Advancing the Human Self. Ewa Nowak

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СКАЧАТЬ grey fur and a face that had thin almost human lips, flat cat nose and high forehead, topped by a pair of pointed ears behind which her head was bandaged. (…) As I saw my own hand rise in front of me mirroring the stranger, I realized it was my own reflection in the mirror (…) What happened to me? I asked.¹²⁶

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Despite the low probability of the entire case developed by T.R. Brown in reality, for many experiences described by Todd, analogies with reports delivered by transplant patients and patients with amputees can easily be found. In particular, patients with face allografts must learn to recognize their new physiognomy, drastically changed after facial surgery, and to become familiar with it. A self-reidentification process may take a long period of time.¹²⁷ Undergoing face transplantation provides them with a human face that not always resembles their original one. They have, though, received a human face. This was not Todd’s experience. After a long period his acceptance of his new embodiment did not extend to his semi-feline, semi-human face.¹²⁸ Although

I no longer saw a monster in the mirror, I didn’t see me either. I didn’t even see the new me. I saw a stranger, and she gave me the willies. Even though, intellectually, I knew it was me behind those eyes (…) When I looked at the other features of my new face, it’s hard to describe what I felt. Fear was part of it, anger, alienation. I have heard of a rare condition where people can’t recognize their own reflections. It was line and unlike that. I saw a stranger, but (…) I knew I was looking out through those inhuman eyes.¹²⁹

Todd’s existence as “the old human self”¹³⁰ hidden in a feline camouflage was mostly dedicated to dealing with what and who he was now, and to learning to accept the truth about himself. Becoming a transsexual¹³¹ allowed him to undergo spectacular intimate and social experiences, including pregnancy and performing a bisexual, polyamorous marriage. Unlike in Gregor Samsa’s case, the initial crisis of Todd’s whole embodied self-identity was followed by a gradual recovery, development, and growth. His second identity will show mixed, “hybrid” and “post-personal” (as the posthumanists put it) properties and capacities. His cognitive and linguistic capacities seem to remain intact, regardless of his new embodiment (which apparently belongs to delusions of posthumanism).

The development of Todd’s afterlife identity was increasingly controlled by his physiology and other functionalities of his new, half ‘feline’ embodiment, and which was medically supported. Their influence prevailed over his original brain, except its originally human cognitive functioning. This development supports a popular conviction a human being/a person’s identity is concentrated ←47 | 48→in their brain,¹³² and the brain plays the role of Hegemonikon, not only in a living organism but also in shaping and reshaping one’s self-identity.

      Brown’s novel is pretentious, full of very improbable periptery, monotonous and literarily dull. But it cannot in any way be denied one advantage: the first-person perspective based narrative and dialogical convention (though absolutely incomparable with Plato’s dialogical mastery), combined with a clinical observation from the perspective of medical practitioners caring for Todd, allowed for the consideration of a few accurate points around the shaping an individual identity based on embodied cognition.

Namely, the creation of identity is influenced not only by the snippets of information gathered and stored in the brain, but also peripheral neural clusters which can regulate parts of the metabolism¹³³ even when disconnected from the central nervous system, and other subsystems:

• “You will likely find you have reflexes to do things you never did before and things you used to be able to do will be difficult;”¹³⁴

• “Your new body has muscle memory that will sometimes respond in ways you don’t expect. It will take time, but you will learn to either control it, or get used to it, or even benefit from it,”¹³⁵

as Todd’s medical assistants make him aware of. Embodiment is not a passive instrument, nor is it a container and hardware to realize our cognition¹³⁶ and cognitive functions monopolized by the brain¹³⁷, whose replica was supposed to simulate neural functions at the “molecular”¹³⁸ level of artificial intelligence in Brown’s novel (Todd’s brain was re-written to provide the foundations of Todd’s rebirth as a cyborg).

Corporeality, as Brown suggests, is far more complex, independent, and marked by personal experience than is believed by those advocating for locating human’s identity solely in the brain and enthusiasts of the “recycled body,” as well as those who celebrate incorporeality, which nowadays posthumanism praises as an ←48 | 49→expression of liberation of man from the embodied and organic and thus a vulnerable, mortal and not always comfortable existence. From a scientific point of view, the doubt expressed by the therapists taking care of Todd that relocating a brain into a new body could imply insanity,¹³⁹ but also the collapse of one’s mind and his entire previous self-identity is absolutely valid.

Therefore, Todd’s personal therapist notes: “I don’t think you can avoid having some similarities to our other transplant patients (…) As for losing yourself, with as extensive a transformation as you’ve gone through, your sense of self is going through serious revision. Have you ever heard of transhumanism?”¹⁴⁰ Todd reports on his new embodied identity as if it was “sharing halves of the same soul”¹⁴¹ with someone else whose body he feels implanted into. It is about his brain-related identity and body-related identity and the discontinuity between the two. It is about bridging “the gap” (van den Berg’s terms) and re-joining the two heterogeneous systems together. Todd apparently observes himself becoming capable of “having one’s actions imputed to oneself.”¹⁴²

“You show them you are a person”¹⁴³ and not a hybrid transhuman creature, becomes a kind of Todd’s humanist imperative. The need for social recognition and evidence of having evolved into a coherent identity, including the moral self, would be, however, signs of predomination of his original human identity over the animal, said not to have any morals. Watching his own avatar on a computer screen,¹⁴⁴ Todd certainly realized that the life of the mind and all that what a ←49 | 50→person thinks of as his self-identity, also includes his own “somatic reflection,” both conscious and unconscious (tacit). We think and feel through our bodies, in particular through the parts making up brain and neural system, stresses Shusterman.¹⁴⁵

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