Advancing the Human Self. Ewa Nowak
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rel="nofollow" href="#ulink_228807bb-e21d-5dc5-850e-743d713f9d33">132 and the brain plays the role of Hegemonikon, not only in a living organism but also in shaping and reshaping one’s self-identity.
Brown’s novel is pretentious, full of very improbable periptery, monotonous and literarily dull. But it cannot in any way be denied one advantage: the first-person perspective based narrative and dialogical convention (though absolutely incomparable with Plato’s dialogical mastery), combined with a clinical observation from the perspective of medical practitioners caring for Todd, allowed for the consideration of a few accurate points around the shaping an individual identity based on embodied cognition.
Namely, the creation of identity is influenced not only by the snippets of information gathered and stored in the brain, but also peripheral neural clusters which can regulate parts of the metabolism133 even when disconnected from the central nervous system, and other subsystems:
• “You will likely find you have reflexes to do things you never did before and things you used to be able to do will be difficult;”134
• “Your new body has muscle memory that will sometimes respond in ways you don’t expect. It will take time, but you will learn to either control it, or get used to it, or even benefit from it,”135
as Todd’s medical assistants make him aware of. Embodiment is not a passive instrument, nor is it a container and hardware to realize our cognition136 and cognitive functions monopolized by the brain137, whose replica was supposed to simulate neural functions at the “molecular”138 level of artificial intelligence in Brown’s novel (Todd’s brain was re-written to provide the foundations of Todd’s rebirth as a cyborg).
Corporeality, as Brown suggests, is far more complex, independent, and marked by personal experience than is believed by those advocating for locating human’s identity solely in the brain and enthusiasts of the “recycled body,” as well as those who celebrate incorporeality, which nowadays posthumanism praises as an ←48 | 49→expression of liberation of man from the embodied and organic and thus a vulnerable, mortal and not always comfortable existence. From a scientific point of view, the doubt expressed by the therapists taking care of Todd that relocating a brain into a new body could imply insanity,139 but also the collapse of one’s mind and his entire previous self-identity is absolutely valid.
Therefore, Todd’s personal therapist notes: “I don’t think you can avoid having some similarities to our other transplant patients (…) As for losing yourself, with as extensive a transformation as you’ve gone through, your sense of self is going through serious revision. Have you ever heard of transhumanism?”140 Todd reports on his new embodied identity as if it was “sharing halves of the same soul”141 with someone else whose body he feels implanted into. It is about his brain-related identity and body-related identity and the discontinuity between the two. It is about bridging “the gap” (van den Berg’s terms) and re-joining the two heterogeneous systems together. Todd apparently observes himself becoming capable of “having one’s actions imputed to oneself.”142
“You show them you are a person”143 and not a hybrid transhuman creature, becomes a kind of Todd’s humanist imperative. The need for social recognition and evidence of having evolved into a coherent identity, including the moral self, would be, however, signs of predomination of his original human identity over the animal, said not to have any morals. Watching his own avatar on a computer screen,144 Todd certainly realized that the life of the mind and all that what a ←49 | 50→person thinks of as his self-identity, also includes his own “somatic reflection,” both conscious and unconscious (tacit). We think and feel through our bodies, in particular through the parts making up brain and neural system, stresses Shusterman.145
←50 | 51→
33 A. Giddens Modernity and self-identity, p. 11.
34 A. Giddens, Modernity and self-identity, pp. 138–159.
35 A. Giddens, Modernity and self-identity, pp. 138–159.
36 “Phenomenological psychology is distinguished in all its characteristics from introspective psychology,” Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The phenomenology of perception, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962, p. 52.
37 Ken Wilber’s core works Integral psychology and A Theory of everything were first celebrated as resolving the body-mind problem on the basis of integral realism.
38 Nick Bostrom, “A history of transhumanist thought,” Journal of Evolution and Technology 2005, vol. 14, no. 1, p. 1.
39 N. Bostrom, “A history of transhumanist thought,” p. 2.
40 Giorgio Pico della Mirandola, On the dignity of man, Cambridge, Indianapolis, Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1965, p. 5.
41 For a critical approach to eschatological and also racial myths on human development, see Ewa Nowak, “Now choose life, so that you and your children may live. Eschatology of perfectibility, niddah, and the scandalon of race hygiene at 1850–1945,” Ethics in Progress 2016, vol. 7, no. 1, pp. 103–117 (in Polish; one of the outcomes of this research project), doi: 0.14746/eip.2016.1.6. For a critical approach to maldevelopment myths founding disability concepts see idem, “Anthropology and disability. The origins, shift and revival of the paradigm,” Ruch Filozoficzny 2017, vol. LXXII, no. 3, pp. 137–157 (in Polish).
42 Robert Kegan, In over our heads: The mental demands of modern life, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1994, p. 17.
43 R. Kegan, In over our heads…, p. 32.
44 R. Kegan, In over our heads…, p. 32.
45 The egocentrism-allocentrism dychotomy is also explored in the phenomenology of spatiality and self-awareness, see Dan Zahavi, Self-awareness and alterity, Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 1999; also Shaun Gallagher, “Review: Complexities in the first-person perspective. Reviewed work: Self-awareness and alterity by Dan Zahavi,” Research