Transhumanist Vision Of Man-Machine Symbiosis

1499 Words6 Pages

Exploring the Transhumanist Vision of Man-Machine Symbiosis in Four Modern, Hard Science Fiction Novels
Indrajit Patra
Research Scholar, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, National Institute of Technology, Durgapur (NITD), India

Abstract: In this paper my aim is to analyze four 21st Century hard science fiction novels, which are Charles Stross’ ‘Accelerando’, Alastair Reynolds’ ‘Revelation Space’, Iain M. Banks’ ‘Surface Details’ and Stephen Baxter and Alastair Reynolds’ collaborative work ‘The Medusa Chronicles’ to explore various aspects of a Post-Singular, Posthuman and machine-dominated future driven by an essentially Transhumanist vision of uplifting and elevating human self by a deep and thorough man-machine symbiosis. The …show more content…

Even though technological expansion always follows an exponential curve in which massive breakthroughs happen to suddenly skyrocket the course of mankind’ progress to unprecedented heights yet a brief analysis of thedevelopment of ideas and theories in this field of man-machine synthesis will benefit our discussion …show more content…

Problems like dealing with man-machine synthesis also expose the difficulties that we face at present as a result of our predominantly reductionist scientific approach which seeks to reduce and disassemble an object to its fundamental, reducible components and then analyze them. The problem of mind and machine can be tackled most effectively only when we are fully aware of their real nature and origin and can trace their evolution thoroughly and independently – the organic core of machines and machinic framework of biological substrates: “The problem is that embodied cognition that reduces body to a mere physical instantiation of sensory motor loops does not go deep enough in acknowledging the importance and implications of the biological embodiment for cognition” (Slawomir J. Nasuto, and Yoshikatsu Hayashi. "Anticipation: Beyond synthetic biology and cognitive robotics" Biosystems, vol. 148, October, 2016, pp. 22-31). The authors stress the need to go beyond the traditional Western dualistic conception of reality and the mechanistic

Open Document