Advancing the Human Self. Ewa Nowak

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СКАЧАТЬ micro-technologies take advantage of our material conditions (also at the molecular level), that is, through exploiting their accessibility and plasticity, also to effect and modify our minds. One of the last efforts made to protect our vulnerable internal life with bodily ‘exteriority’ was that of Emmanuel Levinas. But advances in the theory of embodied mind and self seem to make both, ‘interiority’ and ‘exteriority’, defenceless when confronting advanced technologies. However, this book addresses the re-empowering of the self (or self-identity) rather than disempowering or banning technologies from our lives. We need to develop ourselves, so we need technologies by means of which beings can achieve their human becoming (Menschenwerdung³², as Paul Alsberg puts it) according to their specific, human-developmental principle, which as yet does not seem to have been achieved.

      To advocate for the hypothesis according to which body image and body schema show plasticity (Chapter III), theoretical and experiential arguments were drawn from Hans Jonas’ and Arnold Gehlen’s philosophies of technique, and from the contemporary findings of philosophy of mind and post-phenomenology.

      In Chapters I, III and IV, the symptoms of technological interventions in human embodied self are discussed on the basis of clinical examples reported in medical literature and analysis of modern phenomenology and philosophy of mind (Chapter I presents three cases of radically transhumanist crisis drawn from F. Kafka and T.J. Brown). ‘Embodied technesis’, partial body representations, anomalous self-experience, facial allograft self-experience, and the social imaginaries of abled and disabled bodies, were analysed and illustrated. As such clinical evidence (which is different than the visions offered by posthumanist and transhumanist authors) is not easy to access, despite the large amount of literature reviewed for this study, two additional surveys with Polish and international participants were conducted in order to predict social preferences with regard to the ‘posthuman’ embodiment, as well as towards the postconventionalization of persons with disabilities. The findings are reported and discussed in Chapter III. In Chapter IV, the documented results of neuro- and psycho-enhancement are critically discussed.

      In Chapter V, four phenomenological and psychological concepts of empowering our agential ‘self’ as a remedy against the negative effects of radical technopoiesis are applied, namely those developed by Hans-Georg Gadamer, Bernhard Waldenfels, Kazimierz Dąbrowski and Antoni Kępiński. Autotherapy ←18 | 19→was redefined in terms of hermeneutics and dialogics contributing to the positive disintegration (Dąbrowski) and learning from crisis (Kegan). This complex methodology was elaborated as a component of the self-recovery concept, which offers an alternative to narrative theory and the fate of “post-persons” or “post-humans” assigned to humanity by the proponents of so-called posthumanism.

      Finally, to thoroughly examine whether autonomous artificial intelligence equipped with moral and ethical ‘software’ could provide alter egos and social environments that are compatible with the socialization of human beings (or at least socially safe), the leading approaches to moral machines were revisited and discussed. The hypothesis of social robots provided with the cognitive skills necessary to make decisions based on the categorical imperative procedure would be the most radical, as that procedure was related to a transcendental principle and a moral metaphysics unavailable for intelligent devices. As humans and machines do not share abilities and principles of that kind (neither do they share affects and emotions which cannot be disconnected from their physiological, experiential or evolutionary foundations), the nature of socialization and self-identity development within an intersubjective exchange between human and non-human intelligence requires novel conceptual tools which as yet do not exist.

      Acknowledgments

      This work was supported by Polish National Science Centre (NCN) under a research grant 2015/17/B/HS1/02381, to which I would like to express my thanks of gratitude.

      I would also like to thank Karolina M. Cern, Stephen Dersley, Roberto Franzini Tibaldeo, Mario Marino, Bruce Janz, Michael Hornsby, Halyna Leontiy, Georg Lind, Sharrona Pearl, André Schmiljun, Dawn E. Schrader, Yang Shaogang and Svetozar Poštić for discussing complex issues and collaborating with me at project-related surveys and workshops.

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1 See Terry C. Muck, “After selfhood: Constructing the religious self in a post-self age,” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 1998, vol. 41, no. 1, pp. 107–122.

2 Dan Zahavi, Subjectivity and selfhood. Investigating the first-person perspective, Cambridge, MIT Press, 2005, p. 111.

3 Robert B. Loaden, “Anthropology from a Kantian point wof view: Toward a cosmopolitan conception of human nature,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 2009, vol. 39, p. 516.

4 Peter F. Strawson has pioneered the analytical deconstruction of realistic self in: P. F. Strawson, Individuals, London, Methuen, 1959.

5 Ingmar Persson, “Why we are not identical to things of any kind,” in: Galen Strawson (Ed.), The self, Malden, Blackwell, 2005, p. 27.

6 See also Daniel C. Dennett, “The self as the center of narrative gravity” as a useful fiction, in: F. S. Kessel et al. (Eds.), Self and consciousness: Multiple perspective, Hillsdale, Erlbaum, 1992, pp. 103–115.

7 D. Zahavi, Subjectivity and selfhood, p. 112; also Owen Flanagan, Consciousness reconsidered, Cambridge, The MIT Press, 1992.

8 Aquinas, Selected Philosophical Writings, Ed. T. McDermott. New York, Oxford University Press, 1993, p. 192.

9 See Jean Améry, On aging: Revolt and resignation, trans. J. D. Barlow, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1994; and its 2nd German translation as Sich fremd werden (or “becoming exteriorized,” as Roy Ben-Shai explains, see “Imposition, or writing from the void. Pathos and pathology in Améry,” in: M. Zolkos (Ed.), On Jean Améry. Philosophy of catastrophe, Lanham, Boulder, New York, Toronto, Plymouth, Lexington Books, 2011, pp. 109–135.

10 That originally Nietzschean view was developed by the German anthropologist Arnold Gehlen in Der Mensch. Seine Natur und seine Stellung in der Welt, Wiesbaden, Aula Verlag, 1986.

11 Dieter Thomä, Erzähle dich selbst. Lebensgeschichte als Philosophisches Problem, Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp, 2007, p. 214.

12 About robotic self, see D. Zahavi, Subjectivity and selfhood, p. 111.

13 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The primacy of perception, Evanston Ill, Northwestern University Press, 1964, p. 164.

14 “… identity is not a kind of reference. In fact, identity is − from the viewpoint of the Tractarian philosophy − nothing, i.e. nothing that can be said, although we are subject to the illusion that ‘identity propositions’ may have a content (that’s why identity is ‘the very devil’),” Guillaume Decauwert, СКАЧАТЬ