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Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

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Volume 7 Number 1, April 2006

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Biotechnology and What Makes Us Human:

Beyond the Final Frontier

William S. Haney II

American University of Sharjah, United Arab Emirates

Introduction: Consciousness and the Posthuman

While no theory of consciousness has achieved consensus in the interdisciplinary field of consciousness studies in the West, the one generally accepted by posthumanists as the most convincing holds that “To be conscious is to be conscious of something” (Pepperell 2003, 175). In other words, the argument goes that “Consciousness is always consciousness of some object or other, never a self-enclosed emptiness” (Miller 2001, 62). This theory of consciousness, however, contradicts Eastern philosophy, which posits a qualityless state of pure consciousness or “a void of conceptions”: “That which is non-thought, [yet] which stands in the midst of thought” (Maitri Upanishad 6:18-19; Hume 1921, 436). This essay explores the implications for cyberculture and the posthuman of these two models of consciousness. On the one hand, cognitive scientists tend to equate consciousness with subjectivity, which they associate with the thinking mind as an extension of the body, nature and culture; Eastern philosophy, on the other hand, distinguishes mind from consciousness, with mind defined as the content of consciousness. David Chalmers believes that “‘To be conscious’ . . . is roughly synonymous with ‘to have qualia’” (1996, 6)—qualia being the qualities of subjective experience, or what something is like phenomenologically. By this definition consciousness is part of an open system that depends on input and output. As Robert Pepperell says, to be conscious a system must have “some object other than its own sentience for it to be conscious of” (2003, 175). Pepperell goes on to assert that the only way we can know if any system, whether human or machine, is conscious is by its response to questions about its conscious content.

This theory of consciousness, which underlies the standard definition of the posthuman, carries significant implications for what it means to be human and for the relationship between humans and the environment. This book argues that while conscious content is an indispensable aspect of both the human and posthuman condition, the thoughts, feelings and perceptions of this content do not encompass a vital aspect of human nature attested to not only by the first-person experience of millions of people around the world, but also by the records of both classical and modern contemplative traditions. As I argue, once we consider the strong evidence for the capacity of human consciousness to be aware of itself as a void of conceptions, certain invasive technological features of the posthuman, though as yet unrealized beyond the realm of science fiction, may lose their appeal. The example of speculative fiction suggests that in the near future people will have to balance the potential disadvantages of biotechnology against the potential advantages of consciousness in its pure form.

Posthumanism refers to the human-technology symbiosis. Many see the biology-machine interface as a positive development, but many also fear the possibility of its irreversibly damaging and possibly catastrophic effects on the human condition, particularly from invasive technologies. On the positive side, Katherine Hayles writes:

First, the posthuman view privileges informational pattern over material instantiation, so that embodiment in a biological substrate is seen as an accident of history rather than an inevitability of life. Second, the posthuman view considers consciousness . . . as an epiphenomenon, as an evolutionary upstart trying to claim that it is the whole show when in actuality it is only a minor sideshow. Third, the posthuman view thinks of the body as the original prosthesis we all learn to manipulate, so that extending or replacing the body with other prostheses becomes a continuation of a process that began before we were born. Fourth, and most important, by these and other means, the posthuman view configures human being so that it can be seamlessly articulated with intelligent machines. (1999, 2-3)

In welcoming the prospect of seamlessly articulating human being with intelligent machines as a form of progress, Hayles and others see the posthuman subject as an amalgam of heterogeneous components that will not only supercede but also do away with the “natural” self.

In “A Cyborg Manifesto,” Donna Haraway signals three crucial breakdowns in the boundary between machine and organism: first, nothing enforces the human and animal separation, including tool use, social behavior, language, and reason; second, the distinction between animal-human organism and machine is leaky because of the ambiguous difference between the natural and the artificial; and third, as a subset to the second, the “boundary between physical and non-physical is very imprecise” (1991, 149-81). In her feminist approach to cyberculture, Haraway claims that “No objects, spaces or bodies are sacred in themselves; any component can be interfaced with any other if the proper standard, the proper code, can be constructed for processing signals in common language” (2000, 302). Her definition of cyborg, however, does not take into account consciousness as-such, but only the temporal self: “The cyborg is a kind of dissembled and reassembled, postmodern collective and personal self. This is the self feminists must code” (ibid.). For codifying the self and redesigning the body, bio- and communication technologies become the essential tools. Haraway defines cyborg writing as not about the fall from an earlier pre-linguistic wholeness, but about survival by means of tools as prosthetic devices. Cyborg writing also rejects perfect communication through a master code, “the central dogma of phallogocentrism” (2000, 312). From a feminist view point, a cyborg comprises not an impermeable organic wholeness, but symbiosis, prosthetic devices, hybrids, mosaics and chimeras: “Biological organisms have become biotic systems, communications devices like others. There is no fundamental, ontological separation in our formal knowledge of machine and organism, of technical and organic. The replicant Rachel in the Ridley Scott film Blade Runner stands as the image of a cyborg culture’s fear, love and confusion” (2000, 313).

Haraway concludes that “The machine is us, our processes, an aspect of our embodiment” (2000, 315). Similarly, Pepperell argues that “organic machines would blur the distinction between organic and mechanical” (2003, 9). Citing Richard Dawkins’ definition of DNA as a “machine for making life,” Pepperell claims “there is no distinction between the mechanical and the organic when it comes to considering DNA” (2003, 10). According to Andy Clark, human beings have always been “natural born cyborgs,” or “human-technology symbionts” (2003, 3). “The cyborg,” he says, “is a potent cultural icon of the late twentieth century. It conjures images of human-machine hybrids and the physical merging of flesh and electronic circuitry. My goal is to hijack that image and to reshape it, revealing it as a disguised vision of (oddly) our own biological nature” (2003, 4). As natural born cyborgs, he says, we are always prepared “to merge our mental activities with the operations of pen, paper, and electronics,” to tailor our minds for coalitions and mergers, whether invasive or non-invasive (2003, 6-7). He believes our cognitive machinery works in this way for the purpose of self-transformation, which he defines as an “artifact-based expansion . . . [a] process of computational and representational growth” (8). But Clark is not entirely sold out to invasive technology. To his credit, he prefers a non-invasive machine-biology symbiosis. “[I]s there something nasty lucking under those biomechanical rocks?” he asks, and cautions that “the social and personal impact of bioelectronic interpenetration is difficult to predict” (2003, 118). Throughout Natural-Born Cyborgs he highlights the advantages of mind-body scaffolding, “the looping interactions between material brains, material bodies, and complex cultural and technological environments” that lead to self-transformations (2003, 11). One thing he does not mention the possible implications of these transformations for human consciousness.

Clearly, self transformation comes in many forms, not all of which are necessarily benign. Because of the unknown long term effects of combining human and artificial components, these transformations may in the end prove undesirable. Unlike Haraway and other theorists of the posthuman, Jean-François Lyotard warns that technology and capitalism can have a dehumanizing influence on the humanist subject. In The Postmodern Condition, he argues that capitalism is a “vanguard machine dragging humanity after it, dehumanizing it in order to rehumanize it at a different level of normative capacity” (1984, 63). He says that technocrats justify takeover by the vanguard machine because society cannot understand or designate its own needs, especially in the face of new technologies. In The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, Lyotard argues that the only resistance to the technological inhuman is another inhuman located in human subjectivity. This subjective inhuman is the potential for surprise and unpredictable transformation beyond the reach of rational, technological systems. In defining this subjective inhuman, he says, “what else is left to resist with but the debt to which each soul has contracted with the miserable and admirable indetermination from which it was born and does not cease to be born? –which is to say, with the other inhuman? . . . It is the take of writing, thinking, literature, arts, to venture to bear witness to it” (1991, 7). This dimension of subjectivity, as a non rational, non human source of resistance, suggests a void of conceptions, the unsayable witness represented by literature and art.

George Orwell (1984, 1949), C. S. Lewis (The Abolition of Man, 1944) and Aldous Huxely (Brave New World, 1932) point to such a witness by suggesting that human nature is a key source of values and plays a vital role in helping us define what is right and wrong, important and unimportant. Expressing his concern about the risks of biotechnology, Francis Fukuyama argues “that the most significant threat posed by contemporary biotechnology is the possibility that it will alter human nature and thereby move us into a ‘posthuman’ stage of history. This is important . . . because human nature exists, is a meaningful concept, and has provided a stable continuity to our experiences as a species” (2002, 7). Anyone who has experienced consciousness-as-such, or intuits a deep interior, would most likely agree that human nature exists, however difficult it is to define conceptually. Fukuyama says he is not sanguine about the applications of biotechnology because, unlike many other scientific advances, it “mixes obvious benefits with subtle harms in one seamless package” (ibid.). In this book I will address perhaps the most subtle of the potential harms of biotechnology, the transformation of human nature itself, which would have far-reaching and possibly devastating effects for the human species. But first we need a working definition of human nature.

I suggest that human nature like subjectivity is bimodal: one aspect of human nature is associated with consciousness-as-such, and the other with the mind or the content of consciousness. In terms of the mind, human nature never stops evolving through a continuous interaction with the environment. As Clark puts it, humans are, “by nature, products of a complex and heterogeneous developmental matrix in which culture, technology, and biology are pretty well intermingled. It is a mistake to posit a biologically fixed ‘human nature’ with a simple wrap-around of tools and culture; the tools and culture are indeed as much determiners of our nature as products of it” (2003, 86). In terms of consciousness, as explained below, human nature involves ultimately the innate capacity for the experience of true Being, the ground of all phenomenal consciousness beyond any “wrap-around of tools and culture.” In the Symposium Plato discusses Being in terms of the Good and the Beautiful, which as Jonathan Shear notes “are in many ways parallel to the Vedic discussions of Sat (transcendental Being), Chit (transcendental intelligence), and Ananda (transcendental Bliss), and that these latter are consistently said to represent conceptually distinguishable tendencies of one and the same ‘ultimate,’ manifesting differentially depending on how it is approached” (1990, 23). In Eastern thought, the unique transcendental experience that Plato refers to corresponds to “no-mind” in Zen and to Atman or pure consciousness (turiya) in Advaita (non-dual) Vedanta (Suzuki 1956, 218; Deutsch 1973, 47-65). In Zen, “No-mindness means having no mind (or thoughts) whatever”; “inwardly . . . it is immovable, unshakable; outwardly, it is like space where one knows no obstructions, no stoppage. It transcends both subject and object, it recognizes no points of orientation, it has no forms, it knows neither gain or loss” (Suzuki 1956, 218). In Advaita Vedanta, Atman (or paramātman, the highest Self), “is a supreme power of awareness, transcendent to ordinary sense-mental consciousness, aware only of the Oneness of being” (Deutsch 1969, 48).

Authur Deikman refers to this as “the internal observer”: “we know the internal observer not by observing it but by being it” (1996, 355, original emphasis). While pure consciousness or no-mind is usually referred to as a mystical experience, it is not something confined to the purview of medieval mystics; many modern accounts suggest that self awareness occurs spontaneously to people of all cultures. Bernadette Roberts, a living American ex-nun and mystic, describes her own experience of a great stillness within in her book The Experience of No Self, which Robert Forman describes as similar to his own mystical experience. In his study of what he calls the Grassroots Spirituality Movement in the United States, Forman and his team of researchers have found that up to 59% of the American population has had a taste of this experience (2004).

The Pure Consciousness Event and Human Nature

As represented by Advaita Vedanta and Samkhya-Yoga, mind and consciousness are fundamentally different; mind is physical, whereas consciousness, as the basic condition of all awareness, is not. In this tradition, “There are two kinds of entities—Purusha and Prakriti, spirit and matter. The former is manifold, pure, changeless; the latter is primarily one, but is ever mutable; it evolves the material world out of itself” (Sastry 1930, xix). Consciousness-as-such is purusha, the transcendental principle at the basis of all knowledge, while the mind is an evolute of prakriti. In explaining the distinction between mind and consciousness, Western advaitans such as Forman, Shear, Deikman and others suggest that pure consciousness qualifies as the most subtle component of human nature. Advaita Vedanta and Samkhya-Yoga explain consciousness with reference to the four quarters of the mind, which include the three ordinary states of consciousness—waking, sleeping, dreaming—and a forth state (turiya) of Atman or pure consciousness. Like a white screen reflecting the projected colors and images of a film, the forth state as “a void of conceptions” underlies the mental phenomena of the three ordinary states (Maitri Upanishad 6:18-19; Hume 1921, 436). This witnessing awareness, which is immanent within the other three states, is defined in terms of “knowing by being,” not in terms of an “experience” based on the dualism of a temporal gap between the subject and object. As Forman puts it, turiya “involves neither sensing nor thinking. Indeed, it signifies being entirely ‘void of conceptions’” where one encounters no images, sounds, emotions or other conscious content but “simply persists ‘without support’” (1999, 12, 13). Forman describes this knowing by being as a “pure consciousness event” (samadhi) (1999, 6).

In explaining the relation between mind and consciousness as expressed in Advaita and Yoga, R. K. Rao says that consciousness is reflected in the mind and manifests in both transcendental and phenomenal forms:

The person (jiva) is embodied consciousness (purusha). Embodied consciousness is constrained by the body-mind complex. It is the unique propensity of the mind to reflect consciousness so that its contents become revealed by the illumination of the purusha. By an association with the purusha, the mind, which is by its nature unconscious, becomes conscious. Deriving its illumination from the purusha, the mind manifests subjectivity and has phenomenal awareness. The purusha, however, by this association with jiva appears to have lost its freedom and innate purity and perfection. By mistaking the cognitions of the mind as its own, the existential purusha in the person (jiva) tends to bind itself to the mind and from such binding a sense of false identity arises. Thus lost in the mirage of the mind, according to Samkhya-Yoga schools, the quest of the person is to realize transcendental awareness, purusha consciousness, by gaining the release from the shackles and the bondage of the jiva brought about by is association with the mind and the attendant sensory content. (2005, 11)

From this perspective, which no theory of consciousness has been able to disprove, the basis of human nature is not an experience, not a quality of conscious content that changes over time, but the innate capacity for a non-changing level of awareness-as-such that underlies all phenomenal experience.

In her recent book Consciousness (2004), Susan Blackmore concludes that in spite of all the scientific theories of consciousness, consciousness itself remains a mystery from a third-person scientific perspective. In the first chapter, “What is the Problem?” (of consciousness), Blackmore summarizes Descartes’ substance dualism, which she explains in contrast to property dualism or dual aspect theory, and then asserts that “Dualism does not work. Almost all contemporary scientists and philosophers agree on this” (2004, 13). Having approached this issue from a variety of perspectives throughout the book, in the final chapter on “Buddhism and Consciousness” she addresses the question of nonduality in terms of no-mind or pure consciousness:

Might the psychologists, philosophers and neuroscientists working on the problem of consciousness see nonduality directly for themselves? If so, it seems possible that they might bring together two apparently totally different disciplines: the third-person discipline of science and the first-person discipline of self-transformation. If they did so, might they then understand exactly what had happened in their own brains when all the illusions fell away and the distinction between first and third person was gone? This way the direct experience of nonduality might be integrated into a neuroscience that only knows, intellectually, that dualism must be false. (2004, 414)

Blackmore implies that until philosophers and neuroscientists have a first-person experience of nonduality for themselves, they will not understand the full import of their intellectual knowledge “that dualism must be false.” In other words, their first-person experience of nonduality would confirm that dualism works neither intellectually in terms of mind and brain, nor experientially in terms of consciousness. As discussed shortly, pure consciousness as a first-person event has its own unique physiological condition as determined by objective scientific studies published over the past several decades.

Arguably, as the most refined subjective component of human nature, consciousness-as-such, as Forman notes, “is a, or perhaps the only, nonpluralistic feature of what it is to be human” (1999, 132). He does not claim that consciousness in itself is universal, for there is no evidence that everyone has experienced it, but only that if one eliminates all conscious content, “then the resultant experience will have nonpluralistic characteristics” (1999, note 1, 195). Shear makes a similar observation which further suggests that pure consciousness is a sustaining aspect of human nature. He says “the experience of pure unboundedness is phenomenologically unique. This is because two experiences of qualityless unboundedness cannot be phenomenologically different, since there is nothing in either to distinguish it from the other” (1990, 136). In describing the accounts of unbounded consciousness by Einstein and Valery, Shear says that to the extent these “indicate unambiguously that the unbounded component is completely independent of all spatio-temporal qualities and distinctions, it is clear they must be referring to experiences of unboundedness that are phenomenologically the same” (ibid.). He adds that the correlations between such accounts suggest “they are all referring to the same overall family of experiences” (1990, 137). This family of experiences, which typically begins in isolation but then progresses “to unboundedness along with other content” (Shear ibid.), involves the reduction of physical and mental activity that leads to knowing by being. The capacity for the psychophysiology to settle down to an experience of unbounded Being is precisely what is under threat by posthumanism, with its growing emphasis on enhancing cognitive activity through bioelectronic procedures.

As Forman suggests in Grassroots Spirituality (2004), people are beginning to see that the spectrum of their mental states extends from heightened cognitive activity to complete stasis; awareness can empty its contents, reach a state of least excitation, and be conscious only of itself. The phenomenologically reductive notion of consciousness as always having an intentional object is not confirmed by the immediacy of their first-person experience. Many Western philosophers, particularly constructivists like Steven Katz (1978), argue that consciousness always has an intentional object, and that even mystical experience is shaped by language and culture. But as Forman argues, mystical experiences “don’t result from a process of building or constructing mystical experiences . . . but rather from an un-constructing of language and belief . . . from something like a releasing of experience from language” (1999, 99; Forman’s emphasis). Intentional consciousness involves being conscious of an object, event or other qualia. William James classified intentional consciousness into two kinds of knowledge: “knowledge-about,” gained by thinking about something; and “knowledge-by-acquaintance,” gained through direct sensory experience (see Barnard 1994, 123-34; Forman 199, 109-27). In contrast, knowing by being or the pure consciousness event is a non-intentional experience or what Forman calls “knowledge-by-identity,” a knowing by being in which there is no subject/object duality; “the subject knows something by virtue of being it. . . . It is a reflexive or self-referential form of knowing. I know my consciousness and I know that I am and have been conscious simply because I am it” (1999, 118; Forman’s emphasis). As immediate knowledge, non-intentional pure consciousness, which I define as the most subtle dimension of human nature, is devoid of the dualism of the subject-perceiving-object and subject-thinking-thought (Forman 1999, 125). In other words, it is characterized by cognitive stasis, the void of conceptions. As such it lies at the opposite end of the spectrum to what posthumanist instrumentalism exalts as an optimal state of mind.

Grassroots Spirituality suggests that people are increasingly beginning to intuit the basis of human nature. Forman calls this form of knowledge-by-identity a “panentheistic” experience, which involves the most subtle or deepest self accessed through non-rational forms of self-transformation (2004, 51). Unlike pantheism (“the doctrine that the deity is the universe and its phenomena”), Forman defines panentheism as the doctrine “that all things are in the ultimate, that is, all things are made up of one single principle, but that one principle is not limited to those worldly phenomena” (2004, 52; Forman’s emphasis). All things, including humans, “are made up of a single ‘stuff’ or substance” (52), but this “stuff,” while including all beings within it, also exceeds them. “It is both transcendent (in the sense of beyond) and immanent (within). As the early Hindu Upanishads put this, ‘having pervaded the universe with a fragment of myself, I remain’” (ibid.).

Forman uses the panentheistic to define mysticism and distinguish between what he identifies as its two aspects. Hallucinations, schizophrenia, and visions make up what he calls the “ergotropic side” of mysticism. These are states of hyperarousal in which “cognitive and physiological activity are relatively high” (1999, 4). The “trophotropic side,” on the other hand, consists of hypoaroused states “marked by low levels of cognitive and physiological activity,” as in Hindu samadhi, mushinjo in zazen and Eckhart’s gezucket (ibid.). States of hypoarousal comprise mysticism proper, while hyperarousal phenomena such as visions and hallucinations comprise “visionary experiences” (1999, 5). In terms of metabolic activity, these two scales move in opposite directions, with the hypoarousal states showing a decline in physiological parameters “such as heart rate, skin temperature, spontaneous galvanic skin response, etc” (1999, 4).

Evidence suggests that the capacity for hypoarousal, as the most subtle experiential aspect of human nature, is increasingly under stress by the posthuman condition. The dehumanizing impact of technology has long been a common theme of science fiction. Works ranging from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to William Gibson’s Neuromancer warn of the political, ethical and biological risks of posthuman technology. The imminent merges of electronic circuitry and flesh will not only increase metabolic activity, but also have the potential to strain physiological functioning at its subtlest levels. The psycho-physiological stress that accrues from artificial overloads may block or even subvert our capacity for knowing by being through hypoaroused states of self-transformation. We can better understand the perils of posthuman biotechnology through a brief overview of the research on the neurophysiology of consciousness, and on how culture and biology not only influence but are themselves influenced by consciousness in turn.

The Neurophysiology of Consciousness

Just as culture and consciousness reciprocally influence one another, so also do biology and consciousness. In the introduction to their edited volume Cognitive Models and Spiritual Maps, Jensine Andresen and Robert Forman write that “Physiology clearly influences our ability to have a vision of the divine, or to experience a moment of non-dual emptiness” (2000, 9). To enhance our understanding of the reciprocal influence of consciousness and culture, they propose a discussion that includes four interrelated aspects of spiritual experience: doctrinal analysis, social expression, subjective experience, and scientific research (2000, 10-12). As formulated by the essays in Cognitive Models, the insights from the interrelated analyses of dogma, culture, spiritual experience and objective studies anticipate what Forman later confirms through his study of grassroots spirituality; namely, that spiritual experience (or the religious in general) “reflects pan-human correlations at a deeper level than conceptuality—[e.g.] electrical activity of frontal and temporal lobes of the brain, the stimulation of hormone flows, and the ceasing of random thought generation all may be seen as cross-cultural technologies of spiritual experience” (2000, 13). Andresen and Forman hope to integrate third-person methodologies from the field of consciousness studies with first-person meditative experience, which as Blackmore suggests is indispensable for grasping why dualism is false and non-duality may be true. This integration will also help us in understanding the experiential side of human nature.

In the opening essay of Cognitive Models, “Meditation Meets Behavioral Medicine,” Andresen examines the role in Mind/Body medicine of a wide range of meditative practices, a ground breaking attempt to unite spiritual, scientific, and health-related agendas. She catalogues the many scientific studies that show the positive outcomes of meditation, which include “reducing blood pressure, anxiety, addiction, and stress,” as well as inducing a shift of focus from “a personal experience of the self to one oriented towards the larger reality that contains it” (2000, 17-18).

Arthur Deikman like Andresen also integrates science and mysticism. In “A Functional Approach to Mysticism,” he examines the path to mystical experience through the meditative process of shifting from sensory to abstract levels of consciousness, a shift from the particularities of our individuality to the trans-personal, trans-cultural basis of human nature. He provides experimental evidence to support the conclusion that meditation results in a deautomatization of thought and perception. Such evidence indicates that “Meditation—whether of the Yogic form I had used for the experiments, or the ‘mindfulness’ meditation of Buddhism—featured a shift in intention away from controlling and acquiring toward acceptance and observation” (78; original emphasis). This supports the definition of non-intentional consciousness as a hypoaroused state of knowing by being as opposed to a culturally induced hyperaroused state of cognitive activity.

The shift of intention in meditation from acquiring toward observation has led Deikman to suggest that consciousness is bimodal. On the one hand, instrumental consciousness (or mind as defined earlier) is directed outward through the senses with an emphasis on objects, sharp boundaries, intentional behavior and survival of the self; on the other hand, receptive consciousness is directed inward through an attenuation of mind toward the non-intentional with an emphasis on blurring boundaries, merging, and transcendence. Meditative practices enhance the latter mode, while bionic technology by definition would enhance the former. Clark defines the self in instrumental terms as “our ongoing experience of thinking, reasoning, and acting within whatever potent web of technology and cognitive scaffolding we happen currently to inhabit” (2003, 45). Instrumental consciousness thus places a greater emphasis on localization, boundaries and difference, while receptive consciousness provides a sense of interconnectedness, unity and the reconciliation of opposites.

Deikman proposes that “Profound connection is what the word ‘spiritual’ properly refers to. The spiritual is not a matter of visions of angels, or of being carried away by ecstatic emotion. The mystics are clear about that. At its most basic, the spiritual is the experience of the connectedness that underlies reality” (2000, 84). He cites quantum theory as leading many physicists to conclude that “reality is an interconnected whole, capable of instantaneous response at a distance” (ibid.). However differentiated human nature and reality may appear from a third-person scientific perspective, the consensus from the most subtle first-person perspective across cultures suggests an interconnectedness of everything on the level of non-pluralistic consciousness.

This first-person experience reflects a hypoaroused state of reduced metabolic activity available to ordinary people whose physiology has not been altered by posthuman technology that turns them into electronic symbionts. Many have questioned the moral rightness of bionic technology for normal people. Sidney Perkowitiz, for instance, argues that while there is no question of the rightness of implant technology for the ill and injured, the issue is not so clear for healthy people who on a whim would like to extend their lifespan or augment their mental or physical abilities: “While this possibility,” he says, “is far distant, we have learned something from the issues swirling around other forms of human alteration such as genetic manipulation; namely, technology that modifies people in unnatural ways or overturns old definitions of birth, life, and death raises moral and legal questions, and the earlier we consider these, the better” (2004, 214). While Perkowitz is right in considering the moral issues of bionic technology, he overlooks the more pressing physiological issues that may adversely affect the most subtle dimension of human nature and by extension humanity itself. Some have argued that the human species may one day be replaced by a superior artificial race of its own creations. If this ever happens it will probably be the result of our having modified ourselves out of a sustainable biological existence into the realm of androids

From Robots and Bionic Humans to Sidhas

Perkowitz describes the different combinations of humans and machines, ranging from automaton, to robot, android, cyborg, and bionic human (2004, 4). An automaton is a machine that moves according to pre-set conditions, and a robot is a machine that may or may not be humanoid and is either autonomous or semiautonomous but has specific applications. Like the automaton and robot, an android is also entirely artificial but looks human (the word android meaning “manlike” in Greek), as in Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? On the other hand, cyborg and bionic human (from “biological” and “electronic”) differ from the first three categories in combining machine and living parts. In Perkowitz’s definition, a cyborg consists mainly of machine parts that dominate in mass but remain under the control of the natural part, “essentially, a brain in a box”; a bionic human, however, is mainly human with implants or replacements such as artificial limbs and organs or a pacemaker (2004, 5). As an example of a bionic human, he cites the TV series The Six Million Dollar Man (1973-78), which portends what may happen if humans continue on the path of artificial implants and genetic modifications. If the Six Million Dollar Human were to materialize through physical and mental prosthetics, it may involve more than electronic pulses. As Perkowitz says, “Such enhancements might, for instance, give the brain additional capacity by holding data in an exterior module, retrieving it on command, and recording whatever experiences are worthy of permanent storage. Or they could give the human brain new levels of computing power, or enable direct brain-to-brain or brain-to-machine computation. Another approach might be to use chemical rather than neuroelectronic means to alter brain function” (2004, 100). This technology, although seemingly farfetched, is already being developed by companies designing implantable chips that can store and dispense drugs that modify mental acuity, mood, and behavior.

For bionic technology to enhance our mental and physical capability, however, would mean to induce a state of hyperarousal that may cause unnatural physiological pressure and even structural damage, as evidence by the effects of cannabis, psychedelics, and other mind-altering drugs. A recent study published in Addiction by David Fergusson et al confirms, as mental health experts have long suspected, that “daily users of cannabis had rates of psychotic symptoms that were between 1.6 and 1.8 times higher (P<0.001) than non-users of cannabis” (2005, 354). Another study conducted for the computing firm Hewlett Packard warns of a rise in “infomania,” or addiction to email and text messages that can result in “a fall in IQ more than twice that found in marijuana smokers” (“Texting Troubles” 2005). If people who constantly interrupt their tasks to react to email and text messages suffer mental effects similar to losing a night’s sleep, then one can imagine how much more stress may accrue from bionic implants than make technological prostheses ever more accessible on a twenty-four hour basis.

What if bionic enhancements could be induced by natural, life-supporting means, like those described by Deikman, Forman, Shear and others? According to the Yoga Sutras, the sixth system of Indian philosophy, meditative practices that induce the hypoarousal of “unified” states of consciousness (yoga means union, as in turiya) can also induce a wide range of empirical effects known as siddhis. I. K. Taimni writes that “The word Siddhis is used generally for the extraordinary powers acquired through the practice of Yoga but its real meaning is best expressed by the words ‘attainments’ or ‘accomplishment’ connected with the superphysical worlds” (1961, 307). Siddhi also means perfection, and each sutra or thread in Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras deals with a particular type of perfection or power. These powers are not ends in themselves but a means to stabilize pure consciousness or union along with the three ordinary states of consciousness. They include knowledge of past and future, knowledge of another’s mind, knowledge of the solar system, knowledge of the small, the hidden or the distant, knowledge of everything from intuition, mastery of omnipotence and omniscience, power of increasing strength, power of passage through space, power of superphysical hearing, and many other powers (Taimni 275-373) that far exceed the reach of bionic technology.

One such technology gaining in popularity is telepresence, or remote presence, which Clark suggests could “extend our sense of physical presence in important ways” (2003, 108). He argues that telepresence does not lead to our becoming disembodied intelligences. Rather, it bolsters the importance of touch, motion, and intervention through feedback loops that connect action and commands, and thereby confirms the theory that “we are essentially active, embodied agents” who constantly evolves through different forms of enworldment (2003, 114). One may wonder if the desire to achieve extraordinary abilities such as telepresence through biotechnology reflects an intuition of our innate potential to achieve them by natural means?

As Patanjali, Taimni and others have pointed out, however, these powers may distract the neophyte from the ultimate goal of yoga—the attainment of pure consciousness through the transcendence of the “illusory side of life,” which includes occult powers like the siddhis. If the siddhis as a natural means of perfection can distract us from maximizing the innate potential of human nature, then how much greater must the risks be from powers artificially induced through biotechnology? The risk of distracting the mind through the siddhis may delay the ultimate achievement of yoga, but as far as we know the risk of technologically modifying the brain may be immeasurably greater. Who can say that we would not end up not only diverting the mind from its innate potential, but also subverting the very substratum of that potential by destroying its genetic basis?

Posthuman Consciousness

In their emphasis on the body, posthumanists like Haraway, Clark, Hayles and Pepperell explain consciousness from a third-person approach in terms of observable behavior. For Pepperell, “consciousness refers to all those attributes we usually associate with a sentient human such as thought, emotion, memory, awareness, intelligence, self-knowledge, a sense of being, and so on” (2003, 13). Even though he recognizes that these attributes have a range of densities, he still classifies awareness and a sense of being as attributes, which excludes the least dense or most subtle dimension of consciousness as pure witness beyond attributes. This classification has significant implications for how posthumanists conceive of the relationship between humans and machines. Pepperell believes that human intelligence is not localized in the brain or any single component but spread throughout the body. Similarly, Clark says that the notion of embodied or embedded intelligence is the dominant paradigm in artificial intelligence (1997).

Although posthumanist such as Clark, Hayles and Pepperell seem to collapse consciousness and thoughts, they still allow for a kind of phenomenological experience, however bound up it is with thought itself as an object of observation. Pepperell claims not to posit a “seat of consciousness” and argues against separating “the thing that thinks and the thing that is thought about” (2003, 33). This view is based on William James’ well-known adage that “thought is itself the thinker, and psychology need not look beyond” (1890, 401). For posthumanists, consciousness or conscious thought, as a physical thing, is not a function only of the brain but also of the extended physical universe in which the brain is embedded or embodied. Hence, “both consciousness and human existence can be considered as emergent properties arising from the coincidence of a number of complex events. In this sense they are like boiling; given sufficient heat, gravity and air pressure the water in a kettle will start to boil” (Pepperell 2003, 30). As such, consciousness is not brain determined but a function of the brain, the body and the world as a whole. While Pepperell rejects the dichotomy between mind and matter and claims that no distinctions exist “independently of our conceiving them” (2003, 34), this approach does not account for subjectivity in its more abstract dimensions.

In arguing that the mind is enworlded and that the apparent gap between mind and matter exists only in the mind, posthumanists render the domain of matter all-encompassing and thus shut out the possibility of consciousness-as-such. The notion in quantum physics of a unity between observer and observed, however, does not necessarily mean that mind or consciousness is an extension of matter or the “physical” universe. In fact quantum mechanics physicists have argued with increasing frequency that mind and matter are themselves expressions of a single more subtle underlying reality, and some even suggest that unbounded objectivity, or the unified field, unites with unbounded subjectivity, or pure consciousness. As physicist John Hagelin explains, “According to the Vedic tradition, consciousness is not an emergent property of matter that comes into existence through the functioning of the human nervous system, but is considered fundamental to nature. It is the essential core of life—a vast, unbounded, unified field which gives rise to and pervades all manifest phenomena” (1987, 57; see also Bhagavad Gita 1975; Sankaracharya 1977). Werner Heisenberg says that “the common division of the subject and object, inner world and outer world, body and soul, is no longer adequate and leads us into difficulties” (1958, 24). Similarly, Erwin Schroedinger, commenting on the paradoxes of regarding mind and matter as distinct, says “these shortcomings can hardly be avoided except by abandoning dualism” (1964, 62). The Advaitan and Samkhya-Yoga perspective support this assessment, but it also asserts that the mind/body distinction does not comprise a duality in the first place because both are really forms of matter.

Short Fiction and Mythic Encounters with the Sacred

The posthuman science of mind thus tends to promote cognitive activity and intensify the computational response of the human nervous system. As Susan Lohafer and Charles May argue, short fiction on the other hand tends to promote cognitive stasis or disinterestedness through aesthetic contemplation. As May says,

While the novel is primarily structured on a conceptual and philosophic framework, the short story is intuitive and lyrical. The novel exists to reaffirm the world of ‘everyday’ reality; the short story exists to ‘defamiliarize’ the everyday. Storytelling does not spring from one’s confrontation with the everyday world, but rather from one’s encounter with the sacred (in which reality is revealed in all its plenitude) or with the absurd (in which true reality is revealed in all its vacuity). (1994, 133)

Pinker calls art a pleasure technology (405), but while an aesthetic object like short fiction may organize pleasurable stimuli and direct them to the emotions, pleasure itself can be said to have its source not in external objects but in witnessing consciousness. This void of conceptions forms the screen of qualityless awareness that, while non-changing in itself, mirrors all mental activity or qualia: thought, sensation, memory, emotion, and mood. In representative modern short fiction by James Joyce, Raymond Carver, Kate Chopin, Jorge Luis Borges, and others, the epiphanic moments experienced by characters and the reader derive from a level of consciousness associated with a transcendence of time, place, and culture. Posthuman technology attempts to simulate these experiences on a mechanical/electronic basis through “telepresence,” or virtual presence in cyberspace. Arguably, the transcendence of spatial/temporal boundaries constitutes an innate capacity of human nature, as described for instance by Vedic literature and Indian literary theory.

Yohanan Grinshpon describes the heart of storytelling in terms of “the healing potency of ‘knowledge of the better self’” (2003, viii). As opposed to the “lesser self,” the better self is defined as Atman or witnessing consciousness, which Grinshpon refers to as “Vedic otherness” (5). As Lohafer, May, Grinshpon and others have noted, literature, and especially short fiction, helps one transcend the mind to the better self. Fiction can achieve this because of the close connection between the emotional effects of perception and imagination. While fiction consists only of words, these words stimulate the imagination, and neurobiological research tells us that the same kind of brain activity occurs in both the imagination and ordinary perception (see Kosslyn 1994, 295, 301, 325; and Rubin 1995, 41-46, 57-59). Because of this neurological link, we can experience a powerful intimacy with others through the art of fiction. In his phenomenological approach to reality, William James says that “Whatever excites and stimulates our interest is real,” regardless of whether the context involves sensory reality, idealism, madness or the supernatural; “Every object we think of gets at last referred to one world or another of this or of some other list” (1950, 293-95). Nevertheless, existential experience depends on the delicate balance of our neurological patterns that show alarming signs of vulnerability to posthuman interference. If the technologically enhanced particularity of the computational mind supplants the unifying power of our emotional makeup, then the epiphanic moments of short fiction may one day disappear.

In traditional, modernists and postmodernist short fiction, epiphanic moments open awareness to the interior of human identity. The content of the story combined with its aesthetic structure as defined by Lohafer provide the reader access to the better self as a void of conceptions (see Haney 2002, 46-88). We find this, for example, in James Joyce’s “The Dead” and in Kate Chopin’s early modernist work “The Story of an Hour.” But in a posthuman age with technological mergers invading ever more abstract regions of inner space, technological materialism and its emphasis on computation may increasingly pose a challenge for short fiction. As Robert Silverberg suggests, this technology may someday even be sanctified by religious institutions.

In “Good News from the Vatican,” Silverberg comically portrays an extreme form of posthuman embodiment: the technological simulation of spirituality by a robot pope. The humor of the story depends on several ironic and incongruous juxtapositions. A group of acquaintances await the Cardinals’ decision in Rome, wondering if “at last the robot cardinal is to be elected pope” (242). Seated at a table with a clear view of the Vatican chimney, Bishop FitzPatrick, Rabbi Mueller and the narrator favor the possibility of a robot pope, while Miss Harshaw, Kenneth and Beverly oppose it. Ironically, the gentlemen of the cloth support this departure from papal tradition, while the “swingers” do not. The narrator ponders why he aligns himself with those in favor. Is it to buy off the robots, like the two hundred and fifty Catholic robots waiting in Des Moines, Iowa, for news of the election to decide whether or not to fly to Rome? Is he privately saying, “Give them the papacy and maybe they won’t want other things for a while” (243), or is he really sensitive to the needs of others? Rabbi Mueller thinks if elected the robot pope would improve Catholicism by reaching out to the Dalai Lama, the rabbinate, and the Greek Orthodox Church. Bishop FitzPatrick also thinks he would bring “many corrections in the customs and practices of the hierarchy” (244), even though he’s no more than a shiny metal box on treads. Kenneth, the tightfisted member of the group who has yet to buy a round of drinks, is skeptical about cybernetic ecumenicism. But the rabbi claims, “I don’t think that treads are spiritually inferior to feet, or, for that matter, to wheels. If I were a Catholic I’d be proud to have a man like that as my pope” (245). On a conceptual level, a robot pope may well induce greater harmony between religions and among their following, but whether this would enhance their spirituality is another question.

Bishop FitzPatrick argues that the stalemate among the cardinals delaying the election is thwarting God’s Will; “if necessary, therefore, we much make certain accommodations with the realities of the times so that His Will shall not be further frustrated. Prolonged politicking within the conclave now becomes sinful” (245). Like the rabbi, he believes the goodness of the robot cardinal will prevail. After all, his identity as a religious leader would have been programmed with the help of the council of cardinals to implement the highest ideals of Catholic dogma. The bishop also believes that if elected pope, a robot would encourage technologically-minded youth around the world to join the Church. The story envisions a future in which society at large and perhaps members of the cloth in particular are predisposed toward a third-person conceptual orientation to self-identity and truth. By installing a machine at the pinnacle of Christianity, Silverberg substitutes a transcendent epistemology based on unity and knowing by being with a postmodernist epistemology based on difference, multiplicity and indeterminacy. Unlike the romanticist notion of identity as located in the heart of a person’s being, or a modernist identity centered on reason and observation, postmodern-posthuman identity suggests skepticism toward consciousness, truth and the notion of a deep interior. Faith in technology supplants faith in the human spirit. But the narrator feels nostalgia for the days of human popes and wonders, if the robot wins, whether there will ever be the need for another election.

After the white smoke signals the winner in a compromise vote, the robot Pope Sixtus the Seventh finally appears on his balcony to bless the masses. He then performs a feat that would qualify an ordinary human for sainthood: he levitates off his balcony into the sky above the crowds. But for Pope Sixtus the Seventh, as the narrator observes, this miracle is merely a feat of technological simulation: “He activates the levitator jets beneath his arms; even at this distance I can see two small puffs of smoke. . . . He begins to rise into the air” (248). But even this simulated levitation would serve as a real levitation in a posthuman context where the distinction between reality and simulation no longer applies. As Jean Baudrillard puts it in defining what he calls the “hyperreal,”

There is no longer any critical and speculative distance between the real and the rational. There is no longer really even any projection of models in the real . . . but an in-the-field, here-and-now transfiguration of the real into model. A fantastic short-circuit: the real is hyperrealised. Neither realized nor idealized: but hyperrealised. The hyperreal is the abolition of the real not by violent distrinction, but by its assumption, elevation to the strength of the model. (1983, 83-84)

In the postmodern condition, the distinction between physical mind and nonphysical consciousness collapses on the side of the former, as the hyperreal. In this context, a robot pope would still be able to fulfill the mental aspirations of a society whose spirituality has been replaced my technological simulation. But for a contemporary reader who is not a robot or a machine-biology symbiont, this story leads to a mythic encounter with the sacred only in the negative sense of contrasting its absence within the story to its immanence intuited within the reader herself. Hence, through the comic inauthenticity of a robot pope, the reader reverts back onto a mythic encounter with consciousness, something a zombie robot would not possess.

At the end of the story, Kenneth hails the waiter and buys a round of drinks. The narrator declines to speculate on whether Kenneth was inspired by the pope’s levitation, or by the very fact that he/it was elected pope in the first place. In any case, when Sixtus the Seventh rises into the sky and blesses the crowds, he goes higher and higher “until he is lost to sight” (248). “The new pontiff has begun his reign in an auspicious way,” says the narrator (249). But how ironic is the pope’s disappearing act? In levitating so high that he is lost to sight, does he also lose control of his levitator jets and fall crashing down to earth, or does he ascend all the way up to heaven? Silverberg obviously toys with the idea that a robot pope may help people break away from conceptual boundaries toward greater freedom in defining identity. But the posthuman/postmodern implication of this multiphrenia, or “the splitting of the individual into a multiplicity of self-investments” (Gergen 73-74), means extending identity through biotechnology and an infinite play of difference without ever achieving a mythic encounter contingent on the innate capacity of knowing by being. Under these circumstances, we may find it difficult to have existential experience beyond purely physical sensations induced by simulated stimulations, a dilemma disturbingly depicted by William Gibson.

In Gibson’s story “Burning Chrome,” Bobby Quine and Automatic Jack, two ace hackers, break through the Intrusion Countermeasures Electronics (ICE) of Chrome’s data base and steal a fortune. Jack then tries to help their cyborg girlfriend, Tiger, by giving her enough money to stop working as a prostitute at the House of Blue Lights. At the end of the story, Jack speculates on Tiger’s posthuman condition:

working three-hour shifts in an approximation of REM sleep, while her body and a bundle of conditioned reflexes took care of business. The customers never got to complain that she was faking it, because those orgasms were real. But she felt them, if she felt them at all, as faint silver flares somewhere on the edge of sleep. (191)

Tiger’s neuroelectronics enable the customers to have it both ways, “needing someone and wanting to be alone at the same time” (191). But at what cost? Tiger and her customers have been reduced to pseudo sentient posthumans. Rather than wanting to escape the unbearable solitude of their posthuman condition, Tiger’s customers relish in the particularity of selfish desires, unaware of what they are missing. Being displaced from the sacredness of existential experience not only precludes genuine fulfillment, but also reinforces solitude and the craving for ever more sensational forms of physical indulgence to intensify the illusion of intimacy. As Gibson’s story suggests, the move toward posthumanity carries the risk that we can have physical sensations without conscious awareness, or conscious awareness without emotional contact, but seldom the experience of intersubjective empathy through contact with our better selves. In our blind enthusiasm for technological development, this dimension of human nature has begun to lose its aura and is in peril of being phased out by electronic replacements.

According to some quantum physicists, unbounded subjectivity merges with unbounded objectivity (Hagelin 1987, 57; Penrose 1997, 3-4). As suggested by the genre of short fiction, the experience of an inner space, commensurate with unbounded subjectivity or the better self, does not depend on biological enhancement through electronic mergers. In fact, it is reasonable to assume that any artificial inducement through what Mark Weiser calls “ubiquitous computing” (94-110) would probably result in a transformation of the self away from human nature’s innate capacity for transcendence to a void of conceptions. This assumption is further corroborated by Clark’s biased and patently posthuman assertion that the “idea of ‘mind as spirit-stuff’ is no longer scientifically respectable” (43)—a claim discredited by the vast interdisciplinary field of consciousness studies in which consciousness is increasingly accepted as an autonomous entity (Chalmers 1996; Forman 1998). Clark’s statement is an example of how technology can unwittingly collapse the subjective, first person “I” and “We” domains into the materialist, third-person “It” domain (Wilber 2000, 67)—apparently the ultimate and possibly posthumous goal of the posthuman condition. As May notes, the short story “presents the world as I-Thou rather than I-It” (137). Whereas the I-It represents the familiar world of the everyday, the I-Thou defamiliarizes our understanding of reality as a conceptual construct, renders ambiguous our categories of perception, and allows a receptive mode of consciousness to come that invites encounters with the uncanny and the sacred. The question now becomes, what happens when the uncanny appears as a robot?

If we continue along the path of bionic technology, we run the risk of supplanting our innate capacity for the hypoarousal of pure consciousness with the cognitive hyperarousal of telepresence or telerobotics. Someday, particularly if the fashion for implants takes hold, we may inadvertently design ourselves into the camp of zombies. For the moment, the prospect of telepresence and other forms of bionic technology mask the risk of becoming posthuman, and through our embodiment in cyberspace give the illusion of compensating for the losses we may incur.

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