Embodiment and everyday cyborgs

Embodiment and everyday cyborgs PDF Author: Gill Haddow
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526156326
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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Book Description

Embodiment and everyday cyborgs

Embodiment and everyday cyborgs PDF Author: Gill Haddow
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526156326
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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Book Description


Embodiment and everyday cyborgs

Embodiment and everyday cyborgs PDF Author: Gill Haddow
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526114194
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 207

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Book Description
This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. Your organs are failing and require replacement. If you had the choice, would you prefer organs from other humans or non-human animals, or would you choose a ‘cybernetic’ medical implant? Using a range of social science methods and drawing on the sociology of the body and embodiment, biomedicine and technology, this book asks what happens to who we are (our identity) when we change what we are (our bodies)? From surveying young adults about whether they would choose options such as 3-D bioprinting, living or deceased human donation, or non-human animal or implantable biomechanical devices, to interviewing those who live with an implantable cardiac defibrillator, Haddow invites us to think about what kind of relationship we have with our bodies. She concludes that the reliance on ‘cybernetic’ medical devices create ‘everyday cyborgs’ who can experience alienation and new forms of vulnerability at implantation and activation. Embodiment and everyday cyborgs invites readers to consider the relationship between personal identity and the body, between humans and non-human animals, and our increasing dependency on ‘smart’ implantable technology. The creation of new techno-organic hybrid bodies makes us acutely aware of our own bodies and how ambiguous the experience of embodiment actually is. It is only through understanding how modifications such as transplantation, amputation and implantation make our bodies a ‘presence’ to us, Haddow argues, that we realise our everyday experience of our bodies as an absence.

Natural-Born Cyborgs

Natural-Born Cyborgs PDF Author: Andy Clark
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199881987
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
From Robocop to the Terminator to Eve 8, no image better captures our deepest fears about technology than the cyborg, the person who is both flesh and metal, brain and electronics. But philosopher and cognitive scientist Andy Clark sees it differently. Cyborgs, he writes, are not something to be feared--we already are cyborgs. In Natural-Born Cyborgs, Clark argues that what makes humans so different from other species is our capacity to fully incorporate tools and supporting cultural practices into our existence. Technology as simple as writing on a sketchpad, as familiar as Google or a cellular phone, and as potentially revolutionary as mind-extending neural implants--all exploit our brains' astonishingly plastic nature. Our minds are primed to seek out and incorporate non-biological resources, so that we actually think and feel through our best technologies. Drawing on his expertise in cognitive science, Clark demonstrates that our sense of self and of physical presence can be expanded to a remarkable extent, placing the long-existing telephone and the emerging technology of telepresence on the same continuum. He explores ways in which we have adapted our lives to make use of technology (the measurement of time, for example, has wrought enormous changes in human existence), as well as ways in which increasingly fluid technologies can adapt to individual users during normal use. Bio-technological unions, Clark argues, are evolving with a speed never seen before in history. As we enter an age of wearable computers, sensory augmentation, wireless devices, intelligent environments, thought-controlled prosthetics, and rapid-fire information search and retrieval, the line between the user and her tools grows thinner day by day. "This double whammy of plastic brains and increasingly responsive and well-fitted tools creates an unprecedented opportunity for ever-closer kinds of human-machine merger," he writes, arguing that such a merger is entirely natural. A stunning new look at the human brain and the human self, Natural Born Cyborgs reveals how our technology is indeed inseparable from who we are and how we think.

Affect and Embodied Meaning in Animation

Affect and Embodied Meaning in Animation PDF Author: Sylvie Bissonnette
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351054449
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 504

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Book Description
This book combines insights from the humanities and modern neuroscience to explore the contribution of affect and embodiment on meaning-making in case studies from animation, video games, and virtual worlds. As we interact more and more with animated characters and avatars in everyday media consumption, it has become vital to investigate the ways that animated environments influence our perception of the liberal humanist subject. This book is the first to apply recent research on the application of the embodied mind thesis to our understanding of embodied engagement with nonhumans and cyborgs in animated media, analyzing works by Émile Cohl, Hayao Miyazaki, Tim Burton, Norman McLaren, the Quay Brothers, Pixar, and many others. Drawing on the breakthroughs of modern brain science to argue that animated media broadens the viewer’s perceptual reach, this title offers a welcome contribution to the growing literature at the intersection of cognitive studies and film studies, with a perspective on animation that is new and original. ‘Affect and Embodied Meaning in Animation’ will be essential reading for researchers of Animation Studies, Film and Media Theory, Posthumanism, Video Games, and Digital Culture, and will provide a key insight into animation for both undergraduate and graduate students. Because of the increasing importance of visual effect cinema and video games, the book will also be of keen interest within Film Studies and Media Studies, as well as to general readers interested in scholarship in animated media.

Modified: Living as a Cyborg

Modified: Living as a Cyborg PDF Author: Chris Hables Gray
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 135110781X
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 448

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Book Description
Building off the highly successful The Cyborg Handbook, this new collection of essays, interviews, and creative pieces brings together a set of compelling personal accounts about what it means to live as a cyborg in the twenty-first century. Human integration with complex technologies goes back to clothes, cooking, and language, but has accelerated incredibly in the last few centuries, with interest spreading among scientists, coders, people with sophisticated implants, theorists, and artists. This collection includes some of the most articulate of these voices from over 25 countries, including Donna Haraway, Stelarc, Natasha Vita-More, Steve Mann, Amber Case, Michael Chorost, Moon Ribas, Kevin Warwick, Sandy Stone, Dion Farquhar, Angeliki Malakasioti, Elif Ayiter, Heesang Lee, Angel Gordo, and others. Addressing topics including race, gender, sexuality, class, conflict, capitalism, climate change, disability and beyond, this collection also explores the differences between robots, androids, cyborgs, hybrids, post-, trans-, and techno-humans, offering readers a critical vocabulary for understanding and discussing the cyborgification of culture and everyday life. Compelling, interdisciplinary, and international, the book is a perfect primer for students, researchers, and teachers of cyberculture, media and cultural theory, and science fiction studies, as well as anyone interested in the intersections between human and machine.

Breaking Down Barriers

Breaking Down Barriers PDF Author: Pat Langdon
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319750283
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
The Cambridge Workshops on Universal Access and Assistive Technology (CWUAAT) is one of the few gatherings where people interested in inclusive design, across different fields, including designers, computer scientists, engineers, architects, ergonomists, ethnographers, policymakers and user communities, meet, discuss, and collaborate. CWUAAT has also become an international workshop, representing diverse cultures including Portugal, Germany, Trinidad and Tobago, Canada, Australia, China, Norway, USA, Belgium, UK, and many more. The workshop has five main themes based on barriers identified in the developing field of design for inclusion: I Breaking Down Barriers between Disciplines II Breaking Down Barriers between Users, Designers and Developers III Removing Barriers to Usability, Accessibility and Inclusive Design IV Breaking Down Barriers between People with Impairments and Those without V Breaking Down Barriers between Research and Policy-making In the context of developing demographic changes leading to greater numbers of older people and people living with impairments, the general field of inclusive design research strives to relate the capabilities of the population to the design of products, services, and spaces. CWUAAT has always had a successful multidisciplinary focus, but if genuine transdisciplinary fields are to evolve from this, the final barriers to integrated research must be identified and characterised. Only then will benefits be realised in an inclusive society. Barriers do not arise from impairments themselves, but instead, are erected by humans, who often have not considered a greater variation in sensory, cognitive and physical user capabilities. Barriers are not only technical or architectural, but they also exist between different communities of professionals. Our continual goal with the CWUAAT workshop series is to break down barriers in technical, physical, and architectural design, as well as barriers between different professional communities.

How the Body Shapes the Way We Think

How the Body Shapes the Way We Think PDF Author: Rolf Pfeifer
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262288524
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 419

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Book Description
An exploration of embodied intelligence and its implications points toward a theory of intelligence in general; with case studies of intelligent systems in ubiquitous computing, business and management, human memory, and robotics. How could the body influence our thinking when it seems obvious that the brain controls the body? In How the Body Shapes the Way We Think, Rolf Pfeifer and Josh Bongard demonstrate that thought is not independent of the body but is tightly constrained, and at the same time enabled, by it. They argue that the kinds of thoughts we are capable of have their foundation in our embodiment—in our morphology and the material properties of our bodies. This crucial notion of embodiment underlies fundamental changes in the field of artificial intelligence over the past two decades, and Pfeifer and Bongard use the basic methodology of artificial intelligence—"understanding by building"—to describe their insights. If we understand how to design and build intelligent systems, they reason, we will better understand intelligence in general. In accessible, nontechnical language, and using many examples, they introduce the basic concepts by building on recent developments in robotics, biology, neuroscience, and psychology to outline a possible theory of intelligence. They illustrate applications of such a theory in ubiquitous computing, business and management, and the psychology of human memory. Embodied intelligence, as described by Pfeifer and Bongard, has important implications for our understanding of both natural and artificial intelligence.

Embodiment in Qualitative Research

Embodiment in Qualitative Research PDF Author: Laura L. Ellingson
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 135160063X
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
Practices for Inscribing Bodies in Data -- Chapter 7: Analyzing Bodies: Embodying Analysis across the Qualitative Continuum -- Doing Legwork: On Thinking through Data with Mind-Altering Medications -- Data Analysis as Material Practice -- Analysis as Always Already Embodied -- Head, Heart, and Gut Analysis -- Practices for Embodied Analysis -- Chapter 8: Speaking of/for Bodies: Embodying Representation -- Doing Legwork: Where Social Science Meets Art -- What's In and What Lurks Outside -- (De)Composing Bodies -- Subjugated Knowledges/Knowledge of Subjugation -- Radical Specificity -- Refracting Bodies through Crystallization -- Practices for Embodying Representation -- Postscript: Common Threads -- Doing Legwork: A Calling -- Pulling Threads -- Materializing Social Change -- Knot -- References -- Index.

Radical Embodied Cognitive Science

Radical Embodied Cognitive Science PDF Author: Anthony Chemero
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262516470
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 269

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Book Description
A proposal for a new way to do cognitive science argues that cognition should be described in terms of agent-environment dynamics rather than computation and representation. While philosophers of mind have been arguing over the status of mental representations in cognitive science, cognitive scientists have been quietly engaged in studying perception, action, and cognition without explaining them in terms of mental representation. In this book, Anthony Chemero describes this nonrepresentational approach (which he terms radical embodied cognitive science), puts it in historical and conceptual context, and applies it to traditional problems in the philosophy of mind. Radical embodied cognitive science is a direct descendant of the American naturalist psychology of William James and John Dewey, and follows them in viewing perception and cognition to be understandable only in terms of action in the environment. Chemero argues that cognition should be described in terms of agent-environment dynamics rather than in terms of computation and representation. After outlining this orientation to cognition, Chemero proposes a methodology: dynamical systems theory, which would explain things dynamically and without reference to representation. He also advances a background theory: Gibsonian ecological psychology, “shored up” and clarified. Chemero then looks at some traditional philosophical problems (reductionism, epistemological skepticism, metaphysical realism, consciousness) through the lens of radical embodied cognitive science and concludes that the comparative ease with which it resolves these problems, combined with its empirical promise, makes this approach to cognitive science a rewarding one. “Jerry Fodor is my favorite philosopher,” Chemero writes in his preface, adding, “I think that Jerry Fodor is wrong about nearly everything.” With this book, Chemero explains nonrepresentational, dynamical, ecological cognitive science as clearly and as rigorously as Jerry Fodor explained computational cognitive science in his classic work The Language of Thought.

Seeing Like a Rover

Seeing Like a Rover PDF Author: Janet Vertesi
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022615601X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 331

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Book Description
In the years since the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit and Opportunity first began transmitting images from the surface of Mars, we have become familiar with the harsh, rocky, rusty-red Martian landscape. But those images are much less straightforward than they may seem to a layperson: each one is the result of a complicated set of decisions and processes involving the large team behind the Rovers. With Seeing Like a Rover, Janet Vertesi takes us behind the scenes to reveal the work that goes into creating our knowledge of Mars. Every photograph that the Rovers take, she shows, must be processed, manipulated, and interpreted—and all that comes after team members negotiate with each other about what they should even be taking photographs of in the first place. Vertesi’s account of the inspiringly successful Rover project reveals science in action, a world where digital processing uncovers scientific truths, where images are used to craft consensus, and where team members develop an uncanny intimacy with the sensory apparatus of a robot that is millions of miles away. Ultimately, Vertesi shows, every image taken by the Mars Rovers is not merely a picture of Mars—it’s a portrait of the whole Rover team, as well.