On Spirituality & Technology

First post of the new year! Hope everyone had good holidays, and may I keep remembering to blog here on a regular basis.

Hayles -- I was not really sure what to make of her article. The content seemed to me, to be all over the place. However, there are some points that I feel I should comment on. "Yet already researchers are engaged in developing intelligent machines that can perform mind-like activities" (215) -- here, the operative here is LIKE. However much scientists and inventors attempt to replicate the complexities of the human mind with electronic machines and however much they may insist that certain machines are "alive", their attempts and claims are unconvincing. The term "artificial life" was brought up in relation to machines, but I refuse to believe that any "life" exists when the origin of this "life" is a machine. My stance changes if instead, we are talking about critical patients in palliative care or intensive care units at the hospital who are hooked up to artificial life-prolonging devices, because in such cases, life would have existed and originated with the human. I guess I am a member of the camp that believes human life exists with the presence of actual brain activity.

Taylor's article raises interesting questions as well. How different would the world be if there were no such concept of the "self" and things in the environment to reinforce this concept? Can you imagine a world with no reflections in water or shiny surfaces? A world with no mirrors, no cameras? It is objects like this that let us re-establish our identity to ourselves or others. The internet nowadays is swimming with websites that let us reaffirm our singular identity in the context of a large social network, so that we may be situated within a community, with connections to individuals that we know. It could be argued that the act of frequenting such websites is overly individualistic, but they also serve the purpose of keeping us in touch with those we know.

The discussion about human subjectivity in the article also reminds me of a quote that I came across recently: "we don't see things as they are, we see things as we are" - Anais Nin. This quote can be applied to the levels of thinking discussed in the article: cognition, reflection, and reflexion. How else would we perceive ideas and objects within our surroundings, if not with our subjective minds?

There is also the idea that "if man is time and time a trace, then 'the self of the living present is primordially a trace". In death, our bodies eventually decompose, and all that is left for our remaining friends and family is memories of ourselves. This idea reminds me of society's transition from burials to cremation. Our society is less and less reliant on aesthetics and an actual body to preserve one's identity, and memories are given a more important role.

This idea in the article about naming and being reminds me of a reading from last year's Religious Anthropology class about witch's books in Ecuador. This article by Peter Wogan states that indigenous people in Ecuador associate their name with their individual essence, so that "an individual's existence is only real to the state insofar as that person's name is located in the archives". Their belief of the power of the name as an indication of one's existence extends to the fact that Salasacans fear witch books because they think that these books, that contain people's names and the amount of money spent to cast a spell on them, correspond to state records where peoples' lives are recorded. Here, people place so much emphasis on the power of a name that they believe removing their names from a witch's book will relinquish any witchcraft that was cast on them.