Advancing the Human Self. Ewa Nowak

We have, therefore, identity and change, constancy and modification, oneness of the being and yet plurality of its aspects, as attributes of the individual unavoidably defined as oxymoronic. This had been presented, with its characteristic share of comic, in ‘Our Relations’ film, starring Oliver Hardy and Stanley Laurel. Meeting, at an adult age, his twin brother – Alf (who noticed how much Stanley changed), Stanley replies: ‘You’ve altered too, but you haven’t changed a bit.’ We are and we are not the same, we keep changing but we keep our identity despite the more or less elective tropisms. In the end, the concept of the individual affords only one theme, a paradoxical one: the same and always different, recognizable despite the ceaseless transformation.²⁹

      Being the youngest link of natural evolution, humankind has some strengths, but also some deficiencies when compared to other species. It has no predetermined habitat. Rather it is ubiquitous but, at the same time, forced to create own artificial habitat by means of techno-poiesis. In turn, creative activities and technologies are constantly changing the human condition itself. The original potentialities of the human are to be enhanced and reinforced by technologies, including biomedical ones. Still, the biological life we share with other living beings remains vulnerable and mortal. Fluid changes caused by countless interfering factors demonstrate that vulnerability. Both changes and vulnerability can be observed and involved in one’s psychosomatic biography:

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(…) my body has changed remarkably in just the past few months. I make sense of these experiences by imaging that my embodied mind is embedded in a series of bodily states, and that I have the capacity to go from one ‘still photo’ sense of myself to the next (…) The Self changes as the body changes, and so alas, the Self for the most part dies when the body dies.³⁰

      Regarded as a finished “series” of interrelated bodily and mental states, the self shows its permanent dynamics. These dynamics gain even more complexity when the embodied self confronts the technological enhancement offered nowadays to make the vulnerable and mortal human condition transhuman resp. posthuman. There is no doubt that modifications of that kind will affect human self-identities throughout life. Disintegration, traumatic and schizophrenic-like symptoms, limited autonomy, and authenticity are just the first problems to mention here.

      Objectives

      But can such a dynamic entity as the self be fostered to deal with radical technological transformations? Can she draw from her chronic crisis? That is the core issue of this book.

The book contains six chapters, which are guided by the following questions: What kind of the self-identity would best cater to subjects’ needs in the era of radical auto-technopoiesis, and increasing interest in posthumanist experience and metahumanist manifestos? Does it make sense to consider a posthuman self-identity as a next ‘developmental’ stage of self-identity known to human beings³¹ (Chapter I). Weaving between critical narrative concepts of the self and the embodied self as being the most applicable in the light of advanced technologies, a presentation of how conceptualizations of the human body have evolved across disciplines follows (Chapter II). The question of how technologies can affect and change one’s representations of one’s own body and its functionalities is examined in Chapter III. On the one hand, humanity is familiar with changes and modifications of the individual self-image and self-representation, caused by such experiences as using instruments that are extensions of their embodied intelligence, confronting disabilities, transplants, and bionic prostheses – an issue which is also explored in the third chapter. However, on the ←16 | 17→other hand, in terms of their vulnerable psycho-somatic conditions, human beings can easily be affected by macro- and micro-technologies, including psychosurgery and man-computer interfaces. The outcomes deeply revise the sense of their autonomy and authenticity, which is essential to remaining themselves, as is shown in Chapter IV.

      Dealing with technopoiesis and permanent changes, individuals are prone to the disintegration of their self-identity. The health services, which are technicized, contracted, increasingly based on algorithms supported medical diagnostics and treatment, show not only less and less humanism, but also little interest in promoting the agential potentials of subjects, and the latter are becoming passive (patient-like, in terms of both phenomenology and medicine). Do subjects have any means of strengthening auto-therapeutic strategies at their disposal, such as those offered by medically and psychologically engaged phenomenology? Chapter V deals with this and related issues, however, without questioning the benefits of evidence-, technology-, and efficiency-based treatment. The point is rather to re-empower the agential aspects associated with being an autonomous decision maker and informed user of the technologies that make us passive.

      Chapter VI deals with the following issue: if designing intelligent and autonomous machines will be successful, will humans be able to face their ‘alter-egos’ in their artificial fellow humans – and can they rely on cooperation and socialization within a socio-moral environment that would involve both natural and artificial humans?

      To work out and discuss arguments which provide answers to these questions, cross-disciplinary methods are provided and applied.

      Methods

Chapter I draws on psychological (developmental or ‘evolutionary’, as Robert Kegan would put it), phenomenological, narrative and post-narrative theories of self-identity to select and examine their properties withstanding with new posthumanist challenges. In the same chapter the concept of the embodied self pioneered in the 20th century by Maurice Merleau-Ponty in phenomenology, and by Anthony Giddens in sociology, is then adapted and reinforced in Chapter II, in which the evolution of body conceptualizations in the 20th and 21st centuries (including living organism, lived body, intercorporeality and the ‘new materialism’) will be selected as combining ontological, experiential and cognitive potentials most challenged by technologies. Among others, Hans Jonas’ theory of the individual and autonomous organism and Margrit Shildrick’s concept of crosscorporeality reveal their usefulness in defining the embodied self in terms ←17 | 18→of its simultaneous vulnerability and plasticity. Advanced macro- and 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