Greenflame
Jottings on science, religion, technology, pop culture, photography and faith from the Aotearoa New Zealand
Category: Cyborg
-
A few years back Peter Lineham pointed me in the direction of the various series put out by Icon Books. Recently I’ve been reading the occasional book from their Postmodern Encounters series, including most recently Donna Haraway and GM Foods. All of the books in the series are fairly short and summarize a particular person’s…
-
I’ve been skimming through cognitive scientist/philosopher Andy Clark’s book “Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence” over the past couple of days and came across this bit near the end of the book. The drive toward biotechnological merger is deep within us—it is the direct expression of what is most characteristic of…
-
Interesting interview I stumbled across today. Albert Borgmann and N. Katherine Hayles interview/dialogue The claim that cyberspace liberates people from the accidents of gender, race, class, and bodily appearance is often made by advocates of electronically distributed education. But to conceal a problem is not to solve it. We have to learn to respect and…
-
Article here on the BrainGate, a device the integrates the human brain with computer systems. Using an array of hair-thin electrodes implanted in his brain, a 25-year-old quadriplegic man was able to operate a computer, open and close a prosthetic hand, and manipulate a robotic arm just by thinking about it, according to a new…
-
Article I missed when it came out a few months back, but directly connected to the thesis edits for next week. See Science & Theology News – I, robot? Ethical considerations of cyborgs Crittenden said cyborgs may provoke humanity to engage in what he calls “self-deselection†— the idea that in replacing parts of our…
-
I’ve been looking at various ways in which people have appropriated Hefner’s metaphor of the ‘created co-creator’ and today I was following up a paper by Anne Kull (University of Tartu, Estonia) that drew parallels between the concept of the cyborg articulated by Donna Haraway and the dual-natures of Christ found in the Incarnation. Kull…
-
Wow. Maybe the commercial spinoff will be a TV you can change channels on without having to move any muscles. See Wired News: Brain Waves Make Robot Move In a video demonstration in Tokyo, patterns of the changes in the brain taken by an MRI machine, like those used in hospitals, were relayed to a…
-
Picked up a copy of Digital People: From Bionic Humans to Androids by Sidney Perkowitz this week from the university bookshop. It looks quite interesting and I admit that once I saw the blurb on the back about science fiction movies – just after I’d edited some similar ideas in my introduction – I was…
-
A few articles out recently that pick up on the potential of nanotechnology for the purposes of human therapy and enhancement. Popular Mechanics has an article Redefining The Human: The Upgradable You which covers a range of technological developments relating to nanotechnology among other things. The forever techno-optimistic Ray Kurzweil has an article in the…
-
From this morning’s email a Damaris article on cyborgs. See Culture Watch – Downloads and upgrades: The Cyborg Future by Philippa Taylor (The Centre for Bioethics and Public Policy). This is a reprint of an article from the CBPP Newsletter (Issue 7, Winter 2005/6).