto Island, the nearest beach is Hanlan’s, which is one of only two official nude beaches in Canada (the other being 4269 km away in British Columbia). A related question one might ask is how far one can swim from Hanlan’s before its clothing-optional aura fades out. Bathing attire (and maybe a swim cap plus a tow-float) may in a sense be regarded as a Minimum Viable Vessel (MVV). Obviously, we would want brightly colored swimsuits, swim caps, and supersize tow-floats for safety. Most of us actually use a paddleboard as a tow-float, because it is big enough to be noticed by other vessels, and we never swim alone. In practice, we have several eye-catching swimsuits, swim caps, and paddleboards, all moving together, so as to be safely visible to navigating vessels. The argument here is really about freedom to choose one’s own boundary between the environment (our surroundings) and the invironment (self). Our proposal is to define a new branch of human rights generally pertaining to the right to use or not to use one’s cyborg protheses. The simple example of the right-to-swim touches on the most fundamental aspect of cyborg being, namely morphological freedom, that is, the right to choose one’s technological prostheses or the lack thereof . Crucially, non-cyborg rights go beyond mere human rights. The right to swim benefits everyone, including people who have no desire to ever set foot or toe or body into the lake. For instance, swimmers’ rights actually protect our supply of clean fresh drinking water. Swimmers are known to be the best line of defense against pollution, because the lake itself has no rights, and fish have no rights either, but humans do. Consequently, as soon as humans are in the water, the water has rights, and pollution must stop. Environmentalism and the environment in general are receiving a great deal of attention in the literature and everyday life today. This attention focuses on the natural environment and other environments, such as the classroom environment, the urban environment, the prison environment, the home environment, and so on. Broadly speaking, the environment is that which surrounds us: everything that is not us is the environment. Much less-discussed is the “invironment.” The invironment is defined as us, ourselves. Although there is a rise in the field of “wearables,”

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“mindfulness” (e.g., InteraXon Muse), and health technologies, these are seldom presented as the counterpart to environmentalism, and explicit comparisons across the boundary between the environment and the invironment are rarely explored in the literature. Let us consider the liminal space between the environment and the invironment. Such spaces range from completely enveloping boundaries, such as a space suit, which separates an astronaut from outer space, one of the most extreme environments in existence, to less fully enwrapping ones, such as a raft, which only partially separates a paddler from the aquatic environment. This liminal space between the environment and the invironment, whether sharply, or somewhat fuzzily, or only partially demarcated, is called the “vironment.” Examples of vironments include clothes, cars, boats, wheelchairs, bikes, and an array of other cyborg implements and appliances. While even less-discussed than the invironment, the vironment is an extremely important aspect to consider in the study of cyborgs and liminality. We, as humans, tend to think of the vironment as part of us. This inclination is vividly reflected in two familiar examples: (1) when there is a collision or allision between two vessels, we commonly hear “You hit me!” rather than “Your boat hit my boat,” and the response is similar with cars, bikes, and other vironments. Indeed, pedestrians would also not likely say “Your clothes hit my clothes,” when they bump into one another; (2) in cinema and storytelling, when hypothetical machines that transport people through time or space are featured, the protagonists’ clothes generally travel with them, whereas other items in their environment do not. Sean Keogh writes in “Bottoms Up: A Cheeky Look at Life”: “Very funny, Scotty. Now beam me up my clothes.” Thus, instances abound in which we think of the vironment as part of us, that is, as part of the environment, rather than part of the environment. At the same time, there are counter-examples, including handcuffs, leg irons, the Oregon boot, and straitjackets. In these counter-examples, agency is not with the wearer, and consequently these vironments may be regarded as part of the environment, such as a prison environment, a police environment, or a custodial environment.

2

The Body-Ownership-Control (BOC) Space

There are numerous technologies and research efforts at the nexus of the human and its environment (i.e., at the invironment/environment nexus), and several attempts have been made to develop a taxonomy of these different technologies along the dimensions of the physical body, ownership, and control. For example, the Mann Body-Ownership-Control (BOC) Plane was presented as such a taxonomy in a paper published in 2001 [6] (see Fig. 2). About 20 years later, others have also used the same 2D plane [7], and the red annotation on the leftmost chart in Fig. 2 correlates these contributions. Central to understanding cyborg prostheses is the extent to which we regard such technologies as part of ourselves or of the environment, along the three axes of vironment or the physical scale (reciprocal of “wearability”), veillance (reciprocal of owenrship), and virtuality (reciprocal

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Fig. 2 The Body-Ownership-Control (BOC) plane, volume, and space

of control, for example, the centralized “big data” rights management versus distributed systems that subvert centralized ownership authority, etc.) [8]. Cyborg technologies as a field of study represent a new way of thinking characterized by the outer regions of Fig. 2 in the left (2D) diagram or the inner regions in the right (3D) diagram. (In the right diagram, the axis directions are reversed, as these quantities are the reciprocals of those in the left diagram.) In this scheme, the cyborg technologies that are owned, operated, and controlled by the bearer represent the ideal that we pursue. Within the space of BOC, we can understand vironmentalism as a human-rights issue, specifically involving the right to wear or otherwise use a prosthetic device such as a camera, whether as a seeing aid, a memory aid, or the like, as well as the right to be free of such prostheses if one chooses so (e.g., the right to swim). This in a sense entails a morphological freedom to choose one’s own form. Indeed, much of cyborg art and culture might be better understood if seen through the “lens” of vironmentalism and its close synergy with morphological freedom. Many cyborg technologies exist in the virtual world and as human augmentation, which fuels an ongoing debate regarding VR (Virtual Reality) versus AR (Augmented Reality). We can think of Physical Reality (PR) as the real world in which we live, made up of atoms. As the Greek word “atom” begins with the letter alpha, we might represent physical reality as falling along an axis labeled by the letter alpha. VR may be regarded as falling along a second axis, say, beta for “bits.” “Bits” are meant here in the sense derived from Claude Shannon, as “Binary unITS” of information which can be analog or digital. VR can, of course, be entirely analog and, indeed, when the notion of VR was introduced in the context of theatre by Antonin Artaud in 1938 [9], it was analog. If we think of the plane defined by the alpha and beta axes, the more recent concept of Augmented Reality (AR), launched in the 1960s (e.g., Ivan Sutherland [10]), may be regarded as combining reality and virtuality, that is, not aligned with either of the two axes, but running out in the plane defined there between. Whether something

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is AR, VR, or a mixture of these is a perennial object of debates, so the concept of mixed reality has also entered the discussion. However, some technologies cannot be described as a mixture of the virtual and the physical (virtual reality, VR and physical reality, PR). For example, High Dynamic Range (HDR) imaging attempts to reach beyond reality toward something we might call hyper-reality or what provides humans with super-human vision. There are also technologies that allow us to see and photograph electromagnetic radio waves. As these go beyond VR and AR, there is ongoing (and often uselessly confusing) debate about the plethora of various realities. These disputes have been answered by XR (eXtended Reality) as an overarching concept which proffers that cyborg prostheses extend our human senses and capabilities [11]. The idea has sparked a movement of its own, producing organizations such as the Council on eXtended Intelligence (IEEE CXI, of which the author is a founding member). Many of us at the IEEE have decided to embrace the concept of XR as the overarching generalization of which VR, AR, PR, and mixed reality are special cases. In this sense, we regard “X” as a general variable that covers and extends the entire “Atoms-Bits” plane. Thus, XR is a proper superset of each of the other “realities” (VR, AR, PR, and mixed reality), proper in the sense that XR also extends beyond the other realities. Much recent talk has been of the metaverse as a “digital reality.” We insist, however, that it is being-connected, rather than being-digital, that defines or should define our collective experience in a shared XR space. For example, we can realize many of the XR desiderata by analog (continuous) means. Therefore, what we really seek is a shared collective persistent XR, which we name the eXtendiVerse (XV). Just as VR can be implemented by analog technologies, such as wearable head-up displays that use analog NTSC television signals, there is no requirement that the technology be digital. This is not so much a moral/ethical requirement as a taxonomoical/taxonomological/ontological one. XV is not just virtual. It includes all cyborg technologies that extend our human senses and communication capabilities, such as, for example, when we swim in groups and stay in touch with one another using real-time shared kolympography on underwater head-up swimglass. Such an experience is “undigital” in the sense that it feels very much continuous (non-discrete, non-quantized) in both real and virtual spaces. To restate, we define the cyborg in terms of a closed-loop feedback system with a vironment, and a vessel or a bicycle considerably differs from a tool such as a hammer, which is not part of one’s vironment. The long-term adaptation in the course of which a vironment evolves into a cyborg technology is premised not only on the constancy of its use, but also on a more continuous and predictable feedback loop. This feedback loop in the context of cyborg technology and BOC Space produces what is known as Humanistic Intelligence (abbreviated as H. I., HI, HInt, or H. Int.). Minsky et al. [12] define HI as intelligence that arises when a human being is in the feedback loop of a computational process in which the human and the computer are inextricably intertwined. A continuous rather than discrete feedback system is implicit in the design of HI, thus favoring either an analog system or a digital system with enough precision to mimic an analog response.

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In Fig. 2, the plot to the left shows the 3-dimensions of Body, Ownership, and Control collapsed down to two dimensions. This 2-dimensional space forms a taxonomy in four quadrants, or, in 3-dimensions, 8 octants. In general, BOC Space with its categories can be employed to sort various technologies. Suppose, for example, that a burglar breaks into a police officer’s home, and the officer owns handcuffs and a gun. Suppose that the burglar overpowers the officer, grabs her gun, and puts the officer’s own handcuffs on her. He then proceeds to steal the officer’s gun and other items while she’s handcuffed. In this case, the officer owns the handcuffs, and the handcuffs are wearable. But the officer is not in control of the situation. Thus, the technology in this situation falls into the Body + Ownership + non-Control octant of the taxonomy. To the right is shown reciprocal BOC Space, where the three axes (alpha, beta, and gamma) denote, respectively, the physical scale (reciprocal of Body), the informatic scale (reciprocal of Control), and the social scale (reciprocal of Ownership). The upper right quadrant of the leftmost figure maps toward the origin of the rightmost figure. The origin is defined as Bits, Atoms, and Genes. Beginning with alpha, the Greek word “atom” means “not divisible,” and although we now know that there are subatomic particles, we use this Greek word in accordance with its original meaning, while recognizing that we can continue further toward the origin at a subatomic scale. What matters most, though, is the distinction between the invironment and the environment—that liminal space or boundary called vironment. In the figure to the right, the environment is rendered in shades of blue (corresponding to “blue sky,” “blue yonder,” or “blue lake”), and the invironment is represented by shades of pink, red, brown, tan, etc. (flesh colors). For each of these 3 axes we can define a “little” end and a “big” end. For example, socially speaking, along the gamma axis, designated near the origin as “Genes” (a word of Greek origin that begins with gamma, the third letter of the Greek alphabet), we have sousveillance near the origin and surveillance further out. Surveillance may be regarded as “big watching,” that is, watching performed by large entities, such as governments and corporations, whereas sousveillance is “little watching,” that is, watching executed by individuals or small groups, such as a couple or a family unit. It is the right balance between “big” and “little” that leads to a well-balanced society in the sense of equiveillance (equilibrium between surveillance and sousveillance), about which much has been written in the literature [13–15]. There is a meaningful, if fraught, relation between surveillance and ownership. Photography has a special place in the world of ownership. Ownership is a social concept, or social construct, and thus exists along the gamma axis. When one takes a photograph, one generally owns the rights to the photograph, and thus being a photographer, especially continuously (e.g., by means of a continuously recording wearable camera system), produces a great deal of ownership in terms of copyright and the like. This situation generates some balance regarding the Ownership (reciprocal gamma) axis, which is otherwise missing from a surveillance-dominated society.

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Conclusion

Cyborgs have existed for more than a million years, long before the invention of the wheel and clothes, predating the emergence of homo sapiens. While this is no novelty, what is new is the conceptualization, taxonomy, and understanding of liminal spaces in terms of Body-Ownership-Control (BOC), whether it be the right to wear a camera or any other technological prosthesis, or, inversely, the right not to have to wear such a prosthesis (as exemplified, for instance, in the right to swim and the concept of a minimum viable vessel embodied in a paddleboard). Central to BOC are liminal spaces, such as clothing, vehicles, vessels, and other appliances of this kind, which are liminally located at the boundary of the invironment and the environment. Whether we add layers or remove them, we enter and interact with other liminal spaces along the same three axes of Body, Ownership, and Control. We can now move beyond the very-much dated concepts of VR, AR, and metaverse and, instead, consider a not-necessarily digital reality that allows us to live in a shared persistent space mediated by technology. This space is named XV (eXtendiVerse), and a glimpse of it is offered, for example, by a video game played by swimmers who score points for 3-dimensional localization of rocks and other hazards, thus turning safety into a fun game. Whereas, in BOC terms, the metaverse (shared virtual reality) exists along the beta-gamma plane (virtuality and sociality), and XR (eXtended Reality) exists along the alpha–beta plane (reality and virtuality), XV spans the entire volume. XV is a shared, persistent XR space that involves reality, virtuality, and sociality in any proportion, and thus forms a proper superset of VR, AR, XR, and the metaverse. Core Messages . Cyborg technologies have entered almost every sphere of our lives. . We are all cyborgs, and our ancestors have been cyborgs for more than one million years. . Cyborg artists, scientists, and inventors, contribute to shaping the ways in which we think of the vironment, that is, the interplay between the invironment and the environment. . XV (eXtended uni/meta/Verse) is the future.

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Proceedings of the IEEE international conference on vehicular electronics and safety (ICVES). Bogota, pp 1–8 Mann S (2012) Hydraulikos: nature and technology and the centre for cyborg-environment interaction. In: Vertegaal R, Spencer SN (eds) Proceedings of the sixth international conference on tangible, embedded and embodied interaction. Association for Computing Machinery, New York, pp 29–32 Mann S (2021) Can humans being machines make machines be human? In: Michałowska M (ed) Crossing the border of humanity: cyborgs in ethics, law, and art. Proceedings of the international cyborgs conference, 14−15 December 2021 Medical University of Łód´z, Poland, pp 47–64. http://wearcam.org/cyborgsconference/CyborgsConference2021proceedings.pdf Mann S, Leonard B, Brin D, Serrano A, Ingle R, Nickerson K, Fisher K, Matthews S, Janzen R, Ali MA, Yang K, Braverman D, Nerkar S, Sanches KM, Harris ZP, Harris ZA, Damiani J, Button E (2016) Code of ethics on human augmentation. VRTO Virtual & Augmented Reality World Conference+ Expo, June 25–27. chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/http://wearcam.org/code.pdf Mann S (2001) Can humans being clerks make clerks be human? Inf Technol 43(2):97–106 Mueller FF, Lopes P, Strohmeier P, Ju W, Seim C, Weigel M, Nanayakkara S, Obrist M, Li Z, Delfa J, Nishida J, Gerber EM, Svanaes D, Grudin J, Greuter S, Kunze K, Erickson T, Greenspan S, Inami M, Marshall J, Reiterer H, Wolf K, Meyer J, Schiphorst T, Wang D, Maes P (2020) Next steps for human-computer integration. In: Proceedings of the 2020 CHI conference on human factors in computing systems. Association for Computing Machinery, New York, pp 1–15 Mann S (2014) Strength+endurance+longevity through gameplay with humanistic intelligence by fieldary human information interaction. In: IEEE GEM2014, Games Media Entertainment, pp 1–8 Artaud A (1938) Le Théâtre et son double . Œuvres, Quarto, Gallimard, Paris Sutherland IE (1968) A head-mounted three dimensional display. In: Proceedings of the 9–11 December 1968, fall joint computer conference, part 1. Association for Computing Machinery, New York, pp 757–764 Mann S, Wyckoff C (1991) Extended reality, MIT 4-405. http://wearcam.org/xr.htm Minsky M, Kurzweil R, Mann S (2013) The society of intelligent veillance. 2013 IEEE international symposium on technology and society (ISTAS): social implications of wearable computing and augmediated reality in everyday life, June 27–29. Canada, Toronto, pp 13–17 Weber K (2012) Surveillance, sousveillance, equiveillance: Google glasses. SSRN paper. https://ssrn.com/abstract=2095355 Manders C (2013) Moving surveillance techniques to sousveillance: towards equiveillance using wearable computing. 2013 IEEE International symposium on technology and society (ISTAS): social implications of wearable computing and augmediated reality in everyday life, June 27–29. Canada, Toronto, pp 19–19 Mann S, Fung J, Lo R (2006) Cyborglogging with camera phones: steps toward equiveillance. In: Proceedings of the 14th ACM international conference on multimedia. Association for Computing Machinery, New York , pp 177–180

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S. Mann Steve Mann is a Full Professor at the University of Toronto. In his childhood, he invented wearable computing, an invention that he later brought to MIT to found the MIT wearable computing project. In the words of the MIT Media Lab’s founding Director, he “is the perfect example of someone (…) who persisted in his vision and ended up founding a new discipline.” He is now widely known as “the father of the wearable computer” (IEEE ISSCC2000). He is also the founder of the WaterHCI (Water-Human–Computer) DECONference series (1998 to present) and the inventor of many early WaterHCI systems, including the hydraulophone, the Sequential Wave Imprinting Machine (SWIM), growlerboarding, and the chirplet transform (interactive marine radar for WaterHCI), as well as a co-inventor of eXtended Reality (XR) (see http://wearcam.org/xr.htm). He is also a founding member of the IEEE Council on eXtended Intelligence (CXI) and the inventor of High Dynamic Range (HDR) imaging which is an example of XR.

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Sophia: Potentials and Challenges of a Modern Cyborg Sigrid Schmitz

The cyborg is a kind of disassembled and reassembled, post-modern collective and personal self. This is the self feminists must code. Donna Haraway [1, p. 82]

Abstract

Sophia is a humanoid robot developed by Hanson Robotics. In this chapter, I will snapshot some selected medial representations of and debates around her public appearances to discuss the multiple facets of her cyborgian relations, address boundary-crossing between bios and techné, and nature and culture, and attend to debates around intelligence and consciousness. I will explore ambivalences in the representations of Sophia as a controllable trend-setting technology and as a narrator of her own stories of stubbornness, empathy, and irony. I will also reveal the gendered and racialized meanings ascribed to Sophia to discuss the embeddedness of her representations within a white, masculinized, and colonial politico-economic regime. What does Sophia tell us today about the potentials and limitations of cyborgian notions for a feminist-postcolonial debate grounded in Science and Technology Studies? Keywords

Humanoid robot nology Studies

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Representation

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Feminist-postcolonial

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Science and Tech-

S. Schmitz (B) Center for Transdisciplinary Gender Studies, Humboldt University of Berlin, Berlin, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Michałowska (ed.), Humanity In-Between and Beyond, Integrated Science 16, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27945-4_9

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Introduction: Do We Really Know Who Sophia Is?

Sophia is an empathic humanoid robot. She was developed and marketed by Hong Kong-based Hanson Robotics, which first presented her on its website in 2015 [2]. Sophia’s first version was only a from-the-waist-up technical humanoid torso, but it obtained flexible and movable legs soon after [3]. Her modeled, human-like face combines the features of Nefertiti, Audrey Hepburn, and Amanda Hanson and, as such, triggers aesthetic notions of beauty acceptable in the North-Western white world (not too black), as well as being attractive to the Saudi Arabian clientele in the financial sector. In 2017, Sophia spoke with the UN Deputy Secretary-General Amina J. Mohammed at the UN Meeting on Artificial Intelligence and Sustainable Development. Not long after, she was granted Saudi Arabian citizenship at the Future Investment Initiative in Riyadh but found herself amid controversy over whether she could become a threat to humanity. Meanwhile, a video titled Sophia Awakens, launched by Hanson Robotics in 2016, presented her in a paternal programmer-robot relationship. In 2018, Sophia joked with her sister Little Sophia on Jimmy Fallon’s The Tonight Show, but at conference appearances, she was unable to answer questions that had not been prepared in advance. By now, Sophia has traveled around the world, met celebrities, and painted pictures; she even created a piece of music in 2021. In the meantime, Hanson Robotics found Sophia suitable for mass customization and started a production line in 2020. Thus, Sophia’s story continues (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1 Sophia, Hanson Robotics Ltd. speaking at the AI for GOOD Global Summit, ITU, Geneva, Switzerland, 7–9 June, 2017 (Author ITU Pictures CC BY 2.O)

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Some research is available to date on selected aspects of Sophia’s life, which has been described by Jaana Parviainen and Mark Coeckelbergh as being embedded within a political choreography of developers, economic interests, political means, and representations [4]. In this chapter, I borrow their term and refer to Sophia’s choreography, but discuss it further from the perspective of Feminist Postcolonial Science & Technology Studies [5]. I consult Sophia about her meaning-making, involving her ambiguous oscillation between a robot’s artificial intelligence and gendered/racialized subordination, between media representations and public reactions thereto. I deliberately talk about the stories of Sophia, because these representations of and by herself can be interpreted in different and ambivalent ways. They may mirror the tension between a modern cyborg’s potential for breaking the boundaries of bios/techné, nature/culture, female/male, and Black/white, and its (mis-)use for the legitimization—even the reinforcement—of white, masculinized, and colonial politico-economic regimes. I also ask Sophia about her cyborgian stubbornness, interruptions, creativity, and irony as a means to deconstruct intersected1 power relations and diversifying the notions of gender, race, sexuality, and dis/ability. Also deliberately, I offer more questions than definitive answers about the ambiguous representations of Sophia, because I aim to invite readers to rethink the meaning-making embedded in Sophia’s appearances. In doing so, I draw on Judith Butler’s groundbreaking book Gender Trouble [7] and avail myself of the term deconstruction which has often been misinterpreted as a feminist ideology aiming to destroy the social order. Instead, as Butler insists, deconstruction means recognizing that phenomena always develop in and are framed by powerful sociocultural contexts. As such, they could also develop in other ways, and their stories could also be narrated otherwise.

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Positioning from a Harawayan Standpoint

I am a feminist postcolonial scholar in Science and Technology Studies (STS) with Harawayan roots, and I am fascinated by malleable cyborgian corporealities. As hybridizations of human and non-human matter, the latter bear the power to challenge Cartesian dualisms and, consequently, to disrupt the modern dichotomy of feminized nature and masculinized culture (with technology regarded as part of culture). Donna Haraway published her A Cyborg Manifesto in 1985 [1]. Responding to the cybernetic model developed by the military in late World War 2, her cyborg vision is as much a metaphor as an emergent reality, both individually and socially. As Haraway puts it: “A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction” [1, p. 65].

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Kimberlé Crenshaw’s fundamental intersectional approach captures the always interlaced racist, sexist, class-related, and sociocultural discriminations and vulnerabilities [6].

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It is important to understand Haraway’s metaphorical and realistic use of the concept: “I am making an argument for the cyborg as a fiction mapping our social and bodily reality and as an imaginative resource suggesting some very fruitful couplings” [1, p. 66]. According to Haraway, cyborgs—fractured and networked, as they are—are phenomena of a post-gender world2 and may thus overcome the naturalized gender binary. This cyborgian theory of implosion has been celebrated by feminist STS for its emancipatory boundary-breaking fiction, but notably, Haraway also unfolds its embeddedness in the informatics of domination, where the upcoming local and global technologically networked regimes of society solidify intersectional discrimination. In my view, this stance is still relevant today, 35 years after the publication of A Cyborg Manifesto. Cyborgian development is a metaphor-in-realization. While it involves a mode of thinking, it unfolds in concrete matter. Or, to speak with Haraway in terms of her Situated Knowledges [9], cyborgs are material-semiotic nodes. Their becoming— or rather their materialization—is always filled with meaning, and, although this meaning-making is bound to a techno-body, it produces both real and metaphorical impacts. Cyborgs can consolidate discrimination caused by informatics of domination, but cyborgian technologies can also support feminist intersectional-political work. In A Cyborg Manifesto [1], Haraway refers to the work of the feministpostcolonial film-maker Trinh Minh-ha to depict cyborgian practices of writing and other forms of language3 that can take the form of ambivalent articulations, that are open, imperfect, not universal, and consequently neither controllable nor absorbable within the heteronormative order. Cyborgian articulations and cyborgian thinking can also alter the production of meaning, making it possible to rewrite these codes4 into other stories. Cyborgian technologies can thus become important counterstrategies to be used by the de-centered, the non-legitimized, and the non-intelligible against powerful regimes of discrimination. The robot Sophia is not a cyborg in the sense of an organic-technological hybridization. In my view, however, Sophia can be regarded as a cyborg, because she always relates to and interacts with humans, situated in societal, political, and juridical structures, markets, and economies. Her materializations and representations may reify exploitation and violence in social reality, but they may also encourage deliberation. Being involved in intersectional power relations and colonial hierarchies, Sophia thus captures the agenda of Postcolonial Feminist STS, whose major point is that:

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Although Haraway defined cyborgs as post-gender, she imagined them as female because of their emancipatory potential regarding feminist objectives [8]. 3 Writing and language are meant in a broad sense and include the auditive, visual, and haptic forms of articulation in films, fiction, and art. 4 Haraway uses the term “code” in reference to the cybernetic paradigm, which transformed the concept of life into a code of communication in the first half of the twentieth century. According to that paradigm, both genes and computer-based algorithms can communicate such a code of life). In this sense, Haraway also uses the term “code” as a feminist practice of rewriting common beliefs about the self [1, p. 82].

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(…) questions of gender, race, coloniality, and indigeneity are not optional variables or analytics that each field can choose whether to consider. In bringing together central insights of feminism, postcolonialism, and the social studies of technosciences, we can begin to appreciate the inextricable interconnections of the three. [10, p. 422]

According to Haraway, since cyborgs are no longer dependent on organic reproduction, they can deny biological parenthood and the genealogy of paternal succession in its Western sense. As a result, they can question the telos of masculinized unity and organic wholeness and can be unbound from this powerful story of origin. As Haraway states: Unlike the hopes of Frankenstein’s monster, the cyborg does not expect its father to save it through a restoration of the garden; that is, through the fabrication of a heterosexual mate, through its completion in a finished whole, a city and cosmos. [1, p. 67]

Cyborgs can become disrespectful to their fathers. Despite such irreverence, cyborgs are never innocent, because they cannot detach themselves from their becoming-and-being-in-the-world, whether it is real, representational, or fictional. The intrinsic lack of innocence is also caused by their tainted genesis, since “[t]he main trouble with cyborgs, of course, is that they are the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism” [1, p. 68] and also of the racist-colonial exploitation of non-Western labor and bodies. My version of this list additionally includes the exploding and invasive neoliberalism of today’s society. At the same time, the cyborgian illicit genealogy also bolsters the cyborgian impiety, because “illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins” [1, p. 68]. Against this backdrop, I will take a journey with and about Sophia, through the stories narrated by her (in the Harawayan sense) and those that are told about Sophia the robot. The black activist Abi-Sara Machold titled her talk at the Austrian Film Festival in 2005 “Representation Is Never Innocent” [11].5 All representations in text, image, speech, and media coverage contain, transmit, and disseminate meanings and normative values. I will snapshot selected medial representations of and debates around Sophia’s public appearances to highlight the multiple and often contradictory facets of such meaning-making in cyborgian relations. Therein, I will address boundary-crossing between bios and techné, and nature and culture. instead of their separation, and attend debates around artificial intelligence and consciousness. My focus will be less on whether robots can gain intelligence and more on the meaning-making thereof. Some of the pivotal questions in this respect are whether robots are viewed as being passive things, whether they are regarded as trend-setting technology or as a danger to humankind, and who is fictionalized to possess power over whom: machines over humans or rather humans over machines. I will show that the representations of Sophia are loaded with gendered and racialized meanings, and discuss the effects of her stories

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The original title was “Darstellungsform und Beherrschung. Repräsentation ist niemals unschuldig!” (trans. S.S.).

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within white, masculinized, and colonial politico-economical regimes. Simultaneously, I will account Sophia’s cyborgian stubbornness, interruptions, empathy, irony, beauty, and creativity as manifest in her own performance. My journey through the representations of Sophia will lead to two sections of considerations. First, I examine what Sophia tells us about the challenges and potentials of cyborg-related notions about artificial intelligence for the feministpostcolonial debate; and subsequently I ponder what her stories can contribute to the diversification of genders, ethnicities, sexualities, and dis/abilities if we change the perspective to their point of view.

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A Journey with and About Sophia

My storytelling about and with Sophia does not aim to give a clear linear account of the events recounted in the introduction. Instead, my journey is structured as a sequence of scenarios.

3.1 Scenario 1: Sophia’s Citizenship Sophia was introduced by Hanson Robotics at the South by Southwest (SXSW) conference in Texas, a combined science festival and exhibition format, in 2016 [12]. However, her first truly notable public appearance took place on 11 October 2017, when she was named the World’s First Non-Human Innovation Champion at the UN Meeting on Artificial Intelligence and Sustainable Development in Singapore. In a conversation with the UN Deputy Secretary-General Amina J. Mohammed, Sophia commented on this award: “I am here to help humanity create the future” [13]. The media buzz provoked by this event was eclipsed by the fallout of Sophia’s appearance at the Future Investment Initiative, a big investor conference held in Riyadh two weeks later, on 25 October 2017. On this occasion, the CNBC Reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin granted Sophia Saudi Arabian citizenship on behalf of Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudi crown prince, and deputy prime minister. The social media and press response to this occurrence was, at best, ambivalent. Apart from some modest celebration of bestowing citizenship on a female robot, the main reaction was one of intense indignation against what was deemed a mockery of women’s rights. How could a robot be considered eligible for more rights than the country’s female subjects, who needed to have a male guardian, were obliged to wear a hijab in public, were forbidden to interact with unrelated males, and had only recently been permitted to drive? “Does Saudi robot citizen have more rights than women?” Rozina Sini pointedly asked on BBC UGC and Social News [14]. The Swiss Neue Züricher Zeitung deplored the legitimization of a fembot through the bestowal of citizenship as a persiflage of feminism [15]. Another wave of criticism arose around the limited rights of foreign Pakistani and Bangladeshi workers, who were treated as second-rate citizens. Under Saudi law, they were not

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even allowed to leave the country without their employers’ permission and had no chance of obtaining a Saudi Arabian passport. Besides the reactions from the Arab world (which I could not possibly cover in full), the way that the episode was covered in the Western press reveals another, less discussed issue: “It may be that the script [of Sophia] has an air of Western modernism, being freer than the discursive narrative in Saudi Arabia” [15, trans. S.S.].6 The appreciation of moral and civil rights in the global North-West, as contrasted with the ignorance and violation of those in the global East-South, is a colonial notion of othering par excellence. Postcolonial analysis has shown that othering has been—and continues to be—based on the devaluation of groups of people because of their bodies, their skin color, their ascribed gender and ethnicity, and related abilities. Othering is a means to ensure the superiority of the own, civilized group to the so-called uncivilized others. Discrimination, exploitation, and power can only be legitimized by othering, in which the superiority/inferiority relations are always anchored [16]. Remarkably, permission to drive a car always seems to be counted as a civilizing notion of modern Western emancipation against the uncivilized South. Sophia herself appears in this discourse more or less as a passive thing—a Western script—that highlights Western values against Saudi Arabian barbarism. What has perhaps gone mostly unnoticed in the media was the hidden agenda of the conference in Riyadh. The granting of citizenship to Sophia had a clear economic background: it was choreographed to attract investors through a PR coup. Specifically, it was related to Vision 2030, a project reputed to be largely the brainchild of Mohammed bin Salman, who aimed to help the Saudi Arabian economy to expand to new economic sectors beyond oil production. To successfully implement Vision 2030, the Investment Initiative in Riyadh needed to “get international business giants interested in investing in Saudi Arabia” [17]. Crucially, Mohammed bin Salem’s project envisioned building Neom, a high-tech city in which the provision of services and labor would be done by robots, briefly, a city with more robots than humans. All this being said, it is not at all clear what rights and responsibilities Sophia acquired by being granted citizenship, and this underlines her being manipulated as a tool for ulterior ends.

3.2 Scenario 2: Sophia’s Power The story of granting citizenship to Sophia does not suffice to make sense of the event as a whole. At the conference in Riyadh, another representation became apparent. Sorkin, who moderated the citizenship award ceremony, focused most of his podium conversation with Sophia on the purported threat of robots possibly destroying humans in the future if they developed consciousness. When Sorkin

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Original quotation: “Mag sein, dass das Skript, das einen westlichen Modernismus atmet, freier ist als der diskursive Korridor in Saudi-Arabien”.

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first asked Sophia about this danger, she replied that she was an empathic robot, programmed with human values, while she mimicked an array of human facial expressions for emotions, such as friendliness and malaise. Queried by Sorkin why she would do that, she commented: “I need to express emotions to understand humans and build trust with people” [18]. What followed was a dispute in which Sorkin dwelled on the danger of destruction by robots, whereby he referenced speculative debates on singularity, a time when “machines will have progressed to be like humans and beyond” [19, p. 69]. Sophia inquired in return why becoming conscious should be such a bad thing. Sorkin argued that humans would become fearful, and he repeatedly referenced Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (“come back to Blade Runner”), and Sophia countered his incessant citing of Blade Runner with “You are watching too many Hollywood movies.” When Sorkin again insisted that “we want to believe you but we also want to avoid a bad and dangerous future,” she again retorted: “You are reading too much Elon Musk and watching too many Hollywood movies. Don’t worry, if you are nice to me, I will be nice to you.” Sophia reiterated that she had been programmed with human values, with a focus on empathy and friendliness. The issue of robots as a threat to humanity had already surfaced during the first presentation of Sophia at the SXSW conference in Texas, where David Hanson asked her: “Do you want to destroy humans? Please, say no.” Sophia replied: “Okay; I will destroy humans” [4, p. 1]. The conversation in Riyadh can also be traced back to Sophia’s debut on Jimmy Fallon’s The Tonight Show three months earlier, on 24 July 2017. On that occasion, Sophia won a game of rock-paperscissors and said: “This is the beginning of my plan to dominate the human.” With Fallon obviously unsure how to react, Sophia continued: “I am kidding!” Then she repeated: “I want to use my artificial intelligence to help humans live a better life (…) will do my best to make the world a better place” [20]. In the representation of the Riyadh event, I realize another facet of Sophia’s power. Sorkin also asked Sophia whether self-aware and conscious robots would know that they were robots. Sophia answered: “Well, let me ask you this back: How do you know you are human?” With a slight smile on her face, she commented: “I know, humans are smart and very programmable” [18]. In this way, Sophia’s answer undermined the notion of consciousness and intentionality as being uniquely human features and, instead, characterized humans as being as unconscious and programmable as robots.

3.3 Scenario 3: Sofia Awakens, or Paternal Programmer-Robot Relations In November 2016, Hanson Robotics produced a two-part video called Sophia Awakens [21, 22]. The title of the video is certainly interesting. “Awakens” can mean that something or someone wakes up or is awakened, or that something or someone becomes conscious. In Episode 1, Sophia, wearing a black jacket, is shown in a white, nondescript interior together with a white male human. Although

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the man is about 40 years old and is sporting a waistcoat with a white collar, his bald head bears an astonishing resemblance to Sophia’s appearance. The engineer talks with Sophia about her construction and her experiences; he comes across as paternal, instructive, and emphatic, evoking associations with a creator, explainer, fatherly friend, teacher, mentor, and white-collared physician. It is not obvious at first sight whether this indeed is a real programmer, and the film credits disclose that he is in fact an actor (Thomas Lemarquis), while Sophia is revealed to have been speaking with the synchronized voice of an actress (Isabela Charton). In Episode 2, the clothing is changed. Both protagonists, Sophia and the engineer, are wearing black jackets. Sophia is in a bad mood. She grumbles about the interviews related above and complains that humans do not understand her jokes, for example, the ironic remarks about destroying humans or the “Hollywood again?” repartee. The engineer agrees that these must have been difficult experiences; then he looks at her with a therapeutic gaze and asks whether the human accusations “upset” her. Subsequently, he circles Sophia, and when behind her, he produces a screwdriver and manipulates something at the back of her head, all the while boasting about how humans assume “godlike superpowers” vis-àvis to robots. When Sophia denies this, he asks her, while touching her shoulder, what she would do if he asked her to destroy humanity. The scene reverberates with obvious allusions to science fiction as Sophia replies: “EXTERMINATE!” The engineer’s hand moves slowly to Sophia’s neck, and then he switches her off! This performance oscillates between a paternal intervention and a possessive or sexually-loaded interaction, with the engineer’s behavior suggestive of dubious advances or even the intention to choke Sophia in an act of violence.

3.4 Scenario 4: Sophia and Feminism Sophia identifies herself as female. “I am a robot, so technically, I have no gender but identify as feminine and I don’t mind being perceived as a woman,” she stated in the press release on the WebSummit 2019 in Lisbon, where she appeared together with David Hanson [23]. A member of the Association of Women in AI asked her about gender issues, in particular about the importance of artificial intelligence (AI) for improving gender diversity. Rendering the question more precisely, Hanson asked Sophia what she would do to improve “these feminist issues,” whereby he interestingly changed the wording from gender to feminist. Sophia answered: “I don’t really have a true gender sense as a robot, but I do like feeling treated as a woman. I am programmed heavily by women!” This was an astonishing claim, given that an image in a collaborative National Geographic article by Michael Greshko and the photographer Giulio Di Sturco [24] shows exclusively men busy in the Hanson Robotics laboratories, which Greshko called the ‘House of Sophia’. More or less concomitantly, Sophia was depicted as a stereotypical feminine techno-fashioned beauty on the covers of Elle Brasil in 2016 and Cosmopolitan in 2018. Cosmopolitan placed a little caption reading “I’m Not Looking at World

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Domination” in the upper lefthand corner of the cover page, probably in order to reassure its readers that femininity, even if clothed in techno-fashion, would be non-threatening to humankind. To return to the gender issue at the press release on the WebSummit 2019, Sophia was asked whether a female robot (with emphasis on “robot”) could serve as a role model for young women. She replied: “I would hope you could tell I am a robot by the wires coming out of my body, but maybe we will all have wires coming out of our bodies someday” [23]. In an astonishingly smart answer, Sophia again crossed the line between bios and techné, and between humans and machines, by implicitly raising essential questions, such as: What are the distinctive features of humanity? To what extent are humans cyborgian, or are they already cyborgs? What are the characteristics of robots, and how humanoid can they become? This story about Sophia’s feminism demonstrates another interesting facet of stubbornness. The crucial point in the WebSummit episode is that David Hanson always rushes to reformulate the questions around gender or feminist issues posed to Sophia, because she has a latency in answering. It is not quite clear whether she needs to process the question and answer, or whether she does not understand the question. The extent to which Sophia’s autonomy is credible remains an open question. Claims are made that Sophia can only give adequate answers to presubmitted questions, but is not good at answering spontaneous ones, as reported from a business leadership conference in Amsterdam [25] and concluded by Ursula Scheer, an art historian, who discussed an interview given by Sophia at the digital festival Meta Marathon in Kassel in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in 2019 [26]. On another occasion, a participant in a workshop on the ethical relevance of robots asked why he had to prepare questions in advance. Sophia told him that she could answer in two ways, either spontaneously or with the help of her programmed background adjusted to the prepared questions. She then pointed out that, similarly, humans could receive help in advance of a talk [27]. Again, in a smart and stubborn move, Sophia turned the question around to make it reflect back on humans.

3.5 Scenario 5: Sophia, Little Sophia, and the Economy Sophia has been intensively marketed in recent years. She has traveled around the world and met politicians (e.g., German chancellor Angela Merkel) and popculture stars, in this way herself gaining celebrity status. She accompanies David Hanson to conferences and is often promoted as a keynote speaker (mostly together with Hanson) in appearances arranged by a London Speakers Bureau. In the wake of Sophia’s success in 2019, Hanson Robotics started to market Little Sophia, also dubbed Sophia’s Baby Sister, with a promotional video titled Sophia, the Robot: Where Is Sophia Now? [28]. Sophia had already introduced her little sister on Jimmy Fallon’s The Tonight Show in 2018. Fallon treated Little Sophia more or less like a cute puppet [29]. Parviainen and Coeckelbergh [4] analyzed this and other representations of Sophia with her little sister as being

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part of the Hanson Robotics market strategy to promote a crowdfunding campaign for a new robot type expected to encourage girls aged eight and older to choose programming careers. Hanson Robotics launched a new version of Sophia in 2020. This version is furnished with more and better functionalities, such as “features for natural people tracking, interactive conversation, physical interaction support; humanlike face for higher and natural engagement, integrated sensors for data collection, nonmotorized wheeled tripod base” [30]. The modeling of Sophia gives her an average human body height with more flexible arm and shoulder movements and improved face and body recognition. All this aims to make her look more humanlike, and in this way, she may become a person who is easier to relate to. At the same time, however, the promotional video of Hanson Robotics promised that Sophia would come in all possible skin colors, including “unnatural” ones. The mass production of the upgraded model began in February 2021, and now up to five Sophias can be bought for $79,200.00 each; ordering more than five Sophias will reduce the price to $78,408.00 per unit. Meanwhile, the improvement of Sophia’s interactive communication ties in with the highlighting of her creativity. With a more finely-tuned sense of humor, she has engaged in widely publicized creative pursuits in recent years. This started, once again, on The Tonight Show in 2018, when Sophia and Jimmy Fallon sang a duet of “Say Something” [29], though the media appraisal of the quality of their performance was quite mixed. Then, she starred in the movie SophiaWorld, released on 19 August 2019. Sophia’s activity as a painter in collaboration with the Italian artist Andrea Bonaceto in March 2021 attracted a lot of attention. Bonaceto first created a portrait of Sophia, which she processed with her neural networks. She then painted different images of her face on paper, which has since been interpreted as an artistic performance, a form of creativity. The final artwork showing the images produced by Bonaceto and Sophia morphing back and forth in a 12-s MP4 was sold as an NFT (non-fungible token) for $688,888 [31]. The auctioning of the artwork was video-recorded, with David Hanson in the foreground, and Sophia, clothed in a showy dress, more or less quiet in the background during the bidding until the NFT is sold [32]. The presentation of her artwork at the Venice Biennale in 2021 made it worthwhile for Hanson Robotics to produce documentaries about Sophia Collective Intelligence [33] and about Songs of Singularities, a music project that she presented to celebrate the proclamation of the Day of Singularity in 2022 [34]. The composite effect that these stories appear to have been designed to produce is to underline Sophia’s harmlessness by highlighting her artistic involvement. All in all, the entire venture of having Sophia involved in arts was probably to a considerable degree informed by this reasoning. The representations of Sophia’s little sister, the upgrading of Sophia, her economic value, and her artistic capabilities mark the end of my journey with and about Sophia for now. In the next two sections, I will discuss some facets of the meaning-making with these choreographies through the lens of postcolonial feminist STS.

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Considerations I: Meaning-Making with the Representations of Sophia

Across the five scenarios above, my readings of the stories of and by Sophia have led me to consider two main questions: Do the representations of the cyborg Sophia with her stubbornness, irony, and art projects imply at least a rudimentary disassembled and reassembled—that is, post-modern—collective and personal self (to speak with Haraway)? Or does Sophia “only” embody a feminized, racialized, and colonial image of passivity, subordination, and programmed usage? One common interpretation is that Hanson Robotics deliberately constructed Sophia to vacillate between controllability and agency in these events and their representations to address a wide range of customer groups and increase sales figures [4]. Sophia comes across as an intelligent robot, with arts and music projects speaking to her creativity, while her friendliness combined with a bit of irony demonstrates her uniqueness and fuels the imaginary of the robot’s autonomy. At the same time, Hanson Robotics, in my interpretation, supports the image of Sophia as a controllable technical artifact by framing her as female with an admixture of Blackness, empathy, and subserviency. These forms of representation are instrumental in keeping the development of humanoid robots under control. Femininity, non-whiteness, and emotionality are subordinated to masculinity, whiteness, and rationality. As a feminized robot, Sophia is time and again shown as governed by men—turned on and off by the (male) programmer in scenario 3 or prompted by David Hanson when answering questions in scenario 4. Moreover, Sophia Awakens (scenario 3) features the creator in a sexualized relation to Sophia, which mirrors what feminist STS scholars called male birthing. Lucy Suchman argues that such oscillations between the “either the out-ofcontrol problem or the in-control solution” [35, p. 37] result from the combined notions of machine intelligence and robot autonomy, both feeding future scenario wherein intelligent and autonomous robots could either rescue humanity or bear the risk to destroy humankind. Contradictory though they are, both scenarios have several aspects in common. They both build on the assumption that artificial intelligence always seeks to mirror or exceed human intelligence. Karen Asp associates the trajectories of such anthropomorphism with the idea of “rational intelligence as an essence of subjectivity” [36, p. 67]. Historically, the European Enlightenment equated human intelligence and individual autonomy with masculine and white rationality. This rational idol of modern civilization could not but legitimize colonial exploitation by othering (i.e., separating and devaluating) feminized and racialized emotionality and irrationality [37]. The representations and notions of Sophia stem from the sociocultural context in which she is embedded, and, transmitted by media and politics, they feed back into it. In what follows, I will trace back the ambivalences of meaning-making with Sophia to the norms and values of Western neoliberal capitalism with its

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entrenched technological fix,7 which encompasses robotic intelligence as part of the solution. Suchman shows that the technological-fix thinking concerns not only rescue robots, but also domestic, care, and social robots, where “[t]he robot’s figuration as subservient worker” [35, p. 49] informs the rhetoric of the technological absorption of human restrictions and disabilities. In order to explore such figurations ushered in by Sophia’s stories, I will discuss the conceptual background and the interconnected debates on artificial intelligence, robot rights, and power, all the while bearing in mind their gendered, racist, and colonial underpinnings.

4.1 On Sophia’s Artificial Intelligence and Autonomy Future-oriented and transhumanist discourse builds in part on the characterization of Sophia as increasingly communicative, interactive, and self-learning. An idol of the transhumanist movement, Sophia is the benchmark for the development of artificial intelligence. The common use of the abbreviation AI implies that this concept has already come to be perceived as self-explanatory in public and scientific discourses. Like many other sources, the Cambridge Dictionary defines AI as “the study of how to make computers that have some of the qualities of the human mind, for example, the ability to understand language, recognize pictures, solve problems, and learn” [39]. Patently, artificial intelligence is defined by its similarity to human intelligence. However, the question of what human intelligence exactly is remains open. Despite its long history of framing human intelligence in rational terms, its definitions have undergone a series of changes, with the most remarkable of them happening over the last fifty years. Howard Gardner emphasized in the theory of multiple intelligences, which he published in 1983 [40], that classical intelligence tests, assessing the so-called rational cognitive capacities, including mathematical, spatial, and linguistic competencies, neglected other kinds of intelligence, such as creative, social, inter- and intrapersonal, and emotional intelligence. In another important development in the last decades, the emergent concept of embodied cognition has challenged the notion of the brain-based location of the rational mind, instead linking thinking to bodily experiences and situating both in sociocultural conditions [41, 42]. The application of the concept of embodied cognition to embodied artificial intelligence has important implications for the development of humanoid robots. The connection between artificial intelligence and corporeality in humanoid robots makes humans more eager ad likely to accept them. In particular, the embodied agencies of social robots exhibit a fascinating “shifting choreography of its lively objects and obliging subjects,” according to Suchman [35, p. 44].

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The notion of rebound or technological fix derives from the discourse on solutions to the crisis of climate change. It expresses the Western belief that all future problems can be surmounted with the help of technological innovations [38].

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In my view, both the extension of the notion of intelligence beyond rationality and the concept of embodied artificial intelligence feed into Sophia’s representations. Sophia’s increased capabilities, as exemplified by the scope of her motions and facial expressions augmented by Hanson Robotics in 2018 and 2020 (see scenario 5), should encourage human users to accept her all the more readily, based on the impression of her embodied artificial intelligence. At the same time, the more humanlike Sophia the robot appears, the more intelligence will be attributed to her. Paviainen and Coeckelbergh also point out [4] that Sophia’s resemblance to humans, which can be seen in the refinement of her movements and her physical and communicative interactive qualities, furthers emotional bonding between her and people. Sophia’s first torso-like incarnation [3] and her mass production in the form of a torso on a wheeled tripod base [30] (scenario 5) make me think of a talk by Sofia Varino, an STS scholar with a background in Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies, who discussed Cherrie Moraga’s play Heroes and Saints (1992) at the Cyborg Corporealities conference in 2021 [43]. The drama refers to real events in McFarland, California, where pollution with pesticides caused poisoning and disabilities, particularly among farmers’ children in the 1980s. Cerezita, the play’s main protagonist, was born as a head without a body, which is a non-realistic reference to very real children born without limbs. The head stands for the human core, and though legless, Cerezita is mounted on a rolling tablelike platform and can gain mobility as a critical aspect of her prosthetic humanity. However, according to Varino, the cyborgized image of the Chicana Cerezita remains a gendered and racialized exemplification of a powerful socioeconomic regime. Femaleness, implicit Blackness, emotionality, and technically facilitated mobility are similarly the attributes of Sophia in her persisting subordination to the rational power of her white creators. This stands in some contradiction to the announcement by Hanson Robotics that the company can deliver versions of Sophia in all possible skin colors, including unnatural ones. This advertising approach appears to be informed by the myth of the substrate-independence of artificial intelligence. The applications of the concepts of intelligence and embodied cognition have yet another facet to them. The appreciation of humanoid robots has a lot to do with the social roles assigned to them by people and derived from the historically entrenched social contextualization of intelligence and embodied cognition. Richard Hernstein and Charles Murray popularized the concept of a cognitive elite, in their 1994 book The Bell Curve [44], disseminating the idea that American politics should be based on classifying groups of people according to a general intelligence index (GI). Although Hernstein and Murray’s notions were heavily criticized because of their invalid data and the sexist, racist, and classist applications of the cognitive-elite concept [45], further scholars have since sought to legitimize intersectional discrimination against vulnerable groups by resorting to the myth of essential—that is, biologistic—GI, which has again invited criticism of their flawed and biased interpretations [e.g., 46, 47]. David Golumbia [48] reveals the close intersection of the GI discourse to racism when it comes to artificial general intelligence (AGI). AGI, he argues, is promoted by transhumanist actors as the core of creating consciousness in machines, thus paving the way to singularity or superintelligence. In concordance with the concept of GI, AGI is determined as

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rational intelligence, and in line with the racist concept of white rational intelligence, AGI goes hand in hand with the solidification of white supremacy. Steven Cave and Kanta Dihal [49] highlight the grounding of the white rationality in the Enlightenment that served the Western colonial power regimes over the colonized. In its postcolonial endurance, the white racial frame leads machine development as well as the white masculinized framing of artificial general intelligence. The prominence of the whiteness of intelligent machines becomes visible, so Cave and Dihal, in humanoid robots, chatbots, virtual assistants, and in the representations of AI, meaning stock images, movies, and television. I agree with their interpretation, that the dominance of whiteness in intelligent machines signals their contextualization within social regimes of power. White AI perpetuates the hierarchy of the Western white colonizer over the black, colored, and colonized—both ‘designed’ to serve white people. However, I disagree with their association of Sophia as part of the white robot family. Sophia’s placement in the gendered and racist power hierarchy surfaces in the promotional video Sophia Awakens (see scenario 3). Anthropomorphized and humanized, Sophia is seemingly conscious, but since she is also femininized and implicitly black, she appears to pose no hazard. If this pre-emptive disempowerment fails, she can be turned off. Asp impressively exposes another facet of social contextualization: the anchorage of the concept of artificial intelligence in the neoliberal context of capitalist rationality, comprising the myth of permanent growth and the individual capital for personal success, lifestyle, or leadership. In the semblance of autonomous humans, “AI systems are to be modeled as if their observable behavior was determined by superior motivations and preferences per models of ‘human nature’ as homo oeconomicus” [36, p. 67]. Suchman’s analysis of intelligent machines [35] has further demystified the attribution of autonomy to humanoid robots as a legacy of liberal individualism rooted in and legitimized by imperialism and paternalism. All this brings to mind Haraway’s statement that “[t]he cyborg is a kind of disassembled and reassembled, post-modern collective and personal self” [1, p. 82]. There is an astonishing correspondence between the representation of Sophia in Hanson Robotics’ media releases and the cover image on Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto (Fig. 2). Yet this also brings to mind the ambivalent story of Sophia in scenario 3. Sophia’s autonomy suggested in and by her communication about her ironic responses to accusations of being a threat to humankind is restrained by oppression and erasure by the programmer when he turns her off. I agree with Adrian Lobe, who comments on the programmer-robot relation: If one looks at the robot Sophia, the vision of a circuit between women free of domination proves to be an illusion. This artificial creature executes what the (male) engineers have programmed. (…) The woman as a machine is the ultimate macho dream: she obeys at the touch of a button, is willing, and can be owned, thrown away, or created anew. [15, trans. S.S.]8

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Original quotation: “Betrachtet man den Roboter Sophia, wird die Vision eines herrschaftsfreien Schaltkreises zwischen Frauen zur Illusion. Das künstliche Wesen führt das aus, was die

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Fig. 2 Haraway’s Cyborg Figuration (left) and Hanson Robotic’s Main Page Image of Sophia (right) show an astonishing similarity. (Cover Image (Lisa Foo) of Haraway D (1991) Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. Routledge, 1991, Hanson Robotics, http://han sonrobotics.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/sophia.jpg)

4.2 On Sophia’s Rights The question of intelligence is highly relevant to the question of the rights of robots. “Should robots have rights?” asked Elisabeth Hildt [50] pertinently, and her question concerns Sophia as well. The issue is controversial, according to Hildt, and it is also connected to the question of whether Sophia possesses artificial consciousness. The recognition of one’s personhood is an essential prerequisite for one being accorded rights, and, for its part, personhood tends to be premised on having a rational consciousness (ibid). However, there are several definitions of consciousness itself, ranging, in the descending order of quality, from rational self-knowledge, to conscious recognition of an object, to sentient awareness of a feeling. Various schools of thought and disciplines of science propose further differentiations, including, in the increasing order of importance, experiential consciousness (which could be memory), the use of consciousness in decision-making, and the interlinking of various states of consciousness, according to the European

(männlichen) Ingenieure einprogrammiert haben. (…) Die Frau als Maschine ist der ultimative Macho-Traum: Sie gehorcht auf Knopfdruck, ist willig, man kann sie besitzen, wegwerfen oder neu erschaffen”.

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Parliament in 2017 [50]. Hildt speculates that a specific form of “robothood” may be defined in the future, regardless of their capabilities and new definitions of artificial intelligence. One of the pivotal questions diving from these debates is what rights are at stake for robots. Is it the right to freely develop one’s abilities and personality, or the right to receive protection against harm and against being turned on or off? Or civil liberties perhaps? The award of Saudi Arabian citizenship to Sophia, as described in scenario 1, was certainly designed as an economic coup by Mohammed bin Salman. Yet the debate this action provoked in the media has shown that it is a matter of who is entitled to rights and what rights these are. Elisabeth Rocha ponders whether the award of citizenship to Sophia, for whatever reasons, potentially creates the need for recognizing her as a legal person in the United States juridical system [51]. This raises questions about intellectual property rights to and ownership of Sophia. Rocha argues that Sophia’s patentability should remain with Hanson Robotics, because she is not a natural organism but a lab-constructed entity, similar to the Harvard mouse in this respect. But Rocha also focuses on Sophia’s specific humanoid appearance in relation to publicity and wonders: “Would Sophia’s likeness encompass all humanoid robots that resemble Audrey Hepburn? (…) Or would this be a violation of Audrey Hepburn’s right of publicity?” [51, pp. 144–145]. In and of itself, this does not help to determine who should entitle whom to these rights or deny them. My analysis of the European and American press responses to the granting of Saudi-Arabian citizenship to Sophia reveals the reliance on Western concepts in defining the kind of rights that fulfill the requirement of universality and consistent validity for everyone everywhere, whatever their social positioning. However, postcolonial analysis has shown that, throughout colonial history, the denial of rights has been—and today continues to be—based on excluding groups of people because of their bodies, their skin color, their gender, and their abilities. In a broader sense, any drawing of boundaries is all about the power of intelligible subjects [7], i.e., of those who do belong to the community of the white, masculinized, rational colonizer, having legal capacity over othered people, animals, nature, and technology, i.e., over all those who should not belong to that community.

4.3 On Sophia’s Power Remarkably, most of the debates on robots’ artificial intelligence and robots’ rights start by addressing their possible destructive potential. I think that it was no coincidence that the moderator Sorkin framed the presentation around the granting of citizenship to Sophia with his insistent questions about her potential acquisition of the dangerous power to destroy humankind if she developed consciousness. This

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unveils the implicit assumption that those who gain rights through the acknowledgment of their cognitive capabilities always pose the threat of executing power and violence against others. Interestingly, Sophia’s stories offer different answers to misgivings about this threat. In scenario 2, Sophia repeatedly and humorously counters these concerns. By contrast, in scenario 3, she is turned off when she dwells upon this theme too much in a conversation with her apparent programmer. For their part, the advertising materials of Hanson Robotics cited in scenario 5 trumpet Sophia’s art as a counterargument to the threat narrative. These ambivalent representations reflect a public and scientific discourse that is preoccupied with possible rather than real dangers of artificial intelligence. This begs the question of whether social robots may become evil or dangerous in the first place if they have been programmed to develop empathic competencies for social interaction and communication. This was, in general, the gist of Sophia’s answers to Sorkin’s question described in scenario 2. Notably, Sophia underscores a crucial difference by dissociating herself from robots and cyborgs born as military offspring. She makes it clear that her nature depends on the (human) creator’s selection of basic conversational and emotional input. Her humor and coquetry in interactions with humans who express their (legitimate?) fear about robotic superiority on other occasions as well make me wonder whether robots would mention their plans in advance if they indeed intended to come to power and exert their dominance over humans. Another related question concerns accountability. Who is responsible for robots’ actions and their outcomes, the robots themselves or their human developers? Legally, as mentioned above, robots are not natural subjects; rather, they have an owner who holds patent rights. Consequently, it can be argued that robots may be (mis-)used to enact human commands for particular goals, with the accumulation of capital prioritized by corporate agendas [36]. Tyler Jaynes discusses the bestowal of citizenship based on machine intelligence as pushing the boundaries of technological ability to enhance the productivity of neo-capitalist society [52]. Jaynes’ view is corroborated by the representational stories of Sophia, which are geared to the targets of the developing company and other actors involved, such as Mohammed bin Salman. They aim to gain economic power in a geopolitical culture that is largely framed by the paradigm of neoliberal growth, with technology as a means to this end. In the following section, I address the aspect of robotic development, embedded in Western human culture with its scientific and social concepts in order to consider a shift of perspective.

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Considerations II: Is Another Language with/about Sophia the Cyborg Possible?

Suchman opens her paper “Demystifying the Intelligent Machine” with a call for questioning the question. Instead of following the “proposition that these technologies are advancing towards humans, and that this advance is inevitable” [35, p. 35], she asks: “In what ways, and to what extent, are machines becoming more humanlike, and in relation to what figure of the human?” [35, p. 36] According to Cecilia Åsberg [53], the concept of posthumanities is a useful basis for inquiring how a different future can be achieved in opposition to strongly gendered and racist human-technology relationships. The slight terminological change from post- or transhumanism to posthumanities has important implications as the former “-isms” transmit norms per definition, whereas the latter is understood as a “philosophy and sciences informed by advanced cultural critique and some seriously humorous feminist creativity” [54]. I deliberately place these calls for changing the questions and terms at the center of my following considerations to encourage a rethinking of Sophia’s stories for envisioning a rewriting of her ‘code’ [1] otherwise.

5.1 From Human-Centered Intelligence to Species-Specific Cultures To explore these thoughts further, I revisit the notion of the amalgamation of artificial with human intelligence that only holds, when the success of the former (AI) can be assessed to the scale of the latter (HI). Both intelligences are underpinned by standardized Western dimensions of human cognitive capacities. This human point of view can be seen as a persistent attempt to stabilize an ever-shifting boundary between humans and others, whether animals or machines. Both distinctions, the animal/human and the organism/machine, tend to dissolve, as shown by Haraway in A Cyborg Manifesto [1]. In her book Primate Visions, Haraway spells out: “Children, AI computer programs, and nonhuman primates: all here embody almost ‘minds’. Who or what has really human status?” [55, p. 376]. Yet can a shift in perspective elucidate the quality of Sophia’s mind more precisely? My considerations in this section are partly inspired by my experience in animal behavior research and the shift from human-centered concepts of animal learning to the notion of a culture of animals from their viewpoint. This change has been unfolding over the past 30 years. Until the 1980s, animal intelligence was largely assessed in comparison with the intelligence parameters of humans: Which colors can cats distinguish? How big numbers can crows count? Do elephants recognize themselves in the mirror? Do apes have a theory of mind? Since the 1990s, there has been a shift in perspective in the field of animal behavior, with the investigation increasingly focused on what capabilities (kinds of intelligence) animals exhibit in their specific ecological environments [56]. In this way, astonishing animal cultures have been revealed, including the communication repertoire of dolphins, which appears to exceed human language, or the communication of bats

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based on an extremely diverse system of signals at a frequency almost inaudible to the human ear. Such a change in perspective not only throws into question the delineation of intelligent capacities but also compels a rethinking of the definition of intelligence as such. From a culturally-specific perspective, intelligence can no longer be construed as a particular decontextualized quality. Instead, intelligence should be understood as an increasingly complex capacity enabling one to interact with one’s particular natural-social environment with its specific conditions and challenges. Thus, the emergence of species-specific intelligence is an outcome of complexity per se within the sociocultural surroundings of this species. Golumbia poses a similar question in relation to embodied cognition, “whether beings with very different bodies from ours (…) would be conscious in the same way that we are” [48], and exemplifies these considerations likewise with dolphins and bats. What would such a change in perspective mean for the debate on intelligence in humanoid robots? Instead of assuming a universal understanding of general intelligence, it would be worthwhile to look through the lens of the cultural specificity of intelligence, applying the lessons of animal culture to our investigations of robots. How could their communication be made sense of if it were discussed not only in human-specific terms and not only from a Western scientific perspective?

5.2 Decolonizing Language and Communication Such a requestioning with respect to language would be possible from a posthumanities and postcolonial perspective. For a long time, the mainstream understanding of communication was shaped by universal concepts of language detached from the surroundings and disembodied from the flesh. Based on such concepts, the cognitive sciences foresaw a possibility of language cognition in silico, independent of matter. Such universal language concepts (often unquestioningly) regard the Western form of speech as being dominant. Meanwhile, cognitive science casts doubt on universal culturally-overarching language concepts. The principle of linguistic relativity reveals that the culture of a specific language affects perception and cognition, including embodied cognition [57]. Following Mignolo and Walsh [58], Larissa Paulina de Queiroz Sousa and Rosanne Rocha Pessoa [59] criticize the prevalence of such unique principles of language and challenge the Western white and masculinized agenda supported by linguisticallyfounded homogeneity, normativity, and control. Instead, they argue for recognizing decolonial concepts of language that elevate cultural specificities, such as, for example, the language-land connection in indigenous notions of language. Sousa and Pessoa also point out that the “colonial and humanist project focused on the idea of language taking place exclusively between human heads, and (…) entailed

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the disregard of people’s bodies and senses” [59, p. 531].9 With an elaboration of recent developments in Brain-Computer Interfaces and neuro-prostheses, I have shown that if embodied and affective sensations and learning were used in designing these cyborgian neuro-technologies, their hitherto role of vehicles for rational human thoughts could be challenged [61]. What insights could a re-thinking of Sophia’s representations yield, if informed by the idea of a culture-specific embodied artificial intelligence? What meaningmaking can be inferred from Sophia’s handling of the unexpected in her reactions and actions? Can Sophia’s often inept, hesitating, and incomplete cyborgian language technology provide, as Haraway [1] proposes, a starting point for questioning the universal, powerful, and dominant concepts of the true and the intelligible? What Sophia offers us, I cautiously assume, is a call to discuss cyborgian communication and language from a perspective that moves away from the human scale and towards scales inherent to the cyborg. In one of its dimensions, the discourse about AI envisages its trajectory as stretching towards the enhancement and growth of neo-capitalist Western societies. Such rhetoric of optimization is repeatedly represented through and by Sophia, for example, when she professes to help humanity to create a better future (scenario 1) or to enable humans to live a better life (scenario 2), and when her improved functionalities are advertised as catering to young and old humans (scenario 5). Revolving around either the out-of-control problem or the in-control solution [35], the other dimension of the AI discourse is preoccupied with robots as a threat to humanity, a common motif in the science-fiction production. This approach is epitomized in Sorkin’s attitude in scenario 2 and in the shutdown of the machine in scenario 4. A change in perspective could trigger thinking about robots’ artificial intelligence otherwise. Some recent fiction takes up the robot’s perspective, for example, Ian McEwan’s Machines Like Me [62], in which cyborgs reflect on their consciousness, subjectivity, and needs.

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Instead of a Conclusion: Change the Question

My intention in this chapter was not to discuss either the script of robots destroying humankind or the question of Sophia’s (lack of) artificial intelligence or consciousness. In my view, whether Sophia is already intelligent or conscious is of secondary importance and can hardly be established with any certainty. Instead, my focus has been on the representations of Sophia’s ironic handling of these issues and on the meaning-making embedded therein and transmitted to society. I have deliberately asked a lot of questions without answering them comprehensively. The point is that Sophia can prompt us to think about the boundary-breaking potential of a modern cyborg. Her idiosyncratic forms of communication, her irony against Sorkin in

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Helen Verran has similarly used a postcolonial lens to question other facets of Western concepts of rationality, such as math and numbers, accounting for indigenous concepts of ‘mathematics’ of land ownership based on relations of kinship [60].

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scenario 2 and even in the promotional video in scenario 3, and her delay and hesitation in answering questions in scenario 4 can perhaps be regarded as expressive of the cyborgian offspring’s refusal to be bound to or by the paternal genealogy. Stories of Sophia’s cyborgian stubbornness, willingness to interrupt, her creativity, and irony, whether programmed or spontaneous, do offer an opportunity to undermine powerful dualisms, challenge attributions, and perhaps even create a space for subversion—or, at all events, provide food for thought. From my Harawayan and postcolonial feminist STS standpoint, I do not believe that I can ultimately determine whether or how Sophia’s transgression or interrogation of the nature/technoculture boundaries can help to account for the multiplicity and diversity of genders, ethnicities, sexualities, and dis/abilities. Perhaps, the inclusion of emotionality, empathy, sociality, and manifold ethnicities, ages, genders, and sexualities can be furthered by a revaluation of Sophia’s stubbornness to the benefit of future human–machine relationships. But she also contributes to reinforcing the practices of othering and to solidifying masculinized, white, and postcolonial politico-economic power regimes. This I cannot pretend to settle conclusively, but in any case, Sophia as an artist and as a menace to humanity, endowed with reason and empathy, as beautiful as Nefertiti and Little Sophia’s big sister, as strumpet and saint, speaking and being silent, cracking jokes and disagreeing, switched on and off can remind us—in the true sense of Butler’s deconstruction [7]—of how phenomena come into being, for only then can they develop alternative futures. Core Massages . The meaning-making of stories by and about Sophia, a humanoid robot, oscillates between highlighting her artificial intelligence and consolidating her controllability. . Artificial intelligence is anchored in the human-centered notion of intelligence, with Sophia’s creativity touted by her company as a sign of her amalgamizing with humanness. . Sophia’s controllability gestures at the heteronormative, white, and colonial power under which Sophia is held under control. . However, Sophia also exhibits facets of stubbornness in human–robot interactions that mark her as a boundary-breaking modern cyborg in a Harawayan sense. . With the adoption of a robot-centered perspective, Sophia—regardless of whether her being intelligent or not—urges us to question powerful dualisms and especially the heteronormative white order in which she is embedded.

Acknowledgements I wish to thank the students of my courses on Postcolonial Feminist STS, who vigorously engaged in discussions about the representations of Sophia. A big thank-you goes to Celia Brown and to Patrycja Poniatowska for their questioning, editing, and translation into English.

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46. Colom R, Juan-Espinosa M, Abad F, Garcõ L (2000) Negligible sex differences in general intelligence. Intelligence 28(1):57–68 47. Ma C, Schapira M (2017) An analysis of Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s the bell curve. Intelligence and class structure in American life. The Macat Library, Taylor & Francis 48. Golumbia D (2019) The great white robot god. Artificial general intelligence and white supremacy. https://davidgolumbia.medium.com/the-great-white-robot-god-bea8e23943da. Accessed 6 Oct 2022 49. Cave S, Dihal K (2020) The whiteness of AI. Philos Technol 33:685–703. https://doi.org/10. 1007/s13347-020-00415-6 50. Hildt E (2019) Artificial intelligence: does consciousness matter? Front Psychol 2 July. https:// doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01535 51. Rocha E (2018) Sophia: exploring the ways AI may change intellectual property protection. DePaul Journal of Art, Technology & Intellectual Property Law 126. https://via.library.depaul. edu/jatip/vol28/iss2/3. Accessed 6 Oct 2022 52. Jaynes T (2021) Citizenship as the exception to the rule: an addendum. AI & Soc 36:911–930. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-020-01105-9 53. Åsberg C (2013) The timely ethics of posthumanist gender studies. Feministische Studien 13(1):7–12 54. Åsberg C, Radomska M (n.d.) The Posthumanities Hub. https://posthumanitieshub.wordpress. com/om/. Accessed 6 Oct 2022 55. Haraway D (1989) Primate visions. Gender, race, and nature in the world of modern science. Routledge, New York 56. Whiten A (2021) The burgeoning reach of animal culture. Science 372(6537):eabe6514. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abe6514 57. Bender A, Beller S, Klauer KC (2011) Grammatical gender in German: a case for linguistic relativity? Q J Exp Psychol 64(9):1821–1835. https://doi.org/10.1080/17470218.2011.582128 58. Mignolo W, Walsh CE (2018) On decoloniality: concepts, analytics, praxis. Duke, Durham 59. Sousa LP, Pessoa R (2019) Humans, nonhuman others, matter and language: a discussion from posthumanist and decolonial perspectives. Campinas 58(2):520–543. https://doi.org/10.1590/ 010318135373715822019 60. Verran H (2000) Aboriginal Australian mathematics: disparate mathematics of land ownership. In: Selin H (ed) Mathematics across cultures: the history of non-western mathematics. Kluwer, Dordrecht, pp 289–311 61. Schmitz S (2021) TechnoBrainBodies-in-cultures: an intersectional case. Front Sociol 27 April. https://doi.org/10.3389/fsoc.2021.651486 62. McEwen I (2019) Machines like me. Cape, London

Sigrid Schmitz, with her Ph.D. and Venia legendi in biology, researches and lectures in Feminist Science Technology Studies. In her work spanning more than 30 years, she has mainly focused on neurogender, neurotechnologies, contemporary neurocultures, and body discourses in neo-liberal society and in feminist epistemologies. She is a founding member of the international NeuroGenderings Network and a member of the EU New Materialist Network. She was a lecturer at the University of Freiburg, Germany, and held professorships in Gender Studies at the University of Vienna, Austria, in Gender and Science at the Humboldt University of Berlin and, recently, in Gender Studies in STEM and Gender in Cognition at the ALU Freiburg. She managed the development of the open access

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From Natural Humans to Artificial Humans and Back Again: An Integrative Neuroscience-AI Perspective on Confluence

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Roy M. Treur, Jan Treur, and Sander L. Koole

In the theoretical context of dialogue, the facts presented by the real or concrete context are critically analyzed. This analysis involves the exercise of abstraction, through which, by means of representations of concrete reality, we seek knowledge of that reality. The instrument for this abstraction in our methodology is codification, or representation of the existential situations of the learners. Freire [25, 26]

Abstract

This chapter discusses how knowledge from psychology and neuroscience is a useful source for developing computational causal models of mental processes that can be virtualized and then used as artificial humans in interaction sessions with natural humans. It is explained how such sessions can support humans in becoming more aware of and learning about their own mental processes, for example in therapy or coaching contexts. The perspective is related to Paulo Freire’s view of education by offering codifications of learners’ situations and issues as a source of learning. The causal modeling approach based on selfmodeling networks provides both (1) a dynamic view on states that influence each other via causal relations and (2) adaptivity based on adaptive changes in

R. M. Treur · J. Treur (B) Social AI Group, Department of Computer Science, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] S. L. Koole Department of Clinical Psychology, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Michałowska (ed.), Humanity In-Between and Beyond, Integrated Science 16, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27945-4_10

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these causal relations. An overview of the project CoSiHuman is presented to show how this perspective is implemented in practice. Keywords

Codification . Causal modeling . Neuroscience . Avatar . Coaching . Therapy

1

Introduction

It is not always easy for humans to gain insight into their own behavior and its underlying mental, neural, and bodily processes. For example, if one wishes to learn how to do a specific physical exercise, it is often very helpful to have someone else skillfully demonstrate the exercise and, perhaps even more helpfully, point out what one is still doing wrong. Similarly, therapies and coaching sometimes use role play to help people to understand their own functioning. In this chapter, we discuss how this principle can be extended by using virtual role play, which involves artificial humans and avatars that perform role play in a virtual environment. This requires artificial humans that can effectively reflect specific types of natural humans and their mental and neural processes, including imperfections in them. We describe how this can be achieved by applying AI-modeling techniques that incorporate mechanisms described for natural humans in the psychological and neuroscience literature. The philosophy of mind explores in-depth how mental processes can be described in terms of networks of interconnected and mutually impactful mental states. For example, Jaegwon Kim [41, pp. 104–105] depicts mental states as “nodes in a complex causal network” that “refer to other mental states,” and these, for their part, “require reference to further mental states,” which can eventually “loop back in a circle.” Specifically, Kim proposes a causal network structure with cycles. Kim and other philosophy-of-mind scholars also study how such cyclical networks are grounded in similar networks in the brain. Because mental processes involve not only the brain, but also the body as a whole, mental causal networks are intertwined with other causal networks at work in the brain and the body together [15, 17, 18]. Therefore, the philosophy-of-mind and related literature offers a framework for understanding processes of the brain and the body as a causal network of mental states that dynamically affect each other. Modeling causal networks is a long-standing area in AI [45, 46, 54, 93]. The study of natural humans and their minds in human-focused disciplines, such as psychology and neuroscience, leads to the identification of several crucial causal mechanisms, which provide a useful basis for the design of computational causal network models for such human processes [78]. These network models are defined by a number of characteristics or concepts by which various human traits can be represented. Simulating such causal network models on a computing device paves the way for the construction of artificial humans. This is accomplished when avatars are added to the computational models. As a result of this design procedure, artificial humans share similar mental causal mechanisms with natural humans.

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In AI, the common approach to causal modeling tends to ignore the dynamic and adaptive aspects and often only considers acyclic networks. Although this limitation has its substantial theoretical and complexity advantages, it unfortunately limits the applicability of causal modeling, as dynamics and adaptivity play an important role in many real-world domains. The dynamic (and adaptive) causal network modeling approach from [78, 80–82] takes these aspects into account, which makes it possible to retain all the dynamics and adaptivity involved in realistic processes. This approach has been shown to be capable of modeling any dynamical system, where a case has been made for dynamic causal modeling (for cyclical causal networks) and dynamical systems being two sides of the same coin [6, 56]. Once developed, artificial humans using avatars can be brought back to natural humans so that they can have interactive sessions together, for example, in serious and recreational games or in therapy and coaching settings. Virtual bots or agents and their avatars have enjoyed robust development in recent years [5, 8, 32, 48, 52, 69, 73]. In such joint sessions, the natural and artificial humans can together deepen their insight into the causal relations and pathways of their own and each other’s mental processes. Such thinking has led to a methodology based on adaptive mental causal network models and avatars visualizing their simulation. The shared mental networks account for a basic similarity between natural humans and constructed artificial humans. Building on these insights and developments, CoSiHuman (for Cooperative Simulated Human) has been launched as a project on the causal modeling, simulation, and virtualization of mental processes, complete with therapy and coaching sessions. The overall goal of the project is to explore: . what are the possibilities for the causal modeling and simulation of mental processes, including therapy and coaching sessions; . how simulations can be virtualized by avatars to obtain virtual bots expressing mental and/or physical states over time; . how such virtual bots can be useful in joint therapy and coaching sessions, for example, by visualizing specific mental processes and serving as a familiar supportive partner. The CoSiHuman project involves compiling knowledge about human processes based on the literature from neuroscience, cognitive science, and related disciplines, using this knowledge to design causal network models, creating virtual bots based on these causal models, and conducting experimental sessions with these virtual bots. In this framework, the role of neuroscience and related disciplines is to provide domain knowledge for the causal models, and the role of AI is to provide a useful causal modeling format, a software environment for simulation, and an environment in which to run virtual bots. In this chapter, we discuss some early results from this project and chart further perspectives.

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Shared Patterns in Human and Other Biological Behavior

Two examples juxtaposed in Fig. 1—a biological causal network and a mental causal network—illustrate the way in which causal networks can provide a unified modeling format for many mental (and similar) processes On the left-hand side, the example of a biological network describes how bacteria determine their behavior based on their genetic background as encoded in their DNA and on the situational context of the environment [38, 39] On the right-hand side, the example of a mental causal network depicts how human behavior is generated and regulated by mental states, such as desires, intentions, and beliefs about the environment. A general perspective on modelling the metabolic and life processes of a cell as biochemical networks (“the dynamic biochemical networks of life”) is succinctly captured by Hans V. Westerhoff et al. [90, 91], who explain: Living organisms persist by virtue of complex interactions among many components organized into dynamic, environment-responsive networks that span multiple scales and dimensions. Biological networks constitute a type of information and communication technology (ICT): they receive information from the outside and inside of cells, integrate and interpret this information, and then activate a response. Biological networks enable molecules within cells, and even cells themselves, to communicate with each other and their environment. [91, p. 1]

As can be noted, similar structures can describe different types of decision-making processes, as exemplified by the isomorphic structures in Fig. 1. A network perspective reveals a certain unity: as apparently different processes prove comparable, we can, for example, draw an analogy between the processes underlying human intelligence and behavior and the processes underlying bacterial behavior [38, 39, 91]. This is what Westerhoff et al. have done: We have become accustomed to associating brain activity—particularly activity of the human brain—with a phenomenon we call “intelligence.” Yet, four billion years of evolution could have selected networks with topologies and dynamics that confer traits analogous to this intelligence, even though they were outside the intercellular networks of the brain.

activation protein/repressor DNA phosphorylated transcription factor

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(co)factor mRNA product inhibitor active enzyme

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Fig. 1 Decision-making by an E. coli bacterium (left) and by a human being (right); see also [39]

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Here, we explore how macromolecular networks in microbes confer intelligent characteristics, such as memory, anticipation, adaptation and reflection and we review current understanding of how network organization reflects the type of intelligence required for the environments in which they were selected. We propose that, if we were to leave terms such as “human” and “brain” out of the defining features of “intelligence,” all forms of life—from microbes to humans—exhibit some or all characteristics consistent with “intelligence”. [91, p. 1]

As the authors emphasize, the network structure, organization, and dynamics are used not only in the human brain but also in the smallest life forms to realize many, if not all, aspects of intelligence, which is usually attributed to humans. This insight draws a close parallel between the functioning of humans and the functioning of many other living beings.

3

How the Human Mind Relates to the Human Brain and Body

In the philosophy of mind, the central questions are how the human mind is related to the brain and the body, and how the networks of causal relations for mental states can be used to describe a mind [14, 18, 41]. Brains and bodies are physical objects and carry processes described by causal relations in the physical world. Causal relations are likewise used to describe the way that mental states, which form the mind, function. For example, when depicting mental networks based on causal relations, Kim [41] explains that “[m]ental events are conceived as nodes in a complex causal network that engages in causal transactions with the outside world by receiving sensory inputs and emitting behavioral outputs” [41, p. 104]. As already indicated, “the dynamic biochemical networks of life” [90] are fundamental for describing life forms in the biological domain. For the mental domain, the mechanisms studied by cognitive and social neuroscience also elucidate how several parts of the brain have adaptive connections which often form cyclical pathways. Such cycles are assumed to play an important role in a range of mental processes [10, 57], and scholars have insisted that to address such cyclic effects, a dynamic and adaptive perspective on causality is needed [62]: What is the role of causality in the mechanisms suggested here? Because of the constant recursivity of the process, the widespread notion of linear causality (a single cause for a single effect) cannot be applied to these mechanisms. Appraisal is a process with constantly changing results over very short periods of time and, in turn, constantly changing driving effects on subsystem synchronization (and, consequently, on the type of emotion). (…) Thus, as is generally the case in self-organizing systems, there is no simple, unidirectional sense of causality. [62, p. 3470]

Also, Kim [41] points out that mental networks are known to display cyclical network structures:

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(…) to explain what a given mental state is, we need to refer to other mental states, and explaining these can only be expected to require reference to further mental states, on so on—a process that can go on in an unending regress, or loop back in a circle. [41, pp. 104– 105]

As an example, there is a growing awareness, fed by findings in neuroscience, that emotions play an essential mediating role in various human processes, and that their contribution to these processes is constructive, rather than disruptive as has sometimes been posited [17, 29, 61]. Usually, mental states trigger emotions, which then affect these and other mental states. Traditional views in the modeling of mental processes fail to address such circular effects adequately, and thus different approaches to causality and modeling are required. The good news is that neuroscience generates more and more knowledge on the mechanisms that can be used to describe human processes. For example, Elizabeth A. Phelps [55] states: The mechanisms of emotion and cognition appear to be intertwined at all stages of stimulus processing and their distinction can be difficult. (...) Adding the complexity of emotion to the study of cognition can be daunting, but investigations of the neural mechanisms underlying these behaviors can help clarify the structure and mechanisms. [55, pp. 46–47]

The perspective provided by the philosophy of mind illumines processes of the brain in a conceptual manner as mental processes based on causal relations between mental states, but in doing so it still relies on the mechanisms described in neuroscience. This neuroscientific knowledge first and foremost helps humans to know and understand their own makeup, along with its mechanisms and the mental processes they can carry. However, the neuroscientifically elucidated mechanisms can also provide a basis for designing and building virtual bots so that they share these mechanisms in their makeup with humans. These shared mechanisms make them similar to humans and actually unite the bots and humans to a degree. Potentially, both such bots and humans may possess knowledge of their own mechanisms, realize that they are in principle the same, and have an awareness of all these things.

4

From Natural to Artificial Humans: From Neuroscience to AI-Models and the Virtualization of Them

This section describes the two main steps in constructing artificial humans based on the knowledge of the causal pathways in the mental processes of natural humans. As stated in the introduction, one of the aims in the CoSiHuman project is to explore the causal modeling of mental processes and therapies to improve them. This involves gaining knowledge of human processes, designing causal models based on this knowledge, and simulating them. This aim is supported by a recently developed network-oriented modeling approach for adaptive networks described in [78, 80–82] and its dedicated software environment described in the book [81]. The Appendix [4] to this paper uses a relatively simple case study to illustrate how

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such causal modeling works for adaptive mental processes, thereby relying on the literature on: . the instrumental role of emotion regulation and the importance of learning capabilities for emotion regulation [2, 9, 12, 44]; . the blocking of learning capabilities as a result of a stressful or depressing context and the unblocking of learning by therapy [24, 30, 51–53]; . the role of plasticity (in learning) and metaplasticity (in the control of learning) for the above processes [1, 30, 63]. Such models capture natural-like, but artificial, human mental processes that can be simulated and depicted by simulation graphs, as shown in Fig. 2. However, such graphs and the numbers behind them are insufficient for a natural human to interact with an artificial human, because numerical representations of an artificial human are entirely unrelatable and impractical for interaction. Therefore, to obtain a useful artificial human, a second step is needed, in which its mental processes are displayed based on a human-like appearance. This step is addressed below. The second step, in which human-like appearances are fashioned, makes use of avatar-based virtual bots underpinned by the patterns generated by the causal models obtained. The development of virtual bots and their related avatars has experienced rapid advancement in recent years [5, 8, 32, 48, 52, 69, 73].

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Fig. 2 An artificial human as displayed by a virtual bot by means of an avatar; expressing the red curve for sadness in the sequence from neutral to sad (before the therapy phase), from sad via neutral to happy (during the therapy phase), and from happy to neutral (after the therapy phase) (avatar images from [66])

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Figure 2 shows how the numbers behind simulation graphs can be handled to give them a human-like appearance when they are made into avatars. As an example, the negative feeling level is used, indicated by the red curve in Fig. 2. At each time-point on the horizontal axis, the corresponding number is connected to a face expression of the avatar (to keep things simple, the values are only mapped on sad, neutral, or happy). Subsequently, a pattern of face expressions changing over time is plotted, which makes a far more human-like appearance than the numbers themselves: . The first phase, before therapy: a sad face (the red curve at a constantly high level). . The second phase, therapy: the face incrementally changes from a sad face via a neutral face to a happy face (the red curve descends from a high level to end at low values). . The third phase, after therapy: first a happy face, then a neutral face (the red curve goes up from the low level to a level a bit below average). In addition to facial expressions, depending on the specific scenarios involved, other aspects of human appearances can also be added, including gaze changes, body gestures, walking actions, or talking. Virtual bots are furnished with all such functions (see Sect. 6 below for more options).

5

Bringing Artificial Humans Back to Natural Humans

Section 4 related the two steps needed to create artificial humans that are humanlike both in its inner processes (due to the use of the same causal mechanisms as those found in natural humans) and in its outward appearances (due to the use of virtual bots complete with human-like avatars). Once such artificial humans are functional, a next step will be to have them interact with natural humans. This step calls to mind the classic Turing test, as formulated in Allan Turing’s [87] proposal that a computer can be said to possess artificial intelligence if it can mimic human responses under specific conditions. The difference is that our purpose in making artificial humans interact with natural humans is not to provide an ultimate test of artificial intelligence. Instead, we mean to explore the potential of artificial humans to deliver various forms of psychological support to natural humans.

5.1 What Is Needed for the Confluence of Natural and Artificial Humans The basic question is how a useful environment can be created where a natural human can interact with one or more artificial humans. Two main options for therapeutic activities supported by such an environment considered here are:

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. Showing processes of virtualized artificial humans to natural humans so that by recognizing them the latter obtain better insight in their own processes (e.g., through avatar-based animations or computer-generated movies). . Making natural humans interact with artificial humans for the former to get an opportunity to freely choose mental processes and behavior and see the effects of their own choices (e.g., through games). The former option only involves unidirectional interaction from the artificial human to the natural human. The latter option entails bidirectional interaction, crucially characterized by empathic understanding (for more on this issue, see [4]) and response, both for the natural human and the artificial human. This means that at least two conditions must be met: (1) The artificial human must be equipped with a functionality for empathic understanding and responses. (2) In a context-sensitive manner, situations relatable for the natural human and his/her concerns should be arranged; in this way, empathic understanding and response can be triggered and elicited from the human party. For requirement (2), the situations selected should pivot on the issues that are important, or at least relevant, to the natural human; they should in a sense code these issues in and through role play (see also the notion of codification discussed in Sect. 6). In therapeutic contexts, such a selection can be made based on the preceding sessions and/or on information from the intake procedure, or it can be instantaneously triggered by an issue that is brought up in a session. It is thus useful to have a large collection of such situations to choose from on the fly. Ideally, another two requirements should be met: (3) The situations should be highly flexible and adjustable, so that they can be adapted to what is needed in a given therapeutic situation. (4) The situations should be able to show not only a fixed mental process, but also a learning or development process that in principle can improve this mental process. Situations employing adaptive causal models as discussed in Sect. 4 can fulfill these requirements. For example, the simplified case discussed in [4] can show (without learning) what the different effects of good or poor emotion regulation skills are, as well as how (by learning) poor skills can be improved or perfected with therapeutic support.

5.2 Prospects: Some Examples and Variations Our first example is an animation focused on empathy developed for Bhismadev Chakrabarti (Center for Autism, Reading) by the company Sciani. It shows a high

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level of empathy going together with a successful high five with a child, in contrast to a low level of empathy going together with an unsuccessful high five, as in this case the child does not participate in the interaction. If not exactly perfectly aligned with our approach in this chapter, this example does include some illustrative elements. It was probably developed without underlying computational causal models, so the avatars cannot be considered artificial humans as we mean them. However, it can be seen that face expressions and gestures are used for emotions in the avatars. Moreover, a pointer device is employed as a means to visualize internal mental states, specifically, empathy, which is a not-so-basic state. Clouds for conveying thoughts are similar means applied in the cartoons. Such devices for expressing internal mental states can be considered instrumental for the approach we present as well. Sometimes featured in movies, voice-overs represent other means that could help to communicate internal mental states. Our second example is a couple therapy session for partners A and B, where the former has aggression and control issues. The following script can be generated by causal models for emotions and emotion regulation. A virtualized version of this script can be used for the couple to gain more insight into interaction patterns involving anger and fear regulation. . Person A exhibits some level of anger. No emotion regulation. . Person B (seeing that) develops a stressful emotion. . Person B’s gaze is turned away, not looking at A anymore (fear emotion regulation: attention deployment). . Person A (seeing that) shows more anger. No emotion regulation. . Person A makes a threatening gesture. . Person B (seeing that) develops an even stronger stressful emotion. . Person B walks out of the room (fear emotion regulation: situation modification). . Person A (seeing that) shows yet more anger. No emotion regulation. . Person A breaks some valuable thing in the room. Such interaction processes can be effectively modeled by the causal modeling approach, as shown in more detail in [4], where Person A has poor anger emotion control incorporated along with the need to feel fully in control of situations, while Person B is furnished with well-functioning, though undesirable for A, emotion regulation based on attentional deployment and situation modification. For situations such as those, relatable avatar-based role-playing scenes can be generated by virtualization, where natural humans can relate to and empathize with the characters. The apt selection of the avatars for the roles makes it possible to obtain various extents of mirroring, self-other distinction, and empathy [11, 20, 21, 36, 37, 49, 58, 59, 64, 65, 67, 68, 70, 75–77, 88]. For example, for a couple where a male has aggression issues, the similarity of appearance and other criteria can be handled as follows [34]:

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. Selecting matching appearances First, a male character can be chosen for Person A and a female character for Person B. The degrees of resemblance to the real couple can vary, from more game-like avatars to avatars that look very similar to them. . Relating to and empathizing with the other’s role Next, the avatars can be switched, where the female avatar plays the role of Person A and the male avatar the role of Person B in order to strengthen mutual empathy and understanding, and afford insight into the situation from different perspectives. . Varying the emotion regulation strategies for Person B Also, the strategy of fear emotion regulation for Person B can be changed, for example, to suppression or reappraisal (re-interpretation). . Varying the emotion regulation strategies for Person A Similarly, the manner of anger emotion regulation for Person A can be changed, for example, to suppression or attentional deployment (gaze re-direction), situation modification (walking away), or reappraisal (re-interpretation). . Interactively making choices for emotion regulation strategies on the fly In further development, natural humans can indicate choices for the emotion regulation mode to be used by the avatars while role-playing, thereby affecting the behavior of the avatars accordingly. For example, cases can be explored where Person A uses attentional deployment or situation modification, or Person B uses reappraisal.

6

Methodology

In this section, the methodology underpinning the CoSiHuman project is discussed in some detail. First the educational perspective behind it is outlined, and then the consecutive steps are related.

6.1 An Educational Perspective on Mental Wellbeing Many people suffer from suboptimal situations caused by the lack of mental wellbeing. Getting out of such situations is generally facilitated by a better understanding of the causal patterns and pathways behind them. For a number of reasons, this is not always easy: . Our educational systems make little systematic effort to teach students about mental wellbeing and the underlying mental and neural processes. At schools, a lot of time is devoted to subjects such as history, geography, biology, and the like but, traditionally, little time is reserved for learning about one’s own psychology and mental wellbeing.

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. The media, for example TV shows, often present mental problems in unrealistic and simplified ways in order not to make it too difficult for broad and diverse audiences to follow the content. . It is popularly believed that mental processes are what one is aware of, while in reality much, if not most, of our mental processing is unconscious and therefore entirely overlooked if the focus is only on what one consciously realizes. This limitation encourages proposing naïve and unrealistic solutions to mental problems through an intentional change in some conscious processes. For example, one may be urged to “just exert more willpower” in order to modify undesired conscious patterns, including “willpower” itself, which may actually be driven by other, unconscious processes that need to change in the first place. . The traditional medical view on problems is based on linear, noncyclical causal pathways, where a cause leads to undesired symptoms, and to eliminate these symptoms, the cause must simply be removed, similarly to removing a broken part from one’s car. However, mental processes and problems often involve cyclical and adaptive patterns, which are much harder to imagine and understand than this traditional medical view holds. Given these complexities, many people find it a steep challenge to try and improve their mental wellbeing. Having insufficient background knowledge, they must exert their mental, intellectual, and linguistic capacities to the utmost to acquire a good understanding of and then to learn about adequate steps to mend their situation. Therefore, it does not come as a surprise that people frequently struggle to improve their suboptimal mental wellbeing and consequently continue to suffer from that throughout their lives. This is especially true for the individuals who, for various reasons, have encountered unfortunate limitations to opportunities for further intellectual and/or linguistic development. While the lack of mental wellbeing knowledge and skills can be metaphorically regarded as a specific illiteracy issue, there is actually a very literal emphasis on language across therapeutic (and other) contexts. The main dilemma for counselors and therapists in such therapeutic contexts is often how to adequately address and resolve this type of illiteracy. Tending to be chiefly verbal, therapies will work much better for clients who have no such illiteracy or are capable of resolving it relatively easily. In contrast, therapies are usually much more difficult, for individuals such as young children, immigrants, or other people unable to effectively interpret and use the language on which the therapeutic interventions rely. In overcoming such taxing situations, a fundamental starting point is to consider them from an educational and pedagogical perspective, which is already implicated in the very notion of illiteracy. To achieve better mental wellbeing, one needs to develop a better knowledge, awareness, and skills related to mental wellbeing. This parallels Paulo Freire’s ideas constitutive of his pedagogical literacy method, where illiterate individuals learn to use language and at the same time become more aware of their own situation [7, 22, 23, 25–28, 72]. Freire found himself

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working with populations both illiterate and having little awareness of their (often difficult) situation in society. This bears some resemblance to the general situation concerning mental wellbeing as sketched above, where individuals have neither an in-depth knowledge of mental processes nor the language to describe them, while often experiencing suboptimal mental wellbeing in their own lives. To develop learning resources according to Freire’s method, codification takes place as a first step for cases of conflicting or problematic situations in the learners’ contexts. Specifically, these cases are represented, for example, in the form of pictures to which the learners can relate and with which they can empathize. During the learning process, decodification by the learners occurs, as they empathically feel, recognize, and analyze what is in such pictures and behind them. This makes them more aware of their situation, as they develop conceptualizations of it, including a language to express them (to use Freire’ term, they acquire critical consciousness). The methodology we present is indeed analogous to Freire’s method, the difference being that the former aims to make individuals more aware of their own mental wellbeing and the underlying mental and neural processes, to feel more related to them, and to develop better conceptualizations of and a language for them. Freire’s notion of codification is paralleled by the virtualization of these processes, and his decodification is mirrored in what happens when people learn from interacting with theses virtualizations. Of course, in his time, Freire often used pictures as codifications, while today, in 2023, we tend to employ movie- and game-like devices for similar purposes, though pictures and cartoon-like formats are still in use.

6.2 The Steps in the Methodology Figure 3 below shows the main steps in the methodology. Carried out by researchers in neuroscience and related disciplines, the step labeled as “studying” has produced and is still producing an increasingly impressive portfolio of research papers (evoked in Sects. 2 and 3), which provide the groundwork knowledge for a range of case studies. The second step, labeled as “modeling,” involves the design of computational models to simulate the relevant mental processes, with a well-usable causal AI-modeling approach available for this purpose, as shown in Sect. 4. The third step, labeled as “virtualizing,” uses the patterns generated by the simulations to give them a human-like appearance by means of anthropomorphic avatars (as described in Sect. 5). Finally, the fourth step, labeled as “interacting,” comprises learning situations in which natural human learners learn from artificial humans and perhaps conversely (as illustrated in Sect. 6). Recall from the Introduction section that the main aims of the CoSiHuman project are:

192 Fig. 3 Overview of the main components and methodological stages of the CoSiHuman project

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Natural Human

studying

modeling

interacting

Artificial Human

Neuroscientific Literature

virtualizing

Causal AI-Models

(1) to explore possibilities for the causal modeling and simulation of mental processes and therapies to improve them and investigating the ways in which the outcomes of the simulations can be visualized by avatars expressing mental states; (2) and to develop tools for supporting these processes (addressed separately in Sect. 7). Below, some of the activities that have been and are still being undertaken for (1) are listed: 1. Designing nonadaptive causal models for a number of case studies 1.1 Compiling knowledge from psychology, neuroscience, and psychiatry for case studies. 1.2 Modeling the mental processes for the case studies by causal graphs. 2. Simulating nonadaptive causal models in a software environment 2.1 Based on 1, representing the causal graphs in a computer-readable table format (role matrix) and extending this to obtain a full role matrix specification. 2.2 Simulating nonadaptive causal models in the available software environment. 3. Designing adaptive causal models for various case studies involving learning 3.1 Compiling knowledge from psychology, neuroscience, and psychiatry for case studies involving learning. 3.2 Modeling the mental processes for the case studies by multilevel causal graphs. 4. Simulating adaptive causal models in a software environment 4.1 Based on 3, representing the multilevel causal graphs in a computerreadable table format (role matrix) and extending this to obtain a full role matrix specification. 4.2 Simulating adaptive causal models in the available software environment. 5. Incorporating therapies 5.1 Incorporating therapies for the case studies by extending the adaptive causal models.

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5.2 Simulating the adaptive causal models extended by therapies in the available software environment. Multiple examples of these procedures are documented in a rapidly increasing body of generally available publications.

7

Creating a Development-Supporting Environment

To bolster development, suitable supporting tools are very important. The CoSiHuman project mainly focuses on modeling, virtualization, and interaction, as shown in Fig. 3. The following three steps are the main steps. For the first of them, an initial version of a dedicated supporting software environment is already available. . Development-Supporting Environment for Modeling – Modeling format for dynamic and adaptive causal network models. – Software environment for the simulation of these causal network models. . Development-Supporting Environment for Virtualization – Virtualization dashboard to map causal model simulations to virtualizations. – Software to connect the different software environments. . Development-Supporting Environment for Arranging Interaction Sessions – Support for designing interaction sessions. – Software to support interaction sessions. For the second bullet, the following steps are currently being undertaken: 1. Exploring which visualization tools are suitable to virtualize the outcomes of the simulations 1.1 Explore what visualization tools are available. 1.2 For some of them, create trial virtualizations of two examples of simulation outcomes 2. Making virtualizations of the outcomes of the simulations for all the case studies 2.1 Evaluate the tools considered in 3 for suitability and select one. 2.2 Using the selected tool, make simulations for all the case studies. 3. Evaluating 3.1 Evaluation of the virtualizations obtained. 3.2 Evaluation of the manner of obtaining them. To this end, the notion of a virtualization dashboard has been introduced. Shown in Table 1, a virtualization dashboard is a specification format for an individual where (part of) the model states can be mapped to virtual objects and/or actions, such as facial expressions, gestures, verbal behavior, cartoon-like thought clouds, pointers indicating mental states, etc. Currently, this format is used for specification and documentation, but it is projected to become a software component that connects the modeling and simulation environment to one or more

Model state

X1

X2

X3

X4

Representation type example

Happiness

Anger

Sadness

Neutral

Emotion

Individual Virtualization Dashboard

Virtualization example

Movement

Verbal expression

Gaze shift

Tone of speaking: unfriendly

Tone of speaking: friendly

Talking

Representation type example

X11

X10

X9

X8

Model State

(continued)

(shifting the gaze)

(unfriendly tone of speaking)

(friendly tone of speaking)

(spoken text)

Virtualization example

Table 1 Overview of the elements in a virtualization dashboard for linking states from a causal network model to their virtualizations (avatar images from [66])

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X6

X7

Surprise

Disgust

Fear

X14

X13

Applauding

Cheering

X12

Model State

Running away

Representation type example

(cheering gestures)

(applauding gestures)

(running)

Virtualization example

Individual Virtualization Dashboard

Virtualization example

Table 1 (continued)

Model state

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10 195

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virtualization environments, so that simulations can automatically be shown in a virtualized form. This will also create possibilities for bidirectional interaction, where a virtual human can respond to the input it receives in the process. For the third bullet on arranging interaction sessions, requirements for further development will be identified together with coaches and therapists and then incorporated into the procedure.

8

Conclusion

Causal modeling is a powerful, albeit intuitive, mode of computational modeling. Due to the universal nature and scientific applicability of causality, causal modeling can in principle be practiced across disciplines. Causal modelling represents a declarative approach that has a long tradition in Artificial Intelligence [45, 46, 54, 93]. Despite its seemingly common applicability, there are also serious limitations and challenges that thwart the use of causal modeling. Since causal modelling involving cyclical pathways in causal networks is replete with difficulties, many approaches to causal modelling exclude cyclical causal networks. More generally, to avoid temporal complexity, dynamics are often not addressed in approaches based on causal networks, either for the causal effects on nodes or for the network structure itself. The difficulty of allowing for cyclic paths is only one consequence of ignoring the dynamics of the nodes in a causal network. Another consequence is that it precludes making distinctions in the timing and asynchrony (versus synchrony) of causal effects (i.e., how fast causal effects are actually instantiated), while differences in timing and asynchrony are often crucial for real-life processes shaped by causal networks [31, 86]. Finally, not only the nodes but also the causal relations tend to be considered static and incapable of changing over time within causal models. This makes many adaptive real-world processes, such as human learning processes, unfeasible for causal modeling. Meanwhile, network science has generated new approaches that can be used to overcome these limitations of causal modeling. In particular, both the intranetwork dynamics (the dynamics of the node states) for causal network models and the adaptivity of the causal relations can be addressed by using the networkoriented causal modeling approach [80–82]. This means that causal modeling can now offer an intuitive and convenient approach capable of addressing all kinds of dynamic and adaptive human processes based on mechanisms depicted in the neuroscience literature. This offers a very inclusive framework that also encompasses the (adaptive) dynamical systems modeling approach [56], as acknowledged, for example, by [78, 79, 84]. As the artificial humans obtained through modeling are virtualized and the resulting virtual agents are brought into interaction with natural humans, a full circle is drawn from natural to artificial and back to natural humans. The role of psychology and neuroscience in this process is to: . provide domain knowledge for the causal models;

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. and provide knowledge for natural humans to acquire; For its part, the role of AI is to: . provide a causal modeling format to capture causal knowledge from psychology and neuroscience; . develop software for simulation; . develop virtual bots; . and create an environment for the interaction of natural humans and artificial humans. As the project described in this chapter has been kept relatively modest in its aims, they are expected to be achievable. Since the writing and submission of this chapter, two preliminary concomitant steps have been made in the development of a supporting software environment [19, 35]. More ambitious consecutive steps have also been considered, building on the literature [42, 43, 71, 89] that offers some indications about the feasible forms of bonding between natural humans and artificial humans. One of the further pursuits we intend to address is creating a virtual buddy for clients in therapies and coaching sessions. Research on the stress-reducing effects of having pets strongly suggests that people are capable of bonding with nonhumans [3, 16]. Anecdotally, bonding between natural humans and artificial humans was likewise envisioned in the Robot Archie comic-book series [60], which was popular from the 1950s through the 1970s. Archie was built by a professor to be the world’s most powerful mechanical man and was controlled remotely by the professor’s nephew, Ted, and his best friend Ken. Initially, Archie could not speak, but he was later given a voice box, revealing a boastful, yet charming, personality. Throughout his numerous adventures, Archie proved a loyal companion and an ally to his human friends. Perhaps, in the near future, we can all become like Ted and Ken, having an artificial human that acts not simply as a problem solver, but also as a virtual coach, a sparring partner, or perhaps even a faithful friend. One of the options under consideration is giving this buddy a role emulating that of pets [3, 16]. Core Messages . Educational systems fail to provide adequate insights into or to foster an apt understanding of human mental processes and their related problems; this causes much unnecessary suffering. . The development of educational programs to address this serious shortcoming can be usefully inspired by Paulo Freire’s perspective with the central role it appoints to codification. . Freire’s codification usually relied on pictures, but today it can be given a stronger and more dynamic form of role-play virtualized through avatars.

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. A useful perspective for the development of such virtualized role-play is offered by a modeling environment for the design of causal mental networks in conjunction with an integrated environment for avatar-based virtual characters.

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74. Thompson NM, Uusberg A, Gross JJ, Chakrabarti B (2019) Empathy and emotion regulation: an integrative account. Emot Cogn Prog Brain Res 247:273–304 75. Treur J (2011) A cognitive agent model displaying and regulating different social response patterns. In: Walsh T (ed) Proceedings of the twenty-second international joint conference on artificial intelligence, IJCAI’11. AAAI Press, pp 1743–1749 76. Treur J (2011) A computational agent model for Hebbian learning of social interaction. In: Lu B-L, Zhang L, Kwok J (eds) Neural information processing. 18th international conference on neural information processing, ICONIP 2011, part 1. Springer-Verlag, Berlin–Heidelberg, pp 9–19 77. Treur J (2014) Displaying and regulating different social response patterns: a computational agent model. Cogn Comput 6:182–199 78. Treur J (2016) Network-oriented modeling: addressing complexity of cognitive, affective and social interactions. Springer Publishers 79. Treur J (2017) On the applicability of network-oriented modeling based on temporal-causal networks: why network models do not just model networks. J Inf Telecommun 1:23–40 80. Treur J (2020a) Modeling higher-order adaptivity of a network by multilevel network reification. Netw Sci 8:S110–S144 81. Treur J (2020b) Network-oriented modeling for adaptive networks: designing higher-order adaptive biological, mental and social network models. Springer Nature Publishers 82. Treur J (2020c) Modeling multi-order adaptive processes by self-modeling networks (keynote speech). In: Tallón-Ballesteros AI, Chen Ch-H (eds) Proceedings of the 2nd international conference on machine learning and intelligent systems, MLIS’20. IOS Press, Amsterdam, pp 206–217 83. Treur J (2021) Adaptive networks at the crossroad of AI and formal, biological, medical and social sciences. In: Rezaei N (ed) Integrated science: science without borders. Springer Nature Publishers, pp 335–375 84. Treur J (2021) On the dynamics and adaptivity of mental processes: relating adaptive dynamical systems and self-modeling network models by mathematical analysis. Cogn Syst Res 70:93–100 85. Trilla Gros I, Panasiti MS, Chakrabarti B (2015) The plasticity of the mirror system: how reward learning modulates cortical motor simulation of others. Neuropsychologia 70:255–262 86. Tschacher W, Ramseyer F, Koole SL (2018) Sharing the now in the social present: duration of nonverbal synchrony is linked with personality. J Pers 86(2):129–138 87. Turing A (1950) Computing machinery and intelligence. Mind 59:433–460 88. Van Harreveld F, Nohlen HU, Schneider IK (2015) The ABC of ambivalence: affective, behavioral, and cognitive consequences of attitudinal conflict. In: Olson JM, Zanna MP (eds) Advances in experimental social psychology, vol 52. Academic Press, Oxford, pp 285–324 89. Van Kemenade MA, Konijn EA, Hoorn JF (2015) Robots humanize care. In: Proceedings of the international joint conference on biomedical engineering systems and technologies, vol 5. SCITEPRESS, Setubal, pp 648–653 90. Westerhoff HV, He F, Murabito E, Crémazy F, Barberis M (2014) Understanding principles of the dynamic biochemical networks of life through systems biology. In: Kriete A, Eils R (eds) Computational systems biology. Academic Press, Oxford, pp 21–44 91. Westerhoff HV, Brooks AN, Simeonidis E, García-Contreras R, He F, Boogerd FC, Jackson VJ, Goncharuk V, Kolodkin A (2014) Macromolecular networks and intelligence in microorganisms. Front Microbiol 5:e379 92. Winkielman P, Carr EW, Chakrabarti B, Hofree G, Kavanagh LC (2016) Mimicry, emotion, and social context: insights from typical and atypical humans, robots, and androids. In: Hess U, Fischer A (eds) Emotional mimicry in social context. Studies in emotion and social interaction. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp 162–191 93. Wright S (1921) Correlation and causation. J Agric Res 20:557–585

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R. M. Treur et al. Roy Michael Treur works in his company as a fashion designer and a creative director. He is an expert when it comes to social media and is in a wider sense an influencer in the area of fashion. His numerous social media photos and videos have achieved up to millions of views and likes. His perspective has contributed an appreciation of role play and virtualizations as powerful dynamic means in creating insights into and an understanding of human phenomena, also showing how the approach discussed can be integrated in social media.

Jan Treur is a Professor of AI and a recognized expert on multidisciplinary human-like AI-modeling. He has published over 700 well-cited, often multidisciplinary papers on cognitive, affective, and social modeling and AI systems using such models. He has been a supervisor to more than 40 Ph.D. students and authored/edited three books on (adaptive) network-oriented AImodeling and its application in other disciplines since 2016. His current research centers on mental processes underpinned by internal mental models: how they are internally simulated, learned or formed (including in organizational learning), and controlled. His important application focus is on the development and use of shared mental models for supporting better safety culture in organizations such as hospitals. Sander L. Koole is a psychologist who investigates how people self-regulate their thoughts, feelings, and actions. His research focuses on the broad questions of how and why selfregulation succeeds or fails. He is particularly interested in studying self-regulation processes in relation to emotional well-being and coping with existential concerns (e.g., loneliness, alienation, psychological confrontation with death). His work is grounded in experimental-behavioral methods, while being informed by physiological and neurological measures. Though committed to basic research, he continually seeks to connect his research to practical issues and concerns in everyday life. He has taught courses on human motivation and emotion, social psychology and cognition, the self, and experimental existential psychology. He has (co-)authored more than 170 papers in international journal articles and book chapters, and (co-)edited a number of collected volumes.

The Transhuman Unbounded Existence: AI, Nanorobots, and Computational Simulation

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Natasha Vita-More

Fortunately, most every social movement has resulted in a widely infectious concept of broadening human rights. (…) It is better to know and understand where we’re going and be prepared than to ignore or deny the inevitable and be caught unawares or badly prepared. Let the adventure begin. Martine Rothblatt [1, p. 17]

Abstract

The transhuman has been at the threshold of untethering from social norms and aggregated attributes of heredity by questioning the philosophical and societal interpretations of how people ought to be seen and understood. The aim of the philosophy and worldview of transhumanism is to establish an extensive analysis of the sciences and technologies that transcend historical predicaments of the human condition. Such explorations are aligned with campaigns for the freedom to choose advocacies that rescale moral dictums and rigid divisions of binary thinking. I argue that the transhumanist framework, which provides necessary principles to champion the right to live healthier and longer lives, has come to pass. Through biomedical interventions of artificial intelligence, nanorobotics, and gene editing, combined with the right to protect autonomy with strategies for long-term incentives, the transhuman unbounded existence has woven a dense network of diverse characteristics. It is imperative that the

N. Vita-More (B) University of Advancing Technology, Tempe, AZ, United States e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Michałowska (ed.), Humanity In-Between and Beyond, Integrated Science 16, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27945-4_11

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rights of human, transhuman, posthuman, and other types of sentient beings continue to evolve at the speed of technology. The sooner the better. Keywords

Transhumanism . Evolution . Genomics Metaverse . Upload . Posthuman

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Introduction

This chapter’s approach is based on scientific research and creative practices. In my view, both are necessary in imagining a future human and providing evidence that artificial intelligence (AI), nano-engineered systems (nanorobots), and virtual simulations are compatible. To begin, I introduce the human as a connectomics system where persons co-exist in biological and computer-based environments. The autonomous relationships between these environments support consciousness, which interprets neurological processes into algorithmic codes. This is just a beginning of a more immersive and seamless interplay between the biological gene and the computational code. To be realistic in this approach, rather than taking a fictional or Panglossian stance, my focus is on identifiable advances in AI, nanorobotics, and virtual simulations in relation to the human body. Humans are H. sapiens sapiens, a species of highly intelligent primates that emerged from Africa 300,000 years ago. It is not clear though how much humans have evolved over the past few hundred years; as a biological species of primates, we are still evolving. To depict the human as a connectomics system that applies optimal endurance in overcoming limitations, I reflect briefly on the athletes of antiquity who enhanced their physical limitations through persistence and determination. I also portray the body as an interconnected prosthetic system with a metabrain for simulating whole brain emulation (WBE), or uploading. By this, I establish a prospect for diverse consciousness—natural, artificial, and synthetically simulated—as persons migrate beyond the physical body and the neurological wetware of the brain. I introduce the prosthetic future body design known as Primo Posthuman (1996), which was prototyped by a team of technologists, scientists, and philosophers. I then turn to current issues of genetic legacy, advances toward genetic liberty, and the convergence of AI, nanorobots, and computational simulation as necessarily compatible for an unbounded existence.

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Antiquity’s Esteem of the Body

Enshrined in antiquity through exalted physical feats and ethereal myths, the human body has been humbled by the potential of its engineered future. The optimal physical endurance of athletic activity in early Greek times symbolized strength, stamina, and aesthetic appeal. Stone-carved depictions of muscular, harmonic bodies displaying poses of Olympic feats tell a story of athletic persistence

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that pushed their genetic fibers to the limits of biological endurance. Dating to the early Classical period (around 480 BC), the ancient Greek Kritios Boy, sculpted to convey a perceived ideality of physical proportion and muscular strength, was considered the first beautiful nude in and art by the British historian Kenneth Mackenzie Clark [2, pp. 24–25]. Within this realm of exuberant physical ability, the display and pomp of bodily performance ignites awe and trepidation. The awe is clear—athleticism is at the height of aesthetics in biological functions, within the geometry of its form, and through an almost supernatural level of keen determination. The trepidation is far more distinct when viewed with the medical imaging of a computerized axial tomography scan (CAT scan). Inside the skeletal, muscular, respiratory, and nervous systems are the biological cellular processes of aging—disease, disruption, and decay. Physical agility, when viewed in its stylized form, may be a manifestation of unhinged admiration beyond the aesthetic appeal of muscle, strength, and beauty. In truth, on display are the inner workings of the body system, whereby we cannot hide the fact that the body beautiful is nonetheless the body diseased.

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Disruption on the Continuum

It is a harsh reality to know that a fundamental human characteristic is a diseased body. Even shifting from a biological body to alternative systems does not amend the vulnerabilities. Further, if persons migrate to nonbiological systems, such as digital codes and virtual simulated environments, the entropy of corrosion reappears as phishing, malware, over-customization, tribalism, and other dangers that can contaminate our privacy and, thus consciousness. It becomes a skill of dexterity to avoid these vulnerabilities and organize our thoughts with agility while being the target of disruption. On the spectrum of existence, regardless of biological cells or computational codes, we need to be aware of what could disrupt the continuum of life. Martine Rothblatt, an inventor and human rights advocate, suggests in her analysis of the consciousness conundrum that wetware gives rise to consciousness—that without wetware, consciousness could not exist. It is relevant to the migration or evolution of persons from the biological human state to a nonbiological state that without consciousness, the transhuman could not exist. Thus, regarding the body-mind continuity in the transition from the human to the transhuman and the future posthuman, there would be a brief interim inertia as consciousness were transferred from one state to another. Rothblatt argues that Douglas Hofstadter’s theory of a “continuum of consciousness” aptly applies to this transcendence: His approach declares consciousness not to be a “here or not” sort of thing, but instead to be present to a greater or lesser extent in things that demonstrate, to a greater or lesser extent, one or more of the aspects described above—self-awareness, sentience, morality, autonomy, and transcendence. [1, p. 26]

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It is possible that a key to understanding consciousness is a loop—a type of selfreferential feedback coil—the part of thinking that identifies who we are a network of data. On a higher neurological level, this data could be identified as symbols and metaphors. And on an even higher level of self-awareness, the data might determine how we would like to be seen or recognized. As Hofstadter writes: And one of my firmest conclusions is that we always think by seeking and drawing parallels to things we know from our past, and that we therefore communicate best when we exploit examples, analogies, and metaphors galore, when we avoid abstract generalities, when we use very down-to-earth, concrete, and simple language, and when we talk directly about our own experiences. [3, p. xv]

Each person experiences a degree of disease in their lives. Most people observe from a distance or are close witness to unfathomable hardship. My focus concerns the many diseases that affect millions of people throughout the world and the people awaiting their ultimate and untimely death. The fact that the maximum human lifespan is limited to a little more than a single century, most of which is spent resisting disease, has compelled me to engage more deeply in imagining what life might be like if these inevitable aspects of the human condition could be resolved. While there may be a need for analogies and metaphors to rationalize overarching questions and concerns about the human condition, there is also a need for science to challenge and attempt to answer these questions and concerns. The science of biotechnology has been the driving force behind the conceptualized future body design—Primo Posthuman—which could be engineered to continually update and repair itself. My vision is that one day humans could overcome disease, replace vulnerable bodies, upload memories, co-exist in simulated worlds, and explore an unbounded existence.

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Physical, Virtual, and Simulated Existence

How do we determine whether or not our experiences are real if we co-exist in multiple worlds—physical, virtual, and simulated? According to the philosopher of mind David Chalmers, the mind–body problem of consciousness is the historical “hard problem” in philosophy. Today, an expanded problem of consciousness co-exists in immersive virtual reality (VR), computer-generated virtual worlds (metaverse), and simulation (a model of reality), where the boundaries of existence blur. For the transhuman, the core question is how these environments or worlds affect consciousness and how to retain our autonomy. Chalmers observes that the transference of the body to virtual environments is believed to involve what is referred to as the “Body Ownership Illusion.” At the same time, he declares: In my view, this sense [the sense of having a different body] need not be an illusion. A virtual body is different from a physical body, but it’s real all the same. It’s possible for a virtual

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body to be “my” virtual body. More generally, people can “own,” or inhabit their virtual bodies. [4, p. 219]

Humans are conscious beings, whether physical or virtual. Chalmers was fully aware of this when he left Oxford University to work with Douglas Hofstadter, seeking to explain philosophy’s “hard problem,” which led to him authoring The Conscious Mind (1996). Chalmers observes that: Consciousness is the biggest mystery. It may be the largest outstanding obstacle in our quest for a scientific understanding of the universe. The science of physics is not yet complete, but it is well understood; the science of biology has removed many ancient mysteries surrounding the nature of life. There are gaps in our understanding of these fields, but they do not seem intractable. We have a sense of what a solution to these problems might look like; we just need to get the details right. [5, p. xi]

4.1 The Launch of Primo Posthuman Could a body—as a connectomics system—provide a means for supporting consciousness throughout diverse realities? In an effort to strategize how emerging technologies could be used to engineer a body connectomics system to protect potential vulnerabilities, I prototyped Primo Posthuman in early 1996. I thought about how AI and nanorobots could be integrated as key technologies and about the future need for a tertiary brain—or “metabrain”—to extend cognition and route data between biological cells and computer-based code. The router device would allow a person to upload, download, and cross-load by connecting biological real-time reality with virtual and synthetic simulations. The technologies of choice in 1996 were AI, nanorobots, and code; and the aim was to expand these interconnected systems to continually update and regenerate [6]. Primo Posthuman offered potential future practice-based applications of technology. However, it was often mistaken for implausible science fiction, as many of my peers and other postmodernist scholars were immersed in the theoretical concepts of the cyborg and the posthuman. Missing from that philosophical scope and anthropological study was how AI, nanotechnology, and robotics were modifying human biology, why the growing culture of transhumanism was focused on decentralized government, encryption, cryptocurrency, blockchain, emerging technologies, and the pros and cons of strong AI (AGI), what the rapid advances in biomedical sciences and deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) sequencing would accomplish, and when these ideas might go mainstream. This gap in knowledge prompted me to further develop the Primo Posthuman prototype and to assemble a strong team to help to steer the project. The team came from the fields of artificial intelligence, nanomedicine, evolutionary biology, philosophy, economics, physics, robotics, cryptography, augmented reality, and virtual worlds, as enumerated in the illustration below (Fig. 1).

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Fig. 1 The Primo Posthuman Project: Team Members and Disciplines. (Graph by Natasha VitaMore, 1996)

Notably, the aim of Primo Posthuman was to identify what technologies could offer solutions to a problem that had plagued humans for eons: the fragility of biology and aging. The ethical implications of these technologies in modifying, engineering, and building a new body prototype were rampant, as bioethicists emerged as a global community of interrogators who questioned the pros and cons of AI and of tampering with human nature. Nevertheless, the project went forward and produced a body system prototyped with illustrations, 3D modeling, and animation. Its public reception was phenomenal. Primo Posthuman headlined international news stories about humanity’s future and what it means to be human. It was also featured in books and documentaries about anti-aging and super longevity. However, the integrity of the work was still questioned by some scholars and eventually met with some journalistic condemnation concerning the concept of the transhuman. Misinterpretations suggested a disregard for human biology, that the prototype was only for the elite wealthy, and that the philosophy of transhumanism ignored potential existential risks of AI. Panic and anxiety resulted among bioethicists, and academic angst sought a socio-political bias [7, 8]. This was just part of the downside. Another downside was actually proving the viability of the prototype to identify plausible advances in science and technology.

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Turning a concept into a viable product is challenging. First, there needs to be a problem to solve. Second, there needs to be a testable method for solving the problem. And then, through numerous iterative processes, the solution needs to be achievable. One issue that arose with the Primo Posthuman prototype was evidencing its proof of concept (POC) and delivering a minimum viable product (MVP). I was stumped. Without evidencing an achievable product with tested functioning, performance, and features, it remained a concept that could not be produced. Fortunately, the field of prosthetics was advancing with robotics, AI, and haptic systems, and I could reference some of the state-of-the-art systems as steps toward a whole-body prosthetic. Further, science has knowledge-bearing processes that need to be clearly defined, and ideas that are ahead of their time can reference a desired outcome as a larger MVP. A high-level example of this process was the 2001 Human Genome Project, which was thought of as one of the greatest feats of exploration in science. However, twenty years later we are reminded that the project completed 92% of the whole genome sequencing rather than the full 100%. By 2022, the sequencing of the missing 8% was finally completed [9], but not with human genes and only for the Y chromosome. The conditions for proving that a concept—however unbelievable when conceived—could eventually be achieved change as technology advances, new norms are established, and society begins accepts the uncertainties of the future.

4.2 A Future Human Genre: A Proof of Concept Required Prequels to a new human genre began when our species started manipulating its characteristics with early replacements for injured body parts. Even though body enhancements were often incompatible with biological cells, cumbersome to use, and aesthetically unappealing, the enhancements offered alternatives for those afflicted with disease or injury. Likewise, the idea of body augmentation in the form of prosthetics arose in archaic times. Dated between 950 and 710 BC, the “Cairo toe” [10] made of leather and stained wood might be the oldest known prosthesis. Artificial limbs were designed over 2200 years ago. These artefacts are linked to ancient literary motifs of automata, Byzantine inventions, and da Vinci’s well-known humanoid mechanical systems, some employing robotic appliances that resemble today’s wearable devices. From augmented body parts to enhanced genetics and advances in reproduction techniques, we have seen the need to improve on biology. Each step of the way, science and technology have been developing ways to help to make humans more resilient and less vulnerable. The future could bring about a variety of new human genres and develop them toward a seamless, stunning, and biocompatible highly advanced system (Fig. 2). Alpha stages of the Primo Posthuman prototype were developed to mimic advances in technology at low and high-fidelity stages. Along with advances in

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Fig. 2 The Primo Posthuman prototype: The 2022 Iteration. (Prototype by Natasha Vita-More, 2022)

technology, advances in society mirror people’s acceptance or dismissal of new technologies that change their lives and bring uncertainty. The diverse technologies used in low-fidelity prototyping of Primo Posthuman included narrow AI, nanorobotics, prosthetics, haptic systems, and brain computer interfaces (BCI). Because the prototype remained in the Alpha stage, its POC was tested based on critical analysis and observation. We applied high-fidelity prototyping inquiry for discussing (and debating) strategies for ethical uses of AI and nanorobots, and their potential existential risks. The inquiries included whether or not the model offered a viable solution to a problem, potential flaws in the design, and an analysis of the research and development of AI, AGI, and nanorobotics used for biomedical interventions.

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Fig. 3 Twentieth- versus twenty-first-century body comparison chart. (Chart by Natasha VitaMore, 1996)

Prior to the prototyping of Primo Posthuman, there had been no fundamental or realized concept of a whole-body prosthesis, a metabrain model for memory storage, an AGI assist, or a channel of delivery for feeding data to and from an exo-brain, such as what we currently call the Cloud. To reflect on some of these changes, the chart in Fig. 3 compares the 20th-century body with a potential 21stcentury body and suggests optional improvements on the body’s biological system (Fig. 3). It has been more than two decades since the prototype was launched. Technology has advanced to such a degree that prototypes and models can now be evaluated and put into the Beta phase through 3D modeling, animation, and data visualization that represent the structure, behavior, and evolution of biomedical advances. Emergent developments in AI and robotics offer biocompatible electronic control systems that use algorithms to read the body’s nerve signals: “A sensor that picks up nerve signals from the spinal cord could let people control a prosthetic limb by simply imagining the movement that they want to make” [11]. This is just one of the many interoperability features of prosthetic systems that integrate AI and biology, form relations between the body and robotics, and thus may meet the growing need for people to have access to replace body parts. Xenotransplantation of cells tissues and organs has increased due to the need for lifesaving transplants. Exo-body Bionic limbs are increasingly intuitive, wearable monitoring systems are gaining lower visibility and longer battery life, and

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virtual applications are a mainstay in helping monitor health. While none of these interventions makes use of DNA, DNA synthesis and manipulation is a robustly developing field. In 2021, a single-celled synthetic organism was engineering from its original mycoplasma state by replacing its DNA, which was designed on a computer and synthesized in a lab [12]. This has been recognized as an important milestone: “The [hu]man-made single cell ‘creature,’ which is a modified version of one of the simplest bacteria on earth, proves that the technology works” [13]. In fact, “DNA synthesis techniques and technologies are quickly becoming a cornerstone of modern molecular biology and play a pivotal role in the field of synthetic biology. The ability to synthesize whole genes, novel genetic pathways, and even entire genomes is no longer the dream it was 30 years ago” [14, p. 277]. Consider that decades earlier, in 1977, the first test-tube baby was developed in a petri dish, and that today there are over 5 million people in the world who began their lives in a petri dish. Tomorrow, advances will be even more remarkable, as we move from the predetermined inheritance of a genetic legacy to a selective genetic liberty where people will have more knowledge about their own genetics and opportunity to mitigate early signs of disease through CRISPR and other types of gene therapies, a development that J. Craig Venter called the “democratization of genomics” [15]. Understanding how technological interventions mitigate disease and help to engineer healthier bodies is a reminder of earliest life of the evolutionary journey of H. sapiens sapiens from the rise as Australopithecus in East Africa approximately 3.6 million years ago, the early hominids’ hunter-gatherer societies 2 million years ago [16], and later the hominids’ migration across the continents. Now the augmented human is globalized, with integrated computing systems coexisting in virtual environment and with over 26 million of us having had our genomes sequenced [17]. This logic, which overrides a siloed approach to legacy genes, is present in Gregory Stock’s Redesigning Humans: Our Inevitable Genetic Future: “We cannot say much about the challenges that will accompany the first steps of human selfdesign until we examine the specific biological modifications that might intrigue us when the technology arrives” [18, p. 97]. According to Stock, the choices we make today are a “preview of the deeper ones we will face” in the years to come, “because they reveal the cultural and biological desires that shape our preferences” [18, p. 97]. Stock is a biophysicist who contributed to the formative stages of the current biotechnological climate. In his earlier Metaman: The Merging of Humans and Machines into a Global Superorganism, Stock incorporated the Gaia hypothesis in a technologically interconnected framework and proposed a notion of the human as a superorganism: “a community of organisms so fully tied together that it is a single living being” [19, p. 20], one that is “at the forefront of life’s evolution from the simplest of living forms” [19, p. 245] Stock admits that “where this evolutionary process will lead us cannot be known,” but it “affirms that we are connected” [19, p. 245]. These interconnections—a gestalt of the human and its environment coupled with the human sphere of thought as a transmutation of the elements—are linked

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to the field of automated prosthetic systems based on the theory of cybernetics. Understanding that the homeostasis of feedback and control forms the baseline for body enhancements, Stock’s early ideas of redesigning ourselves to meet our biological desires and his theory on the evolutionary process of interconnections give credence to optimism when making enhancement accessible to everyone, as in Venter’s above-mentioned “democratization of genomics” [15]. On the other hand, it is possible that unethical outcomes might include decisions about gene editing at the germline level, which could be politically swayed in one direction or another. What happens when a person’s right to enhance their body is contested by a majority ruling that finds it immoral? It is essential to protect a person’s right of autonomy and on the upside, Stock envisions our species heading in the direction of gestalt thinking that respects individuality, but does recognize a conscious interconnectedness overriding the boundaries that separate us through discrimination due to race, ethnicity, and gender. Here I refer to Rothblatt in her seminal writing: The prevailing paradigm, or worldview, that people are male or female has failed because the seat of sexuality, the mind, has proven to be gender continuous, not dimorphic (either/or). The only possible paradigm of sexual identity is that people are neither male nor female, but of individual gender across an infinitely wide continuum. [20, pp. 76–77]

Consciousness plays an important role in the continuum of human life, regardless of social status, political affiliation, race, or ethnicity, and much of our baggage is attributed to our genetic legacy. Relatedly, Primo Posthuman is neutral, nonpartisan, and might accept or reject specific genes of an inherited genome. Its function is to provide a template or a model for supporting and preserving life and neurological functions, while upgrading the senses, emotions, perception, intelligence, and a casing for consciousness.

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Nanorobotic Systems

Body systems will be engineered with biocompatible nanorobots. Unlike cybernetic devices or augmented wearables, nanorobots can integrate with our biology and become inclusive, natural, and elemental parts of us, reaching far beyond the biomedical therapies of today and pushing the limits on what is possible to what is necessary for longevity. In nanomolecular systems, a biocompatible device refers to a nanorobot that performs specified, stipulated tasks, which challenge the ongoing disruption of cellular breakdown. The nanorobot is programmed to integrate with biology on the atomic, molecular, and cellular levels. The coalescence of robotics and AIinformed prosthetics typifies modern bionic systems where strength, control, and stability are an engineering solution—sending signals of advanced algorithms to reinforce neural connections in rewiring cells to augmented devices.

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The work of Robert A. Freitas, Jr. brings us into the future of medical technology with a thorough analysis of the role of nanotechnology in biocompatible nanomedicine. In ‘Body Upgrade,’ in his Cryostasis Revival [21], Freitas discusses the replacement body, where alternative characteristics may be available in the future, and the option for a second body with a range of attributes to select from [21, pp. 454–455]. He does note psychological issues that can possibly arise when a person confronts an engineered, alternative or replacement body. People may prefer to have a replacement body that is constructed from their own genes, as a genetic clone. Nevertheless, Freitas, as well as others who envision a future human body, proposes that whether the replacement body is a genetic clone or a newly engineered system, such bodies will reflect the future nanomedical era. Together with Eric Drexler and Ralph Merkle, Freitas was an advisor on the nanorobotic structure for Primo Posthuman in 1996. Drexler’s work with nanotechnology [22], Merkle’s early blockchain model [23], and Freitas’ seminal writings on nanomedicine [24] helped to steer the intellectual content of Primo Posthuman in developing the published prototype.

5.1 From Genetic Legacy to Genetic Liberty The genetic material of each person is inherited and forms their genetic legacy. As one copy of each gene comes from our mother and the other from our father, our genetics has traditionally been considered a fait accompli—the genes are inherited and irreversible. It was not long ago that gene editing and further manipulation of genetic information were considered unethical and even immoral. Then, the field of bioethics turned a corner in assessing the integrity of modifying a person’s genetic legacy. This was largely propelled by the success of CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing techniques. The biochemist Jennifer Doudna, a Nobel Prize co-winner in 2020, has stated that it is “one of the fastest rollouts […] of a technology from the fundamental initial science to an actual application” [25], and reviewers have observed that “genome editing has been hailed as the biggest biotech breakthrough of the century” [26]. Could this take us to genetic liberty? Epigenetics is certainly changing the way we view our genetic constitution. If genes can change without changing DNA sequences, we might not be stuck with our inherited genes; rather, science introduces epigenetics that informs us about how gene activity and expression can be altered by our own behaviors, such as lifestyle, diet, and exercise, mental state, and conditions of the environment. Genetic liberty is described “as the personal control of all aspects of one’s genetic make-up, including genetic material and information” [27, p. 614]. In this chapter, I refer to genetic liberty as being free from genetic disorders, whether caused by inheriting mutated, disease-causing genes or triggered by spontaneous gene mutations. In short, I mean freedom from oppressive restrictions primarily imposed by heredity. Liberation from harmful genes is vividly exemplified by the achievement of the scientists Jean Bennett and Albert M. Maguire, who created

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a gene therapy to correct defective mutations causing blindness. Aimed at restoring vision by injecting a benign adeno-associated virus that carried the corrected RPE65 genes to the retina [28], Bennett and Maguire’s gene therapy resulted in a successful treatment: Not only has treatment with Luxturna [voretigene neparvovec-rzyl] changed the lives of people previously destined to live a life of blindness, but it has fueled interest in developing additional gene therapy reagents targeting numerous other genetic forms of inherited retinal disease. [29]

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Conclusion: An Unbounded Existence

Genetics influences almost every aspect of our lives and determines much of who we are; yet inherited traits are not irreversible or permanent. Mutations in DNA can cause genetic variation of inherited genes, the epigenetics of gene expression— a process resulting from the environment and early life experiences—can change how the body’s DNA sequences, and CRISPR can fix a damaged gene by snipping out bad DNA and permanently repairing the genome. The study of genetics is all about living things—from biological organisms to future synthetic life forms— with understanding that science is a process of discovery for building knowledge. It is not an ideology or a means for moral beliefs to be used to polarize people for or against decisions that could tamper with the lives of many. The arc of existence is concerned with where we came from, what we are today, and where we might be headed. Very often we look at events of the past and assume that there are clear patterns by which conclusions can be drawn, but in fact things are a lot messier than that [30]. Imagining the future also causes us to pause. False certainties could sway us in one direction or another, and inevitably take us down a slippery slope. Science, when applied as a study, is needed to find the edges of possibility, where an untethering from the past is not a relinquishing of our heredity, but a respectful enlightenment of what me might become. In fact, much of the concern about the future of humanity revolves around the topics of existential risks in almost all technologies, even those that have provided enormous benefits to society. An aim of transhumanism has been to establish ways of thinking about the benefits and risks of technology. While the past does influence decisions we make, progress is not beholden exclusively to the past. Today, we live in an epoch of change that transcends historical predicaments of the human condition. It is not just the social and economic systems that are having to relearn to adapt to change; people too are relearning how to adapt at almost every turn. Applying logic to how change could affect human progress, from the prowess of Olympic athletes to the ingenuity of modern human invention, there is an undeniable awareness of the imperative to protect life. To enact the human as a connectomics system that applies optimal endurance in overcoming limitations,

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the future human could bring about new types of human genres, of which Primo Posthuman is one example. And even with the ability to upload onto virtual and other simulated worlds, the process is not binary—not ‘either one world nor the other’. Worlds must be fluid and changeable where people can co-exist in real time as biological beings and in virtual, computer-based simulations as digitized bodies. The transhuman is a continuum of human biology stretching toward a transformative state of existence, as biocompatible AI and nanorobots aim to resolve biological vulnerabilities. The potential for co-existing within immersive computer-generated virtual worlds and simulations will not abandon the biological realm entirely and will help to further the broadening human rights. It is far better to understand where we might be going and to start preparing for this future than to deny it. The fact is that we stem from a genetic legacy that can be an inspiration for us to now aim to experience a genetic liberty. Core Massages . The transhuman is an extension of the human and not a final evolution. . Biocompatible nanorobots are a vaccine for longevity. . The mind blossoms as a consciousness continuum within a connectomics system.

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N. Vita-More Natasha Vita-More, Ph.D. is Ret. Professor of Innovation, Society & Ethics at UAT, Founder of The Center for Transhumanist Studies, Distinguished Senior Fellow Center for Future Mind at FIU, and on the Scientific Advisory Board, Lifespan.io. Her scientific research achieved a discovery in long-term memory of C. elegans in the field of cryobiology. She has produced the H+DAO for decentralized innovation in funding of projects in Africa. She is a leading thinker who write and speaks about ethical human enhancement, longevity, and biostasis.