Human, transhuman, posthuman. Representations of the body between incompleteness and enhancement

"Posthuman" is often used to indicate some position, practice, perspective and vision concerning the future of human beings closely related to the use of contemporary technologies. This contribution would like to analyze some conceptions of the notion of posthuman and to present it as a possible form of "non-anthropocentric" thought which considers technological changes as non-human realities strictly involved in the construction and the definition of what constitutes a human being (and his body) and its predicates. Contrary to anthropocentrism which has characterized Western thought from humanism up to the extreme outcomes of transhumanism, non-anthropocentric posthumanism shows how the human being, who has always been the product of hybridization with the non-human (environment, animals and techniques), is built not only by his own strength but always through his partnership and his environment. The idea of enhancement of the body by technology to reach another stage of human evolution is one of the constant elements characterizing transhumanism. Posthumanism suggests no longer considering the interface with technology as an ergonomic relationship with an external tool that just extends the human body, but as a hybrid, or interpenetration that questions the separation of the body and its centrality. In this perspective, the question is not of simply establishing which is a good use of a technology but, every time, of redefining ourselves in our perspectives and our predicates with regard to what a technology allows and opens up to us.     

Language as shaped by the brain

It is widely assumed that human learning and the structure of human languages are intimately related. This relationship is frequently suggested to derive from a language-specific biological endowment, which encodes universal, but communicatively arbitrary, principles of language structure (a Universal Grammar or UG). How might such a UG have evolved? We argue that UG could not have arisen either by biological adaptation or non-adaptationist genetic processes, resulting in a logical problem of language evolution. Specifically, as the processes of language change are much more rapid than processes of genetic change, language constitutes a "moving target" both over time and across different human populations, and, hence, cannot provide a stable environment to which language genes could have adapted. We conclude that a biologically determined UG is not evolutionarily viable. Instead, the original motivation for UG--the mesh between learners and languages--arises because language has been shaped to fit the human brain, rather than vice versa. Following Darwin, we view language itself as a complex and interdependent "organism," which evolves under selectional pressures from human learning and processing mechanisms. That is, languages themselves are shaped by severe selectional pressure from each generation of language users and learners. This suggests that apparently arbitrary aspects of linguistic structure may result from general learning and processing biases deriving from the structure of thought processes, perceptuo-motor factors, cognitive limitations, and pragmatics.     

流动儿童歧视知觉与社会文化适应：社会支持和社会认同的作用

采用整群取样方法对选自北京市的1164名流动儿童进行问卷调查, 考察社会支持、社会认同在歧视知觉与社会文化适应关系中的作用。结果表明, 流动儿童的歧视知觉整体上并不明显, 其社会文化适应状况整体良好; 歧视知觉对社会文化适应有显著负向预测性(β=-0.39, p<0.001); 在歧视知觉与社会文化适应的负向预测关系中, 社会支持起部分中介作用, 城市认同有增强作用, 老家认同有缓冲作用; 社会支持的中介作用受到城市认同、老家认同的调节。     

心理学危机的实质与解决方案

人们曾在不同层面上讨论心理学的危机,而这种对危机认识的偏离本身又进一步加强了学科本身的分裂。在总结前人对危机认识的基础上,通过分析表明,心理学危机是心理学学科发展中自我同一性危机的表现,其实质在于心理学学科同一性的缺乏,而根源来自于心理学建立之初的理论基础。因此,心理学危机的解决有待于其学科同一性的确立,心理学学科的发展则有待于其学科同一性的展开。     

民族接触减弱民族本质论：文化认同与文化相似性的中介作用

采用问卷法，以911名少数民族和汉族大学生为被试，探讨了民族接触减弱民族本质论及其机制问题。研究1检验了民族接触与民族本质论、民族交往态度的关系，结果表明，少数民族被试的民族接触与民族本质论存在显著负相关，汉族被试存在负相关但不显著；研究2检验了少数民族被试的本民族文化认同和与汉族文化的相似性感知在民族接触和民族本质论之间的中介作用。结果表明，文化认同和文化相似性完全中介了民族接触和民族本质论之间的负相关。文章认为民族接触可以通过增加民族之间文化相似性感知、降低内群体的文化认同而减弱民族本质论信念。最后讨论了本研究在理论和实践方面的贡献，以及存在的局限性。     

流动儿童心理韧性对文化适应的影响:社会认同的中介作用

本研究旨在探讨流动儿童心理韧性、社会认同及文化适应的关系。采用青少年心理韧性量表、流动儿童社会认同量表、流动儿童文化适应困难量表对北京市932名流动儿童进行了调查。经过分析发现：（1）女生、未转学、家庭收入高、父母教育程度高、公立学校的流动儿童文化适应更好;（2）流动儿童的心理韧性对其文化适应的直接预测效应显著;（3）流动儿童的心理韧性可以分别通过老家总认同和城市总认同间接影响文化适应,也可以通过老家总认同和城市总认同的整合更好地间接影响文化适应。     

Body ego and the preoedipal roots of feminine gender identity

Traditionally, visual cues (that is, seeing the difference between one's own genitals and those of the opposite sex) and the fantasies that they prompt were thought to be the central determinants in the organization of gender identity. More recently attention has been focused on mother-infant interaction patterns, on the construction of the body itself, on its kinesthetic sensations, and on the fantasies that these evoke. These matters are now thought to be equal in importance to the traditional considerations. The resulting concept of a core gender identity has suggested the possibility of various forms of preoedipal genital anxiety. This paper discusses how two experiences common to childhood as well as adulthood--the tumescence of erectile tissue and the involuntary vaginal secretions of sexual arousal--may contribute to the organization of feminine gender identity. Case material, including a close examination of an analytic hour, is presented to show how this process may manifest itself in adult neurotic conflict.     

身心二元论的困境与具身认知研究的兴起

摘要 由笛卡尔开创的身心二元论一直制约着人们对身心关系的认识。但是近年来兴起的具身认知研究却从理论和实证的角度系统论证了二元论的不可能性,指出了心智对身体的依赖性,并据此提出了身心一体的身心关系学说。最初,有关具身认知的讨论仅仅是哲学领域有关身心关系问题的形而上学思考,随后开始成为心理学中的一种理论思维,并逐步进入实验心理学领域。如今,ERP、FMRI等认知神经科学的手段在具身认知的研究中得到了广泛使用。具身认知已成为心理学和认知科学中的一股汹涌澎湃的实证研究思潮。     

Modernity and Identity: Themes and Perspectives in the Study of Older Adults

Developments in social gerontology have led to an increased awareness of the relationship between political economy, culture, and personal narrative as influences on social identity in later life. Central to this debate has been a growing interest in lifestyle choice as evidence of a change from modern to postmodern forms of aging. A key component of this process has been the erosion of a predictable framework for an aging identity, previously supplied by the welfare state. It is argued that, alongside the emergence of no-care zones in health and welfare, postmodern ideas on consumerism and the body have led to an assault on identity in old age. As a result, we may be seeing the emergence of no-identity zones which fail to sustain an authentic framework for supporting experiences in old age. A critical gerontology should include the study of identity as central to understanding the disjunction between aging from within and aging within society.     

论阿多诺视域中的一段现象学公案

同一段现象学描述,在胡塞尔那里意味着同一性和直接性,而阿多诺却从中发现了非同一性、中介性、缺席性、他者性和剩余性这些与后现代思想相关的特质。但是,互文性的分析表明,这些特质的首倡者恰恰不是阿多诺而是胡塞尔。阿多诺的分析与批驳,胡塞尔的凸现与“辩护”,恰恰透露了辩证法与现象学的不同旨趣。     

The Image of the Male Body in Lithuanian Ultra-Orthodox Thought in Israel and Corresponding Strategies for Forging an A-feminine Public Sphere

This article deals with the increasingly severe attitude in Jewish Ultra-Orthodox society in the State of Israel regarding the relationship between the sexes. I seek to trace the philosophical roots of this attitude, as a product of existential thinking within the male contingent of the Ultra-Orthodox (Lithuanian) world itself, and I propose that the growing separation between the sexes is a direct result of rabbinic efforts to re-structure this world from within. The image of the Ultra-Orthodox public sphere is considered to be an exact reflection of the male individual and the way of life that is required of him. Ultra-Orthodox thought requires men to stop the flow of life, causing a ‘disconnect’ between the reflective self and the world in which the self exists as an object without reflexivity. According to Ultra-Orthodox thought, inability and failure to live all of life as reflective are linked to the human person as an ‘embodied being’. I explain the Ultra-Orthodox solution to the ‘problem of the body’ and how it influences the structure of the yeshiva as a ‘safe haven’. This mode of dealing with the body entails the exclusion of femininity from male life in the yeshiva context and is also increasingly reflected in the public domain. In recent years, Ultra-Orthodox rabbis have designed the public sphere using the model of the yeshiva as a space that is a-feminine. This is supported by readings from new Ultra-Orthodox Musar writings, directed to men, which deal with women’s sexuality and create a new definition of modesty.     

Frankensteins and cyborgs: visions of the global future in an age of technology

This paper draws attention to the role of representation in the depiction of scientific and technological innovation as a means of understanding the narratives that circulate concerning the shape of things to come. It considers how metaphors play an important part in the conduct of scientific explanation, and how they do more than describe the world in helping also to shape expectations, normalise particular choices, establish priorities and create needs. In surveying the range of metaphorical responses to the digital and biotechnological age, we will see how technologies are regarded both as 'endangerment' and 'promise.' What we believe 'technology' is doing to 'us' reflects important implicit philosophies of technology and its relationship to human agency and political choice; yet we also need to be alert to the assumptions about 'human nature' itself which inform such reactions. The paper argues that embedded in the various representations implicit in the new technologies are crucial issues of identity, community and justice: what it means to be (post)human, who is (and who is not) entitled to the rewards of technological advancement, what priorities (and whose interests) will inform the shape of global humanity into the next century.     

Vowel-contingent feature detection

Do vowel-contingent selective adaptation effects for place of articulation depend on vowel identity, or on the particular formant frequencies used? An experiment is reported here which tested the adaptation effects of consonants with exactly the same formant transitions before different diphthongs. In this experiment, the phonetic identity of the vowel and the formant frequencies of the consonant are not confounded as they have been in previous studies. In the contingent adaptation condition, no phoneme boundary shifts were observed, and this is interpreted along with previous evidencefor such phoneme boundary shifts when phonetic identity of the vowel and formant frequencies are confounded as indicating that adaptation operates on the spectral representation of the stimulus. Other evidence consistent with this conclusion is that adaptation with alternating adaptors from each end of the test series produced negligible shifts, and that a single adaptor from a diphthong series different from that of the test series produced phoneme boundary shifts as large as those with a single adaptor from the same test series.     

The resolution of adolescence in college

This article discusses five prominent developmental tasks encountered by the college student during late adolescence and early adulthood. The manner used to resolve these tasks is crucial not only to the student's adaptation at college but to his eventual life style. The five tasks are: (a) the shift in the nature of one's relationship with one's parents, i.e., from a child-parent to an adult-adult relationship; (b) the resolution of a personal sexual identity; (c) the creation of a value system which fits the student as a truly unique individual; (d) the development of the capacity for true human intimacy; and (e) the choice of a life's work.     

Über mediale Identifizierung

Increasing use of technical media such as television, computers, and the Internet as a means of communication implies significant changes of identity-forming processes in human development. The medial mode of communication proves to be more influential in this context than the overwhelming amount of information which is communicated. It represents a narcissistic structure of relationship evoking needs, which are not met within relationships. Identification with that mode constitutes the basis of what is called medial identity here, which is defined as adaptation to noncontingent experiences in a relationship. There is an interrelation between increasing medialization of the adult world and estrangement in the developmental environment as an identity-forming factor in childhood. As the phenomena in question appear to become ever more common in everyday life, there is a trend towards a new normality being established.     

No representation without awareness in the lateral occipital cortex

Recent research has shown that four small dots presented in the vicinity of, but not adjacent to, a target stimulus can banish that stimulus from conscious awareness. It is thought that the mental representation of the masked stimulus is "erased" by the trailing quartet of dots. Using functional magnetic resonance adaptation, we show that there is no persisting neural representation of the successfully masked stimulus in lateral occipital cortex, a region that has been implicated in the processing of object structure. This finding rules out the alternative interpretation that a lingering neural representation is merely rendered inaccessible to consciousness, as is the fate, for example, of monocular information under conditions of binocular rivalry.     

Porous skin: Breathing through the prism of the holey body

The skin is a body's largest organ and both a metaphor and a materiality. It constitutes a person's exteriority through which and on which social meaning is negotiated and constructed. My contribution challenges the modern idea of the skin's imagined solidity and fixity by returning to an older set of ideas that approach the body as porous, relational, ambiguous and atmospheric. The thought of a body that is open, holey from both the inside and the outside, atmospheric, strikes against culturally constructed and carefully policed myths and norms of groundedness and boundedness. Porosity, however, has not always been feared in that way. My paper explores the ways in which older, speculative thought celebrated the skin's ability to mingle corporally with air, wind and world. This radical openness affectively and materially ‘ungrounds’ seemingly familiar feelings and expectations of order, sense and stability. I wish to retrieve some of this original thinking, which approaches the body not as surface but through its glands, crevices, pores and holes that blur dichotomies of inside and outside. The purpose is to offer an embodied and relational politics that starts from a breathable skin that makes emotion and affect more contingent on the body's holey relationship to air and atmosphere.     

The Perverse Mother: Maternal Masochism in Ira Levin's Rosemary's Baby

This essay suggests that despite the traditional viewpoint that it seemingly supplements patriarchy's consistent marginalization of maternal bodies, masochism, as formulated by Gilles Deleuze, offers the possibility of a maternal subjectivity beyond paternal domination. Deleuze's conception of masochism reveals an innovative way in which to view maternity as a tactical schema that operates through the perverse disavowal and resexualization of patriarchal law in order not only to destabilize its foundations, but to produce a maternal identity of the mother's own creation. This essay will use Ira Levin's horror novel Rosemary's Baby to contextualize an adaptation of Deleuze's theory in order to account for the relationship between mother and child, and the emergent subjectivity the dyad produces. Levin's novel seamlessly showcases how the maternal body is observed and optimized by reproductive technologies in order to produce not only a heteronormative ideal of maternity, but a child who will reflect paternal law. This essay argues that the titular character, Rosemary Woodhouse, establishes a masochistic contract with her son whereby she reconfigures his identity through a perverse disavowal of the Law of the Father, replacing it with maternal authority. Most important, her performance of masochism results in the marginalization of the father, and the emergence of a new maternal identity.     

Compatibilism and personal identity

Compatibilists disagree over whether there are historical conditions on moral responsibility. Historicists claim there are, whilst structuralists deny this. Historicists motivate their position by claiming to avoid the counter-intuitive implications of structuralism. I do two things in this paper. First, I argue that historicism has just as counter-intuitive implications as structuralism when faced with thought experiments inspired by those found in the personal identity literature. Hence, historicism is not automatically preferable to structuralism. Second, I argue that structuralism is much more plausible once we accept that personal identity is irrelevant to moral responsibility. This paves the way for a new structuralist account that makes clear what it takes to be the diachronic ownership condition (which is normally taken to be personal identity) and the locus of moral responsibility (which is normally taken to be ‘whole’ person), and helps to alleviate the intuitive unease many have with respect to structuralism.     

Self-regulatory efficacy's role in the relationship between exercise identity and perceptions of and actual exercise behaviour

Identity theory posits that when people endorse an identity they maintain or alter their behaviour in order to behave consistently with that identity. This assertion is supported in the exercise context where strength of exercise identity relates to exercise behaviour. Less is known about self-regulatory constructs that may aid individuals in behaving consistently with their exercise identity. Self-regulatory efficacy may mediate the relationship between exercise identity and exercise given the influence of this variable on exercise self-regulation; this relationship has not been examined. Exercise identity research has focused on the relationship between identity and behaviour; yet, identity theory recognizes perceptions of identity-behaviour consistency as theoretically important. Through influencing how identity-relevant information is processed, self-regulatory efficacy may also mediate the relationship between exercise identity and perceptions of identity-behaviour consistency.ObjectiveIdentity and social cognitive theories were used to examine self-regulatory efficacy as a mediator between exercise identity and i) exercise behaviour and ii) perceptions of identity-behaviour consistency.Method/designUndergraduate students (n = 311) were followed for 8 weeks. At baseline, participants completed demographic, exercise identity and exercise measures. After 4 weeks they reported their self-regulatory efficacy and after 8 weeks they reported their perceptions of identity-behaviour consistency and their exercise behaviour.ResultsConsistent with theory, self-efficacy mediated the relationship between exercise identity and both outcomes.ConclusionsFindings extend the exercise identity literature by providing empirical support for self-regulatory efficacy as a mechanism through which exercise identity strength leads to exercise behaviour and the perception of behavioural consistency with exercise identity meanings.