Future Bodies

Femborgs and History

Many artists and critical theorists have been examining, and questioning, the boundaries of the body. What are your edges? What separates your self from your environment, or your tools? Would anyone like to define where that edge lies? Conventional thinking might say it's your skin. I have heard some argue that even when implanted under the skin, a tool is still just a tool, separate from the self.Then there are those who say that any tool has the capability of extending the body beyond it's inborn boundaries, even if the interface to the tool is external. When you sit in front of your computer and chat with a friend halfway across town or halfway around the planet, do you end at your fingertips? Or is the tool in front of you extending your existence far beyond your physical boundaries? The desktop computer is hardly a transparent interface, it's clumsy and distracting, and yet I'm sure we've all had situations where it seems to melt away. When you're chatting you stop thinking about the monitor and the keyboard, you're just thinking about your friend. As the interfaces become less distracting, and eventually invisible, these boundary disputes will only become more convoluted.

Master of extending the body's boundaries, Stelarc has repeatedly stated that "the body is obsolete", but he didn't mean it's unusable, or disposable. Which is good, i don' want to give up my body. I do not agree with Hans Morovec and the Extropian camps who say we can download our consciousness into a box or translate its electrical signals into a program thereby capturing our essence in some immortalized form so that we can exist in the complete absence of body. I feel that our consciousness, memories, perceptions, ideas, emotions, desires, etc., are not phenomena localized to the brain, but exist throughout this complex system. When we extend or modify the system, it is likely these things will transform too, but i see no point in replacing or even dampening the system itself. For me, the Cartesian mind body split is completely bankrupt. Would you maintain the identity construct you currently exist in if you were just a brain in a box? Or is your identity influenced by your vehicle, is your understanding of the world shaped by the perceptions built of inborn structure. If you were a foot taller, how would that change your fundamental persona? Would it be a greater or lesser change if you had always been that tall vs. if you suddenly became that tall?

So when Stelarc says "the body is obsolete", he doesn't mean it's worthless, or that we should get rid of it. What he means is that given the technological and information constructs in which we now live our lives, our current vehicle, this human flesh devoid of augmentation, is insufficient to deal with the world. "The body is obsolete" does not mean that we can throw it away, but that we have to accept our ability to improve it as a necessity, cease to define our beings by the formalities of the vehicle we currently use, and reconsider the boundaries of the self.

The future of human evolution will be cultural and technological: we must seek self induced mutations to prevent stagnation and even extinction as a species. Based on the Darwinian model, humans have stunted our physical evolution. We've developed tools that make it easier to survive, no matter what our handicaps. Because I can wear these glasses, I'm no longer likely to be eaten by unseen predators and therefore I can pass my genes for defective vision onto the next generation. So now it's the tools themselves that drive our adaptations, and by extension, our evolution. We have mostly eliminated population capacitors, the factors that normally control population growth and influence evolution, through widespread use of mass production, medical science, and other technologies. The processes of natural selection based on adaptive advantage via genetic mutation is all but defunct in humans, unless we create our own. But how do we know what adaptations have an advantage? The most successful adaptations will likely be ones with persistent ability to adapt further. I find it hard to motivate to get beyond my humanity, I think regardless of the mutations or extensions the core remains the same. I agree that we can evolve ourselves but I do not believe that we can distance the body or our humanity to do so. The body is our launching pad. A point of departure. The soil in which to germinate our psymbiotes. The womb in which she gestates.

Future Bodies

Femborgs and History