How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics by N. Katherine Hayles

How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics Reviews

• 
  laura

  i read this book as a senior in college in preparation for my thesis, which was basically about issues of selfhood and agency in a deterministic universe. it was, at the time, one of the most difficult books i'd ever read and, correspondingly, one of the most satisfying. the language can be difficult-- it's a literary critic analyzing systems analysis, for goodness sake-- if you don't have a pretty firm grasp of academese, it will not be easy going. but having mined it, i not only learned just a ton about the movement of scientific thought in the 20th century (particularly the VERY difficult and VERY important move from a deterministic world-view to a probabalistic one), but found these little gems, which i added to my intellectual tool kit and have been thinking with and about ever since: the platonic backhand and the the platonic forehand.
  
  "The platonic backhand works by inferring from the world's noisy multiplicity a simplified abstraction. so far so good: this is what theorizing should do. the problem comes when the move circles around to constitute the abstraction as the originary form from which the world's multiplicity derives. then complexity appears as a 'fuzzing up' of an essential reality..." (Hayles, 1999, pp. 12-13).
  
  anyway, this is a somewhat esoteric and challenging book, but if you're interested in thinking about consciousness, whether as a philosopher, biologists, computer scientist, psychologist- whatever- i highly recommend this one. and if you have dreams of uploading yourself onto a harddrive, existing bodyless in cyberspace, or living forever in a silicone body, it is absolutely required reading.
• 
  Sarah

  Theory book on cybernetics. I found it particularly inspiring in thinking about myself as a disabled person. The ways that we depend on machinery to construct our humanity grows and grows every day. The freakishness of disability is minimized by the minute, as we all wrap ourselves in metal.
• 
  Becca

  Took me forever to get through this book, but it's worth the effort. Hayles' basic argument is that modern conceptions of artificial intelligence (and the posthuman body) privilege informational patterns over material instantiation. In other words, as a culture, we tend to emphasize cognition rather than embodiment. This is nothing new - after all, for centuries Western philosophers have been telling us that consciousness, and not embodiment, is the seat of human identity. Hayles returns to Descartes' mind/body dualism in order to understand why the idea still persists in modern-day discussions about AI.
  
  Western philosophical traditions are pretty ill-equipped to talk about the body and embodiment, which is why theorists like Judith Butler and Julia Kristeva have made conversations about the body their bread and butter. Hayles adds to these discussions in a really meaningful way.
• 
  Jeff

  Very well-researched and smart text on the ongoing shift from our Western Liberal Humanist persona of humanity to a more posthuman cyborg (connection between human and intelligent machine).
  
  I can't believe I just said that. As a self-chastised luddite, I preferred the sections of literary analysis. And although I suppose there's nothing I can do to counteract technology (I mean, I review books on an internet social media site) I still can't get over the annoying posthumans who walk into me as a result of Facebook status updating while sidewalk promenading and those who are face down to screens rather than face out to mountains. Still though, I'll take a bionic heart and live to 150. (Is it obvious that I only half-grasp most of what Hayles says? I bet she checks these reviews on Goodreads and when she gets to mine, will have to shake her head at my foolishness, plug herself into a Kurig machine, and brew herself a nice batch of disembodied informatics.)
• 
  zynphull

  I actually finished this book a few months ago, but I never got around to updating it here, mostly because I dreaded having to write a review for it. In short, this is so because although I mostly loved Hayles' book and her reflections on embodiment and how it was erased by cybernetics (and later tech-influenced philosophical thought on the mind, as well, such as the whole of functionalism and all the Kurzweils and Wolframs and out there), I really am not much interested (to this day at least, which is as much as I can always say about my intellectual hunger) in literary analysis: no matter how philosophical it might be, I would mostly prefer to read theory, I guess.
  
  In any case, I read Hayles mostly because of the history of cybernetics she presents. One of my interests in the analytic tradition in the philosophy of mind is understanding how anyone could fathom such an absurd idea as "mind uploading" or "conscious machines". This is partly because of my path in these studies, I guess: I used to entertain the idea that machines might one day display conscious-like behaviour. Much like Alan Turing, when I learned programming, I too saw no good reason *not* to ascribe them consciousness - if they walk and talk like a duck... It was only when I was introduced philosophy of mind via Varela, Rosch and Thompson's critique of internalist, "disembodied", computational-based cognition in
  The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience that I started to reject the idea of conscious machines. Human consciousness is itself far more ineffable and complex than our silly computational models can ever grasp. Funnily enough, Varela did not deny the possibility of conscious machines as I do (he was fond of the potential of Wolfram's automata for enacting consciousness).
  
  Hayles pinpoints some very specific and interesting moments in the history of scientific development in the mind-brain sciences in the 20th century in order to exemplify many of the assumptions which have formed the field since then - such as a type of scientific realism regarding biological neural modeling using computational neural networks. I turn to this example (probably my favourite passage in the book) in the rest of the review as I think it represents the tone of the book and Hayles' main argument.
  
  Warren McCulloch, a neurophysiologist and cybernetician in the 1940s developed one of the first theoretical accounts (or model) of a neuron cell as a basic logical unit. McCulloch observed that neurons' networked organisation made them "capable of signifying logical propositions" (Hayles p. 58). For instance, if neuron A is connected to neurons B and C, and the excitation threshold of A is equal to that of C and B combined, then this setup can be said to instantiate the logical proposition "if A, then B and C" (or B ∧ C → A). A natural-science-philosophical parenthesis: one should point out how much work has been done here: it is often only after a model has been proposed that interesting science can be done. As Steve Heims (apud Hayles) has said, "it [is] not easy to extrapolate from amorphous pink tissue on the laboratory table to the clean abstractions of the model". Logician Walter Pitts came later, and developed the network implications of McCulloch's unit neuron - for instance, demonstrating that a neural network [of sufficient complexity, I assume] was able to "calculate any number (that is, any proposition) that can be calculated by a Turing machine", i.e., it was Turing-complete. Such approach has proved a success by most measures. Today, a lot of neuroscience works exclusively with neural modelling using computational models. Neural network modelling has also led to huge developments in computer science and artificial intelligence in the last decade, as we all know.
  
  For McCulloch (and many of our contemporaries), the success of his approach was vindicated by history. But what are the nature of models? How can a model of the brain prove anything regarding actual human minds? What does behaviour of artificial neurons, mere mathematical reductions, prove regarding actual nerve cells - or worse, regarding the human constituted by such cells? In 1947, a fellow cybernetician, psychologist H-L Teuber, asked this very question (more elegantly):
  
  

  "Your robot may become capable of doing innumerable tricks the nervous system is able to do; it is still unlikely that the nervous system uses the same methods as the robot in arriving at what might look like identical results. Your models remain models-unless some platonic demon mediate between the investigators of organic structure and the diagram-making mathematicians."

  
  
  McCulloch's answer, for me is exemplary of his fellow machine-functionalists to this day:
  
  

  "I look to mathematics, including symbolic logic, for a statement of a theory in terms so general that the creations of God and man must exemplify the processes prescribed by that theory. Just because the theory is so general as to fit robot and man, it lacks the specificity required to indicate mechanism in man to be the same as mechanism in robot."

  
  
  Second natural-science philosophical parenthesis: you may treat a theory (such as the neural-scientific view of the nerve cell, derived from McCulloch) differently depending on whether you believe it describes reality more or less accurately, or whether you take it as only a useful fiction, one that leads to productive science, but which purports to bear no resemblance to reality whatsoever. These positions have been called, in the analytic debate on the philosophy of science, respectively realism and anti-realism. However, an individual must not limit their stance to either accepting/rejecting a theory. You may treat what it says as true only as a methodological principle for making scientific observations, and ignore everything about its view of reality once you leave the lab. Thus you need not assume a mind if you are trying to do behavioural psychology (your subjects are just larger pigeons, after all!) - you can act, methodologically, as if all a person is is a pretty complex machine, always readly apt for (re)programming like any other, and still, outside the context of scientific observation (say, while you discuss results with your peers and carry on daily activity) act as if everyone has a mind, feelings, and so on (although you might try to manipulate those around you with 'positive reinforcement'...).
  
  Neural-modelling-realism says that whatever brains are made of, they are *fundamentally* information-processing systems (or computers). Brains capture data from the external world via sense neurons in the retina or the nose and process this data in their internal wiring, and it is this aspect of neural behaviour (not, say, their chemical behaviour, although in principle that may also fit under a sufficiently loose definition of "computation") that is relevant for understanding mental phenomena (and definitely not then-dreaded Freudian psychology and all of its subjectivity-leading traps).
  
  In the terms above, then, McCulloch believed that his theory ("backed" or not by empirical observation, that isn't the point here) not only explained neural behaviour in a way that was interesting, productive, or apt for the creation of technology (all very true) - it indeed provided us with the actual principles that governed the natural phenomenon under study. It is those principles, and not anything else, that make neural behaviour happen, he claimed. This is, I think, a complex philosophical position, but which is, as Hayles claims, a type of platonism. It is not dissimilar to those who are realists regarding the laws of physics, perhaps, for whom the laws described by physicists too are so general that God and man must obey. That is because, for McCulloch and others today, what "matters" is the organisational structure (or the functional behaviour, if you prefer) of neurons. And by matter, I mean what is necessary and sufficient for the emergence of mental phenomena - such as first-person consciousness or "qualia" (that is if the theorist grants them existence at all and is not an 'eliminativist').
  
  Note that the distinction Teuber pointed out - between a model and the real thing, and the former's insufficiency in mimicking the full reality of the latter - is more at home in the traditional debate in the philosophy of mind, outlined above. A model is not reality, and we ought to debate how acceptable it is as a description of the latter. However, this distinction fades into the background in McCulloch's answer: he found a statement "so general" that whatever nature or man creates is its mere "example" - or in contemporary analytical metaphysical terms, it is an "instantiation" of it. What most essentially defines the ontology of a brain under this view, then, is the very organisation of its composing parts, as distinguished from the material substance they are made of. Given that the mind is a byproduct of the brain (a true given for materialists), and the brain is "only" instantiating general principles, it stands to reason (I suppose? I find this just crazy) that whatever medium is made to replicate the same principles (or structure, etc.), such as a silicon robot, shall also replicate whatever else a brain does - such as having a mind. Now, it is not so much that theory is seen as true, but it is seen as preceding reality itself.
  
  Hayles calls McCulloch's epistemological (if not rhetoric) strategy a "Platonic backhand". In this move, one "works by inferring from the world's noisy multiplicity a simplified abstraction" (Hayles, p. 12) observes the noise and complexity of reality and theorizes that some or other set of simpler, more understandable, general principles explains what is seen. This basic initial abstraction is of course part of science: the problem begins when the move "circles around to constitute the abstraction as the originary form from which the world's multiplicity derives" (p. 12). Laws "so general" are thought to be found that their occurrence (or modelling, I'd rather say) is itself seen as an occurrence of the phenomena they were supposed to model in the first place.
  
  For Hayles, writing in a more general context of 1990s feminist critique of traditional Western rationality, the above process is one of the points in which the body was "erased" in order to give place to abstractions such as "bodiless information" (p. 12), or the idea that individuality = brain structure = information patterns. Philosophically, this occurs by foregrounding the importance the physical organisation of matter, rather than any special substantive quality of matter itself, in bringing about mental phenomena. For many reasons, I find functionalism untenable as a position in the philosophy of mind. Hayles provided me with more reasons, showing how shaky assumptions made by daring theorists can be turned into religious dogma for technologists a generation later, and inform projects such as the Blue Brain project - that aims to replicate a human brain (and by materialist-biased extension, a mind) using IBM supercomputers. One can only hope their bots can read Hayles after reaching singularity.
• 
  Dan

  This has some interesting stuff in it but mostly it’s one of those 1990s books on technology and culture that haven’t aged very well.
• 
  Kyrill

  Wide ranging and well researched book which gives some good intros to aspects of the history of cybernetics. The intro to autopoesis was particularly good. I found the mixture of cybernetic theories with Lacan, phenomenology and Foucault didn't really gel into a final synthesis. It weirdly concludes by endorsing Searle, as part of its general pitting of embodiment against cybernetics.
  
  Lacan offers an interesting frame here but it seems the more Lacanian message, which Hayles gestures at but stops short of, is not that cyborgs are really women but that women are really cyborgs. Since this was a central thread, it was a bit strange that there was so little exploration of sexuation.
  
  It goes down some alleyways in AI research which age the book but it does well to balance accessibility and technical depth.
  
  I didn't get much out of the literary analysis though I've read most of the books mentioned and usually enjoy literary analysis. Perhaps it fell flat because after reading stuff that came out of CCRU at this time, it seems a bit tame for all its promise. She chooses good examples but something about the presentation drains their import.
• 
  Addison Nugent

  A staggering acheivement.
  However,Hayles glazes over the disparity between between the richest and poorest societies on the planet. There has always been an uneven distribution of wealth, so uneven in fact that human society has divided itself into two separate worlds: the first and the third. The idea of the first world posthuman, adds another level of hierarchy to the already insurmountable one in place: not only are we now from two different worlds but two different levels of evolution. Therefore, when we talk about “our” future as amalgams of human and machine, beings with unlimited access to knowledge and transparent technologies, we may very well be talking about the birth of an almost superhuman ruling class. I'm not sure that should be celebrated.
• 
  Emily Beall

  the perfect coda to my late-summer incessant reading of octavia butler. i prize the freaky scholarly imagination it took to write this book
• 
  Matt

  Hayles' book is a philosophical and cultural elaboration of the concept of the "posthuman". This is not an empirical claim, that we have built cyborgs and AIs and other such things which supersede humanity. The point of the book is that what we have taken "humanity" to be through the last few centuries of Western culture is in fact a local sort of cultural product. The posthuman is not a succession of mankind oriented into the future, but an unmasking of the human animal as a very different, very material, bodily, sort of being.
  
  Chapters alternate between historical and philosophical analyses of cybernetics and cognitive science, the origins of materialism and mind/body problems and what have you, with chapters analysing science fiction novels and short-stories as a means of glimpsing the changing visions of humanity. Purists may be put off by this but I found it to make the book's arguments richer, not to mention more interesting.
  
  The book is a smart complement to Dupuy's Mechanization of the Mind. In fact I came to Hayles through a paper of Dupuy's remarking on the close alignment of their views on minds and machines.
• 
  Cole Stratton

  A deep, probing investigation of what it means to be human. Drawing on an incredible range of material - from the natural sciences to literature to philosophy - Hayles displays a commanding knowledge of the discourses that shape our self-perception. As computer science and cybernetic research have produced new epistemological paradigms, Hayles constructs an eloquent argument to ground us in our humanity and convince us that our embodied presence should forever keep us from confusing the systems of information we construct and study with our own unique existence.
• 
  saïd

  If my nightmare is a culture inhabited by posthumans who regard their bodies as fashion accessories rather than the ground of being, my dream is a version of the posthuman that embraces the possibilities of information technologies without being seduced by fantasies of unlimited power and disembodied immortality, that recognizes and celebrates finitude as a condition of human being, and that understands human life is embedded in a material world of great complexity, one on which we depend for our continued survival.
• 
  Karen Dich

  Fascinating. Combines thoughts of cognition, consciousness and a lot of informatics - the latter of which I knew very little (and didn't understood half of it, damn you dobble masters!). I'm still digesting, but I'm certain to come back to some of the problems raised in the book.
• 
  Jan D

  The "upload your consciousness to a computer" is a posthuman idea: Instead of seeing people as mind inside a body and as possessing a body, the "posthuman" is data and thus can be understood and dealt with like computer programs.
  The book draws on a wide range of sources including literature, cybernetics and cognitive science. The reading difficulty is OK: It is not easy, but it does not drown the reader in self-invented terms nor are the sentences super long and intertwined – for such a postmodern topic it's pretty accessible.
  
• 
  Feral Academic

  Still processing, will probably write a blog post about it. This book laid a foundation that I needed like 5 years ago before venturing into new materialism and science and technology studies related stuff. Her literary analyses were, I was thought, of varying quality, but the survey of scientific and cultural ideas in conjunction with the literary readings was very helpful. She takes complicated and disparate ideas of the human, the machine, and information and tells a story that even this lil humanities scholar could follow. Mostly. There was some talk of coding.
• 
  Sasha Ambroz

  Не зважаючи на назву, книга геть не про те, як ми стали постлюдством, бо виявляється, постлюдством ми були практично від моменту злізання з дерева, а про те, як зрозуміти, що усвідомлення себе як постлюдини - це не страшно і для індивідуума, і для науковця.
• 
  Nan

  She portrays here an archaeology of cybernetics, rethinking Bateson, Haraway, Weiner. I liked her idea that "our limits are built more than given".
• 
  alzabo

  loved it for the most part (but why to literary critics love gibson so much?) looking forward to reading more in this vein/author
• 
  нєνєℓ ¢ανα

  Thought-provoking, multilevel, sharp...
• 
  Marty Heath

  Fun & interesting read. Slightly limited b/c of its age, but ideas are still very useful to examinations of contemporary technologies & posthuman imaginaries.
• 
  Nick Bentz

  Very well-written and thoughtful archeology of cybernetic theory, and how it sets us up for the posthuman.
• 
  Damian Stockli

  This is a top contender for the most interesting book I have ever read in my life.
  
  {obligatory melodrama because I am writing a Goodreads review}
• 
  Ivan Kapersky

  This past semester I took the introduction course to Semiotics. I was so fascinated by the teaching methods and readings assigned by the professor that the class expanded my scope of reading. I requested references from my professor for my summer reading and he recommended Katherine Hayles’ How we Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics.
  
  Hayles explains that the human condition as it is, is constantly evolving. Posthuman, does not mean the human existence after death or the cease of humanity. On the contrary; the human condition per se, as we are now, will continue to evolve as machines parts are integrated to the human body. As “disembodied” information grows, the human condition integrates this information, or “splices” (in words of the author) as part of the human body.
  
  The author resembles the Descartes theory of mind and body; however, Hayles states that the mind will use the body as a medium in order absorb the information, therefore reducing randomness and creating meaning through pattern recognition. Since a machine works in binary sequences, pattern recognition will serve as methodology to construct meaning of existence as the posthuman emerges.
  
  The book can be difficult at some points for those readers that are not acquainted with cybernetic literature. However, I highly recommend it for those searching for a way to expand critical analysis regarding the posthuman. Read chapter 10: “The Semiotics of Virtuality” it will blow your mind off!
• 
  Joy

  Popular media in the last few decades have been fascinated with the idea of cyborgs: half-human, half-computer beings. Those who fear technology may cite one of their worst fears as the computer taking over the role and place of humans. This is why films like The Matrix or The Terminator have been so popular; the rise of technology has proven fertile ground for fears of its power. Hayles describes the post-human perspective through this book, which can be seen as a view of identity that is more than bone and flesh. Instead, identity and self could be transmitted onto technology, where technology becomes part of us either in practice or in physical terms. She cites examples that include hearing aids as an extension of a deaf person, walking canes for a blind person, and word processing on a computer as a way to illustrate the model of humans working with technology to become better, a sort of cyborg. In this view, technology no longer becomes the enemy, but instead becomes related to consciousness and becoming a better self. Her explanation includes a history of three waves of cybernetics and uses lucid examples to explain the theory. Although in some instances I think she went a bit too far in the implications of technology/human symbiosis, I appreciate her clear depiction of the theory. Furthermore, the theory directly relates to my interest in video games as learning tools. This will be a book I return to.
• 
  John

  An amazingly diverse and far-reaching text that is nonetheless pretty readable. Hayles traces the history of cybernetic theory and shows how its concepts are reflected and experimented upon in sci if lit, thereby telling her three larger narratives of how information became immaterial, how the cyborg was constructed, and how we became posthuman. Some important points for me were are her emphasis on embodiment and her contention that posthumanism must continue to rely upon, rather than see itself moving away from the constraints of, the body and embodied knowledge. She draws upon folks like Connerton and Bourdieu to make this argument, and does so with real alacrity. She also disarms the potential terror of the Posthuman as the antihuman in a way that seems fruitful.
• 
  Lisa Phillips

  Hayles examines the cybernetics era from the 1940s until the late 1990s. Her project is to address how information "lost its body" because she wants to intervene in discourse suggesting that the body is so much "meat" for a separate Cartesian consciousness. She traces the historical development of cybernetic theory in scientific discourse, examines the rhetoric of sci-fi, and explicates a posthuman ethos that offers a both/and solution for people and things living in the information age.
  
  While it is not a "quick read" it is an important foundational text for anyone interested in digital media, information technology, or literary analysis performed in concert with complex cultural and scientific contextualization.
• 
  Leonard Houx

  So far, Hayles' book is amazing--an amazing work of research and blend of cybernetics and literary criticism. That said, I think she is wrong (about how we became posthuman).
  
  Hayles could also do without the pop references to Lacan--she should either take him seriously or not, but don't quote him like his texts are some lines from a Bob Dylan song.