Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 5 Number 1, April 2004
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Robert Pepperell. The Posthuman Condition: Consciousness Beyond the Brain. Intellect, 2003. 199 pages.
Reviewed by
American University of Sharjah, UAE
First published in 1995, The Posthuman Condition came out as a new edition in 2003, having been reprinted in 1997. Robert Pepperell is among those who helped to introduce the posthuman as a cultural construct, which now seems destined to replace postmodernism as the dominant paradigm of contemporary culture. As Pepperell notes in his preface to the new edition, the greatest change in the intellectual landscape since the publication of the first edition has been the explosion of interest in the field of consciousness studies. Pepperell adopts a “functionalist” approach to consciousness, specifically a non-linear variation of the computational view of the mind, or AI, advocated by Marvin Minsky, Douglas Hofstadter, and Daniel Dennett. In eight chapters and two useful appendices, Pepperell lays out the case for the posthuman, defined as “the general convergence of biology and technology to the point where they are increasingly becoming indistinguishable” (iv). He describes the posthuman condition as a distinct self-awareness “after humanism” involving an attitude of both anxiety and enthusiasm toward technological change. This awareness, he claims, has been developing for decades, perhaps centuries, and should be no cause for alarm; society continues to benefit from its growing reliance on technological innovations in robotics, communications, prosthetics, intelligent machines, nanotechnology, genetic manipulation, and developments in artificial life.
Pepperell’s enthusiasm for the biology/machine merger, which is shared by many, leads him to claim that from a genetic perspective “there is no distinction between the mechanical and the organic when it comes to considering DNA,” a prospect that others regard with deep ambivalence. Pepperell’s claim hinges on the definition of consciousness presented in Appendix I: namely, that a conscious system cannot be closed, and cannot be conscious of nothing. Consciousness, moreover, will always have a function or purpose, a view that rejects the possibility that consciousness can be conscious of its own consciousness, a central tenet of the world’s contemplative traditions and perennial psychology. This posthuman definition of consciousness seems to leave no room for the distinction between awareness and the content of awareness. In Chapter one, however, Pepperell uses the term consciousness to refer to the attributes of a sentient mind, including “thought, emotion, memory, awareness, intelligence, self-knowledge, a sense of being, and so on” (13). Although Pepperell’s definition seems to be contradictory—on the one hand denying the possibility of consciousness being aware of itself, while on the other hand associating consciousness with self-knowledge—the overall thrust of the book emphasizes the functionalist definition of consciousness, which can only be “deduced from observable behavior” (15), as inseparable from cognitive content.
In describing posthuman existence, Pepperell goes to great lengths in demonstrating that consciousness and the environment cannot be distinguished in any absolute sense. This argument opposes the reductionist view that conscious thought can only occur in the brain, that as part of the body it is separate from the environment. Pepperell’s argument is nothing if not consistent in asserting that a “continuum exists throughout consciousness, body and environment . . . . [and that] nothing can be external to a human because the extent of a human can’t be fixed” (22). While advaitans or perennial psychologists may agree in principle with the claim that nothing is external to the human, unlike Pepperell they would define consciousness in immaterial or spiritual rather than materialist terms. But The Human Condition dispenses with consciousness defined as the “immaterial spark of life,” suggesting that this may be nothing but the illusion of material complexity. From this perspective, which collapses consciousness and thought, awareness and its content, Pepperell argues that it is more realistic to treat thought processes as determined not by the brain alone but rather by the interaction between brain, body, and the world.
Pepperell calls this an “embedded,” “enworlded” or “embodied” notion of human existence, with the conscious mind embedded in the body and by extension in the world (30). This view is offered as an alternative to idealism, described as the “black hole of solipsism,” and materialism, which also assumes a division between mind and matter. The posthuman condition replaces this duality with the embeddedness of mind and reality—a cognitive continuum so to speak. Pepperell calls this the “extensionist” view of natural phenomena and human existence: “In brief, rather than regarding identifiable objects in the world as coherent and discrete, extensionism holds that all objects and events extend indefinitely through space and time” (188). In other words, consciousness defined as thought processes is coextensive with and embedded in the entire universe. While logically coherent within itself, extensionism as presented here precludes the possibility that consciousness may prove to be something altogether different, as suggested by the ancient Vedic tradition of India, as well as by recent scientific studies on the distinction between consciousness and behavior. These studies problematize the habit of attributing volition to consciousness (as in Pepperell’s functionalism), and suggest instead that the primary function of consciousness may be the witnessing of conceptual content (Journal of Consciousness Studies 11.2: 2004).
Ironically, Pepperell’s extensionist argument that human existence has no determinate origins or ends, that there are no absolute divisions between ourselves and the environment, would apply even if consciousness were defined not in posthuman functionalist terms but as an “immaterial spark” devoid of cognitive content. Starting in Chapter two, Pepperell discusses “the problem of resolution,” the fact that our ability to answer questions about reality and human existence depends on the resolution or depth of our knowledge about the universe. In quantum theory, for example, what appears to be solid turns out to be a frictionless field of all possibilities—which some liken to pure witnessing consciousness as the container of thought. Order and disorder thus depend on perception or resolution, with what seems to be disorder or chaos on one level emerging as order on a deeper level. For posthumanism, then, order and disorder are not mutually exclusive absolutes but a continuum, like the continuum of mind and environment, internal and external reality. In elaborating his definition of consciousness as a co-presence of innumerable factors, Pepperell notes that its complexity can never be objectively resolved or known. This leads him to conclude that even though our understanding of consciousness may remain imprecise, the fact that it is part of a continuum of mainly material as opposed to immaterial components suggests that there is no reason to suspect “we may not be able to produce an analogous form of consciousness in a non-human medium” (69): namely, a cyborg. In other words, if consciousness consists of nothing more than computational data, we can build it like any other machine.
Reduced to the activity of thought, posthuman consciousness is not a station but a journey that extends to the whole body and throughout the universe; nothing would prevent the production of an analogous form of consciousness in a machine. William Gibson and other science fiction writers speculate about downloading somebody’s personality as software, a stream of information bits, onto a computer. For all practical purposes, the resulting cyborg would function like a biological human. Although science fiction often portrays cyborgs in an ambivalent light, Andy Clark claims that humans been natural-born cyborgs (in a book by that title, 2003) ever since the invention of pen and paper. For Pepperell, not only will cyborgs be able to think, they will also have the human capacity for creativity, defined as any act of transforming or modifying existing data. If consciousness consists only of mental content without the presence of pure being, then granted, a computer can be designed to combine already existing but disparate elements into an organic whole—a “coincidence of discontinuous ideas” (113). Pepperell thus defines aesthetic experience in material terms as a juxtaposition of “semantic or perceptual discontinuity and conceptual coherence” (116). He never mentions, however, the role of the experiencing audience, the subject as witnessing consciousness, which by definition cannot be just another conceptual object.
Chapter seven describes the posthuman sense of “being” as “the sum of active thoughts or sensations occurring in the cognitive medium, reinforced by a certain stability over time” (139). Although this cognitive medium has the virtue of not limiting our sense of being to the confines of the brain, the posthuman cannot account for how stability is achieved over time without the unifying effect of pure witnessing consciousness as distinct from the ever-changing flow of thought. In one sense Pepperell is right to claim that the sense of being exists equally without absolute demarcation between humans and other species. The possibility of a continuity between humans and the universe on the level of mental computational, however, does not exclude the possibility of continuity on the level of consciousness devoid of content. In any case, Pepperell has not proven the contrary.
Pepperell thus makes the case that all attributes regarded as essentially human, such as creativity, consciousness, a sense of being, and aesthetic experience, “could in principle emerge in non-human media” (145). As I’ve tried to demonstrate, however, this depends on what you define to be essentially human attributes. Given the problem of resolution, or the scale of our perceptions, the posthuman does not have a monopoly on human nature. By eliminating metaphysics and the notion of diety, the posthuman purports to elevate the technological to the human, the man-made to the natural, but it also threatens to transmogrify the human to the machine. Paradoxically, Pepperell concludes by reinstating the distinction between consciousness and its content, and thereby contradicting their posthuman collapse on the side of computation. If the contents of consciousness, he says, “can exist in remote physical locations,” then consciousness can also exist in remote physical locations (175). But which consciousness is he talking about? While I would agree with this from an advaitan perspective, The Posthuman Condition consistently defines consciousness as inseparable from its conceptual content. Humorously, this confusion confirms Pepperell’s prediction that “truly intelligent machines, those with human capabilities, will most likely be just as confused as we are” (145).
The Posthuman Condition is a marvelously informative book that anybody interested in the posthuman would enjoy reading. Pepperell provides a clear, in-depth analysis of our posthuman condition without losing his sense of humor and reality. The comprehensive insights of the book, moreover, are summarized in Appendix II, an eleven page Posthuman Manifesto highlighting the main points, bringing conceptual coherence to the discontinuous.