“Suppose a population of tiny people disable your brain and replicate its functions themselves, while keeping the rest of your body in working order (see Block 1980a); each homunculus uses a cell phone to perform the signal-receiving and -transmitting functions of an individual neuron. Would such a system be conscious?” (Kirk, Robert, "Zombies",
I read from Nagel’s work in my post humanism class. You raise valuable post humanist perspectives here. You made me think of Stiegler’s epiphylogenesis and Gibson’s “Johnny Mnemonic” in which the technology becomes part of us. Thanks for giving me something to think about further in this realm.
Thanks, Julie 🙌🏻. You lead me to a completely new connection. Bernard Stiegler and Bruno Latour are important sociotechnical thinkers for this period, just what the doctor ordered, and I’m grateful to you for helping me make this link, which moves me closer to having something useful to share with literacy teachers about AI. Literacy pedagogy in this moment tends to treat teachers of children in poverty as parts in a teaching machine, a piano roll in a player piano (a prison by analogy), a blender in which one makes smoothies, I’m seeing more and more clearly, and is woefully undertheorized. The bot is a wake-up call. Stiegler’s life story in itself is a metaphor (like Malcolm X and Frederick Douglass) for the inseparability of human memory and the technology of print, an especially revealing metaphor for a teacher seen as a cure or a poison (they have both powers). If one could accomplish what he did in a prison, what are the possibilities for school? He went to prison, a tool or techne humans use to cure the sick from badness (if the medicine doesn’t kill them), and came back to society with a gift to the future. Now I’m thinking of Foucault… I’ve got some thinking to do myself—very grateful to you!
I read from Nagel’s work in my post humanism class. You raise valuable post humanist perspectives here. You made me think of Stiegler’s epiphylogenesis and Gibson’s “Johnny Mnemonic” in which the technology becomes part of us. Thanks for giving me something to think about further in this realm.
Thanks, Julie 🙌🏻. You lead me to a completely new connection. Bernard Stiegler and Bruno Latour are important sociotechnical thinkers for this period, just what the doctor ordered, and I’m grateful to you for helping me make this link, which moves me closer to having something useful to share with literacy teachers about AI. Literacy pedagogy in this moment tends to treat teachers of children in poverty as parts in a teaching machine, a piano roll in a player piano (a prison by analogy), a blender in which one makes smoothies, I’m seeing more and more clearly, and is woefully undertheorized. The bot is a wake-up call. Stiegler’s life story in itself is a metaphor (like Malcolm X and Frederick Douglass) for the inseparability of human memory and the technology of print, an especially revealing metaphor for a teacher seen as a cure or a poison (they have both powers). If one could accomplish what he did in a prison, what are the possibilities for school? He went to prison, a tool or techne humans use to cure the sick from badness (if the medicine doesn’t kill them), and came back to society with a gift to the future. Now I’m thinking of Foucault… I’ve got some thinking to do myself—very grateful to you!