How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics

by N. Katherine Hayles

Book Overview

In this age of DNA computers and artificial intelligence, information is becoming disembodied even as the "bodies" that once carried it vanish into virtuality. While some marvel at these changes, envisioning consciousness downloaded into a computer or humans "beamed" Star Trek-style, others view them with horror, seeing monsters brooding in the machines. In How We Became Posthuman, N. Katherine Hayles separates hype from fact, investigating...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0226321460
• ISBN13: 9780226321462
• Release Date: February 1999
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Length: 364 Pages
• Weight: 1.13 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

REDEFINING WHAT HUMAN IS -- into the 22nd Century

Yes, this is 22nd Century thinking today. I was fortunate enough to meet the author at a LA FUTURISTS SOCIETY meeting where she was a guest speaker. She looks ordinary-- like a college professor-type, speaks clearly but her writing is the extraordinary talent. She combines humanism and science to see how virtual bodies and informatics are influencing how we live, work and love. One of those books that yearns for you to write in the margins and put your notes in the back. Pages and pages of notes on my copy. No one will share this copy, don't even ask!!!! Not an easy read but well worth the journey. I love to read books in hours or days but this one took weeks (in between other reading) and it was well worth every minute, hour, day spent. Perfect book for this summer when the MACHINES ARE TAKING OVER on our screens at movies and television. The crossover from cybernetics to literature is what is so fascinating. I can't begin to summarize all that I learned and all the questions that it brought up for me to seek out more info. Belongs on every science and literature teacher's shelf. One of the books they should require for every engineer and techie at the beginning of their careers. Make way for the future!!!!!

Resistance is futile - read this book

In this book of panoramic scope Hayles considers no less than the fate of the human race. In a rich and detailed discussion ranging from the science fiction of Greg Bear and Philip K. Dick to the science of Norbert Wiener's cybernetics and Claude Shannon's information theory, Hayles traces the changing conception of human consciousness and claims that a great many of us are already posthuman. A posthuman is someone who has been reconstructed in some sense, either physically or mentally, such that he or she exceeds, or believes they can exceed, the boundaries of a human. About ten percent of Americans can be considered cyborgs in the technical sense by virtue of having some kind of artificial implant - these people would qualify as posthuman since they have compensated for some limitation of their bodies through technological augmentation. However, Hayles claims that to be posthuman no prosthesis is necessary, simply the way in which we think about ourselves as conscious agents needs to change. The advent of Shannon's information theory has led to the modern convention of treating information as if it were entirely non-physical. If this idea is applied to the information in our heads - that is, the collection of memories that make each of us unique - then we quickly arrive at the conclusion that our consciousness can be uploaded into a computer, decanted into a robot-body, or even backed-up onto computer disk, giving us eternal life.This is the story of how information lost its body and it is an idea which is now well established in Western culture and technology. Yet, Hayles believes it to be misguided. Any informational pattern, be it pebbles on the beach or electrons whizzing across the internet, must have a physical embodiment to exist. The importance of embodiment is also being discovered in fields such as neurology and experimental robotics. A surprisingly large amount of the information processing essential for being a responsive agent in the world goes on in body parts such as nerves, the spine and the proprioception of joints - our powerful human consciousness is a relatively recent add-on. Hayles argues that future posthumans will not be the ethereal information-beings of much of current science fiction, but they will certainly have a much more intimate relationship with computers than we do today. In terms of information flows, a collection of humans and computers contains no boundaries between one and the next. As computers approach the complexity of our bodies and information becomes more important to our work and leisure, humans and computers will become more compatible with each other and there will be an increasing potential for one to collapse into the other. Whether this is to the detriment or betterment of humanity represents a cross-roads which urgently needs to be addressed. Hayles is well aware that technology issues such as these currently concern relatively few people - the majority of the world's population has yet to make

She's definitely onto something here

When the U.S. president called our war against terrorism a new kind of war--a war of information instead of a traditional war--I was struck by the similarity between what he said and what Hayles wrote a couple years earlier in How We Became Posthuman. Hayles describes how:1) information is more important than physical presence2) consciousness is only part of what makes us human3) we can think of the body as a prosthesis4) humans and intelligent machines merge seamlesslyThe book is well written, accessible, and has been very useful to me in my PhD literary studies. I highly recommend it!

Hayles delivers a (virtual) reality check.

Finally, a well-informed, razor-smart analysis of the cultural evolution of information as we (mis)understand it today. Hayles does for information and cybernetics what Foucault has done for sexuality, madness and the penal system, and she does it in a way that is thorough-going, highly contemporary, and enjoyable. Hayles offers the paradoxically devastating thesis that, in our visions of information, in our approaches to cybernetics, and in our handling of our own place in the world, Western culture has been hurtling down the wrong path. We have forgotten the physical. Worse, in order to forget the physical, to elide our own bodies, we had to forget or disregard a mountain of evidence. Not content to let us remain ignorant, Hayles recalls that evidence for us, shows us where we've come from, where we are, and offers some insight into where we're going. This is one of those books that you will tell all your friends about.

Stunning tour de "force" ! Hayles burns up brain circuits!

Read this book to see how an American writes in that obtuse French post-modern style. She covers the psybernetic/media territory from 1943 to 1999 the best I've ever seen. Zig-zags from Gregory Bateson & Alan Turing on to William Gibson and covers the very interesting idea that "information" probably does not exist like we generally think of it...a la Franciso Varela. Most importantly, She retreives Embodiment as the fundamental ground of all consciousness..that no feature of consciousness is ever not physical and even "information"-bits & bytes on/in the 'Net... cyber"space" is always embodied in servers/fiber optic lines/memory storage magnetic fields,etc.