your skin is not the edge of you

http://northover.sg/

Your skin is not the edge of you

Singapore Futurists 25.10.02012


Hello

◦  Researcher ◦  Education and technology ×  Learning through games & mobile learning

◦  Futures: ×  http://www.beyondcurrenthorizons.org.uk ×  http://edfuturesresearch.org/

◦  IDA, MDA, HP, RP, RI & IAL


This discussion

◦  Transhumanism! ◦  Any project to extend the limits of what it means to

be human has to have given those limits some thought.

◦  So that’s what we’re doing now.


A word on skin


A word on skin

◦  Interface to the world ×  Sensation ×  Osmosis

◦  Transient, dynamic ◦  Not a fixed and static barrier*

*although Jalila Essaïdi & cell biologist Abdoelwaheb El Ghalbzouri are making bulletproof skin


Three parts

◦  External limits ×  Where’s the limit to the individual? ◦  Internal limits

×  How far are we individual bodies? ◦  Temporal limits ×  When do you stop being in the world?


Distributed self

Networks of cognition & understanding


Connections

◦  Human selves are constituted through relations with other actors

×  Human ones ×  Non-human ones ◦  Cognition depends on there being more than one of

us


Distributed cognition

◦  Some social theorists reject the notion of pure ratio. ◦  All cognition situated within social context. ◦  Knowledge, social context & embodied experience all

interdependent. ◦  Cognition is a function of the interaction between

agent, environment & technology.


Actor-Network Theory

◦  Bruno Latour (also Callon and Law)

◦  Material and conceptual (semiotic) relations: how do they act as a whole? ◦  All actors – human &

non-human – treated equally.


Man-gun hybrid

◦  How does a gun mediate action?

×  “Guns kill people” ×  “People kill people” ×  Or a ‘citizen-gun, gun-citizen’ might do ◦  Identity is fluid, contextual &

reflects place in a network of relations.


A Cyborg Manifesto (Haraway, 1986)

◦  Challenge to notion of discrete, binary boundaries ×  Human/animal ×  Animal/machine

×  Physical/non-physical ◦  Implications for traditional notions of identity ×  We are all cyborgs

“Our best machines are made of sunshine; they are all light and clean because they are nothing but signals”


Aggregate self

More than the sum of your parts


Parasitic DNA

◦  Sequences of DNA that insert extra copies of themselves into the genome.

◦  Don’t contribute to the host organism. ×  Costs time and energy to replicate ◦  ‘Selfish’ genes in competition with others


‘Infrahuman’

◦  From ‘super-human’: Lee & Motzkau (in press) suggest ‘infrahuman’

◦  Describes the bacterial & eukaryotic cell activity that composes human life

◦  Not us. Not themselves either.


Time-travelling self

Past & future parts of you


Different biochronologies

◦  We treat different parts of ourselves as if time passes differently for them.

×  Metabolic age ×  ‘Brain age’ ×  “She has the skin of a twenty-year old”

◦  Are these the same self aging? Or different selves?


Acting on the world

◦  Parental expectations before birth shape their lives ◦  Filial impressions of your values and actions shape

their lives after your death

◦  So your influence on the world extends beyond your presence in it


200-year present (Elsie Boulding)

1900 2000 2100

Self Parents Grandparents Children Grandchildren


Light cone

◦  Light you could have influenced since your birth. ◦  Area of potential

causality – no action travels faster than light.


Implications of networked identities

More than human scale


Part of a wider whole

◦  Are we part of a similar, bigger system? ×  Gaia (Lovelock) ×  City-virus (Morrison)

×  Moon food (Gurdjeff) ×  Interstellar consciousness (Stapledon)


Interstellar networks of consciousness

◦  Empires of galactic entities ◦  Human consciousness irrelevant ◦  Human activity influential


For discussion

◦  Boundaries of the self and the body are smeared and blurred across time and space.

◦  Impossible to understand the individual in isolation. ◦  Technological interventions need to be understood

as social, not personal, changes.


Richard Sandford

[email protected]