It is easy to notice a contemporary cultural obsession with cybernetics and prolonged life. Where the androids of Blade Runner or Ex Machina pose questions about what it means to be human, the modified bodies of Alita or Altered Carbon challenge us to consider humanity more closely as it pertains to biological bodies and their evolution. The transformation from biological to technological introduces the hybrid human, a different being altogether from the sentient android, whose brain is purely technological, and brings in to focus the struggles surrounding the Mind/Body Problem outlined by Jonathan Westphal via four propositions that encompass what cannot be rationally held true when placed together: “The mind is a nonphysical thing.” “The body is a physical thing.” “The mind and the body interact.” “Physical and nonphysical things cannot interact.”
This project considers what happens when the self becomes other and what it means to be human through a range of cyberpunk literature and film. When looking at transhumanism and posthumanism, perhaps the most pressing question is this: Is the posthuman, human? Natasha Vita-More calls transhumanism “an intellectual and cultural movement that supports the ethical use of technology and evidence-based science to improve the human condition”. Whereas the posthuman is a broader presumption outside of fiction that deals with how humanity will evolve. This project will look at how this evolution is presented as cybernetic in fiction as a version of cultural wish fulfillment. As James Hughes cautions that “transhumanists need to grapple with how their projects and ethics would change if personal identity is an arbitrary, malleable fiction”, this research will dig deeper into “what does it mean to be human?”.
About the presenterJeff Basile
Jeff Basile is a PhD candidate at Kent State University. Though he is currently paid to teach writing, he has written on and worked closely with topics on literacy, contemporary fiction, and second language acquisition. He has spent many years as a writing tutor and an English as a second language instructor. He loves teaching more than anything, but talking about literature, from in the classroom to the bar, is a close second.