Eureka! An angle!

At long last, I have an angle and an outline for my paper.  I even have two or three possible case studies.  I can’t tell you how marvellous it feels. I have purpose and direction.  All is right with the world.

My angle, after reading a few pages from my Prof’s thesis and a few chapters from Turkle’s Alone Together, amongst other things (and realising with horror that all of my ideas have already been had and I’m entirely unoriginal) is this: WHY? Why do we quest after disembodiment?  After all, this is no new thing.  Religion, the concept of a soul, belief in ghosts, astral travelling… it’s all been around for millennia.  So what is it about us that makes us so keen, in some cases compels us, to escape our bodies?  Do we really believe that we can live without them, and that living without them will be better? (This makes me think of Douglas Adams – in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: So long, and thanks for all the fish, the Total Perspective Vortex is guarded by a spirit who is undergoing a trial separation from his body, which is out having fun without him.) How can we even conceive of ourselves if we are not our ‘selves’? Will we use our new technology to create E-bodies, which follow traditional lines, much like E-books; or will we branch out in entirely new directions? I think the latter is unlikely – it is too alien, too extreme. Our entire language is littered with references to the body – ‘I know it like the back of my hand’ and ‘she’s the apple of my eye’ and ‘it’s time to grit your teeth and face the music’ – I could go on. I really could.

The point is, we think in terms of bodies, and it will take a long time for us to stop doing so.  Or perhaps not. Perhaps we will adapt within a few generations. Who can say? I wonder what Stephen Hawking would say about all this.  He’s one of the few people qualified to talk on the subject.

And what if, after we eliminate the need for the body, we find out that our brains (unlike Mr Hawking’s) are far more limited than we hoped?  What if our dualistic future is more Dystopian than Utopian? What if, instead of the traditional ‘greys’ – stunted, small aliens with no musculature but enormous brains – we become more like the wallowing, fat, unthinking, pleasure-seeking slobs in Wall-E?

Perhaps this is the price we pay for having evolved such an advanced consciousness, like the analogy of Adam and Eve, who eat the fruit of knowledge and realise their own nakedness. Perhaps all of this can be boiled down to a fear of mortality; or a desperate desire to connect with more people in our crazy, disengaged world; or to remake ourselves without the usual limitations and rules and prejudices and conventions – the new, fresh, gender/race neutral, possibly anarchistic and hopefully improved post-human version of me; or extreme paranoia and Cartesian scepticism: it is easy to distrust what we see and hear, when so much of it is deceptive, misleading, or complete bollocks – never more so than today.

We cannot know what will happen, or how it will manifest, but we can look to Science Fiction to hazard a guess. And that’s what I’ll be doing in my paper… watch this space.

One final, facetious thought, before I head off to find the film I’ll be using as a case study: if we all become completely disembodied, what on earth will teenage boys and girls obsess about, if their acne and their bodies no longer matter? I’m sure they’ll find something.  Count on it.