Talk given to the Singapore Futurists group in October 2012

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Your skin is not the edge of you
Singapore Futurists
25.10.02012

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Hello
◦ Researcher
◦ Education and technology
× Learning through games & mobile learning
◦ Futures:
× http://www.beyondcurrenthorizons.org.uk
× http://edfuturesresearch.org/
◦ IDA, MDA, HP, RP, RI & IAL

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This discussion
◦ Transhumanism!
◦ Any project to extend the limits of what it means to
be human has to have given those limits some
thought.
◦ So that’s what we’re doing now.

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A word on skin

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A word on skin
◦ Interface to the world
× Sensation
× Osmosis
◦ Transient, dynamic
◦ Not a fixed and static barrier*
*although Jalila Essaïdi & cell biologist Abdoelwaheb El
Ghalbzouri are making bulletproof skin

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Three parts
◦ External limits
× Where’s the limit to the individual?
◦ Internal limits
× How far are we individual bodies?
◦ Temporal limits
× When do you stop being in the world?

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Distributed self
Networks of cognition & understanding

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Connections
◦ Human selves are constituted through relations with
other actors
× Human ones
× Non-human ones
◦ Cognition depends on there being more than one of
us

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Distributed cognition
◦ Some social theorists reject the notion of pure ratio.
◦ All cognition situated within social context.
◦ Knowledge, social context & embodied experience all
interdependent.
◦ Cognition is a function of the interaction between
agent, environment & technology.

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Actor-Network Theory
◦ Bruno Latour (also
Callon and Law)
◦ Material and conceptual
(semiotic) relations: how
do they act as a whole?
◦ All actors – human &
non-human – treated
equally.

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Man-gun hybrid
◦ How does a gun mediate
action?
× “Guns kill people”
× “People kill people”
× Or a ‘citizen-gun, gun-
citizen’ might do
◦ Identity is fluid, contextual &
reflects place in a network
of relations.

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A Cyborg Manifesto (Haraway, 1986)
◦ Challenge to notion of discrete, binary boundaries
× Human/animal
× Animal/machine
× Physical/non-physical
◦ Implications for traditional notions of identity
× We are all cyborgs
“Our best machines are made of sunshine; they are all light
and clean because they are nothing but signals”

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Aggregate self
More than the sum of your parts

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Parasitic DNA
◦ Sequences of DNA that insert extra copies of
themselves into the genome.
◦ Don’t contribute to the host organism.
× Costs time and energy to replicate
◦ ‘Selfish’ genes in competition with others

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‘Infrahuman’
◦ From ‘super-human’: Lee & Motzkau (in press) suggest
‘infrahuman’
◦ Describes the bacterial & eukaryotic cell activity that
composes human life
◦ Not us. Not themselves either.

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Time-travelling self
Past & future parts of you

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Different biochronologies
◦ We treat different parts of ourselves as if time passes
differently for them.
× Metabolic age
× ‘Brain age’
× “She has the skin of a twenty-year old”
◦ Are these the same self aging? Or different selves?

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Acting on the world
◦ Parental expectations before birth shape their lives
◦ Filial impressions of your values and actions shape
their lives after your death
◦ So your influence on the world extends beyond your
presence in it

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200-year present (Elsie Boulding)
1900
2000
2100
Self
Parents
Grandparents
Children
Grandchildren

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Light cone
◦ Light you could have
influenced since your
birth.
◦ Area of potential
causality – no action
travels faster than light.

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Implications of networked identities
More than human scale

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Part of a wider whole
◦ Are we part of a similar, bigger system?
× Gaia (Lovelock)
× City-virus (Morrison)
× Moon food (Gurdjeff)
× Interstellar consciousness (Stapledon)

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Interstellar networks of consciousness
◦ Empires of galactic entities
◦ Human consciousness irrelevant
◦ Human activity influential

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For discussion
◦ Boundaries of the self and the body are smeared and
blurred across time and space.
◦ Impossible to understand the individual in isolation.
◦ Technological interventions need to be understood
as social, not personal, changes.

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Richard Sandford
richard@northover.sg