BODY & EMBODIMENT
A thought on
Distributed Embodiment: Real Presence In Virtual Bodies. 2014
John A. Waterworth & Eva L. Waterworth
How does information lose its body? How it came to be treated as a disembodied entity?
According to Waterworths’s article, “Alteres, expanded and distributed embodiment”Links to an external site., physical presence is the transition from the sense of materiality to the sense of being in the physical and virtual world through the use of another form of embodiment, which can also be interpreted as moving from physical presence to mediated presence in virtual reality. I find this incredibly intriguing, and I call it the “illusion of self-presence”, the sensation of having a false perception of one’s self within an object, or even part of one’s body, just as if you had lost your leg, but still feel its itching, which is happening for someone with intense Alzheimer’s.
Basically, something beyond the conscious awareness of the organism is occurring, like a child who has lost all perception of the outside world. “Loss of Spatial Awareness” and “Cybersickness or Sim Sickness”Links to an external site. are conditions associated with excessive video gaming, especially with virtual reality VR devices.
When terms like these become embedded in our minds, and neural networks, then we no longer just have a futuristic theory that we will be able to transfer knowledge (in general) into a non-physical form of archive, which means we are accustomed to non-form beings. Similarly, it was mentioned in the book, “Distributed Embodiment”, that we already can, at least to some extent, produce the feeling of being in a virtual body that is also experienced as remotely located, separated from our own body. This is the feeling that “that is me over there, and I am present in that body.” (New Scientist 2010; Slater et al. 2010).
And now, just for a quick overview, Katherine, in her book “How We Became Posthuman”, examines what the future holds for embodiment in an age of information and technology. Hayles’s book spans the history of technology and culture and weaves together three interconnected narratives: the evolution of information as a distinct entity from material forms, that is, as information lost its body, it developed a concept that distinguished it from material forms, the emergence of cyborgs as cultural and technological constructs and the eradication of liberal humanist discourse within cybernetic discourses.
“Was it possible for someone to believe that the mind could be separated from the body? - Even assuming that such a separation was possible, how could anyone think that consciousness is an entirely different medium would remain unchanged as if it had no connection with embodiment?”
I was just pondering the fact that a human mind would have been able to foretell that sooner or later humans would confront a catastrophe (or better to say a brand new technological world without a prediction of shaping a catastrophe!) with their own machines and entities is truly amazing!
Hayley mentioned Moravec’s “Mind the Children”, for describing this concept of dominance, but in fact, the concept was created much earlier, when the word “robot” first appeared in a play by Karel Caperk called R.U.R (Rossum’s Universal Robots) in 1921Links to an external site.. Those robots from Czech were “forced labour”, not robots in form since their chemical batter made them indistinguishable from human beings!
After a while it begins to insert its own messages into the flow, gradually insinuating itself into your thinking, endowing you with new knowledge and new skills. In time, as your original brain faded away with age, the computer would smoothly assume the lost functions. Ultimately your brain would die, and your mind would find itself entirely in the computer. (Moravec. 1988)
A step away from robots and cyber agencies in the future, the transition of humans into cyber-humans or cybernetic humans is also something that could be quantified in the near future. By the end of Hayles’ narrative, it becomes clear that the future of human subjectivity does not need to be contained in silicon vessels, as Moravec predicts, but that other alternatives do exist. As a result of her argument, she aimed to emphasize the fact that human beings are first and foremost embodied, and that embodied actions are based on location and specificity.
I would like to add that the concepts of “embodied agency” and “conceptual intelligence” are becoming more mainstream, resulting in wearable technologies becoming more functional in terms of possibilities and social acceptance.
The ability to understand how interfaces are incorporated into and expelled from our dynamically shifting embodied experience becomes critical once they are worn on our bodies. The relationship we have with objects changes once they are worn rather than held, and now we step even further into the states of biological agency species, becoming cyber human (cybernetic human), AI embodiment and so forth.
Hans Moravec, in his 1988 book “Mind Children” and his 1999 book “Robot”, predicts that robots will establish a new civilization incomprehensibly superior to our own. In the near future, humans will have the option of uploading their minds into these robots, a process known as “going ex-human,” although Moravec is not optimistic about the prospects for organic humanity: “Biological species almost never survive encounters with superior competitors. An entity that fails to keep up with its neighbours is likely to be eaten, and its space, materials, energy and useful thoughts reorganized to serve another’s goals. Such a fate may be routine for humans who dally too long on slow Earth before going Ex.” (Hughes. J, 2004)
After a while it begins to insert its own messages into the flow, gradually insinuating itself into your thinking, endowing you with new knowledge and new skills. In time, as your original brain faded away with age, the computer would smoothly assume the lost functions. Ultimately your brain would die, and your mind would find itself entirely in the computer. (Mind Children, Moravec. 1988)
Considering the advances we have achieved, such as Brett or AI generator models like Google AlphaGo, accepting robot dominance in the future is not an abstract concept, and the same would apply to the notion of cybernetic humans. The essential thing would be defining novel perspectives on the posthuman era since there is no sharp contrast between bodily existence and computer simulation, between cybernetic mechanisms and biological organisms, or between robot teleology and human objectives.
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. Robot, mere machine to transcendent mind by Moravec, Hans PLinks to an external site.
. Waterworth, J., Waterworth, E. (2014)
Altered, expanded and distributed embodiment: the three stages of interactive presence.
In: Riva, G, Waterworth, J. A. & Murray, D. (ed.), Interacting with Presence: HCI and the Sense of Presence in Computer Mediated Environments (pp. 32-45). Walter de Gruyter http://dx.doi.org/10.2478/9783110409697.2