Still thinking about humans

I'm still thinking about "more human than human" especially after such great comments from everyone. Thanks!

I sat in the airport this weekend thinking about it, not just because of White Zombie, but because I thought it might be a worthwhile thing to think about.

At first, I rationalized that figuring out what "more human than human" means would require defining "human" first. But I also quickly realized that defining what makes a human, human in the first place would require a really long answer... say, dissertation length.

But then I rationalized that the reverse might be just as productive. If I were to examine the answers to what "more human than human" looks like, those answers might reveal the assumptions on which those answers are based. After all, in order to answer the question, you have to have some idea what "human" is in order to imagine what could transcend the human to become "more".

So I started thinking about it. The music video features a lot of kids in costumes, with the most frequent costumes being a pumpkin head and a robot. While in the live show, the huge creature wandering the stage is more alien looking. (I posted the best clip I could find from Youtube - and yes, that's actually the best one)

The first thought that came into my mind when I saw the thing in the stage show we attended was that it looked a bit like a homunculus. Not a lot, but a bit. More so like the sensory homunculus that is supposed to represent the brain's designated spaces for bodily sensations.

What both homunculi have in common is an overly large head, and the sensory homunculus has very long arms. I think that's what caught my attention the most with the big monster/alien thing at the Zombie show. But that's beside the point.

Zombie's answer to what is more human than human is an alien or a monster. And that got me thinking that the monster just might be more human than human.

Part of what makes the monster monstrous is exactly that it is "more". It's not more "human" than humans, but it's certainly "more" than human. Monsters either have more limbs, or eyes, or larger heads, or even just larger bodies overall. Their bodies tend to be "more" than human bodies are, which is what actually makes them monstrous.

Then I got to thinking about the novels I've been reading and realizing that many of the clones and cyborgs in them are monstrous in just this way - they are "more" than human. So maybe Zombie's answer of "monster" to the question of what is more human than human isn't so far off. Maybe what really makes us human is what unacademic advisor and rebeckler suggest in the comments below, that it is our frailty and our failings that make us human. To be "more human than human" is simply a construction we hold up that fails to provide us with a guideline about what it means to be human because it expects more from us than we are capable of. And that more is itself monstrous.

But I think in proposing that, I'm waxing philosophic in a way that would not be useful in a literary dissertation. But it's fun to think about, and has served the function of organizing some of my thinking about the topic and about the books I'm reading. In helping me organize my scattered thoughts, there is indeed much good.

I still am not sure about the robot in the music video though... that might be another post. Any thoughts?

Oh, and in answer to my question/suggestion last week: yes, a couple of days of sunshine and warm weather have made me feel less cheated about our short summer. Now I'm ready for fall and winter to arrive.

Rob Zombie More Human Than Human Live

Short clip from a live performance

White Zombie - More Human Than Human

The images in this video are more robotic than the images in the live show

Viva!

I'm running off this weekend to a place where I can wear dresses without needing tights, and can even wear shorts during the daytime. I can't wait!

I don't write this to make people envious - I know how it feels when other people are taking off for fun vacations in warm places and you're stuck at home, and it's not a nice feeling. But I am writing it because I'm looking forward to it. The last few months have been much more hectic than I would've expected them to be if you'd asked me about them at the beginning of the summer.

And August here was so wet and cool that it didn't feel like summer at all. Not to mention that the month was eaten up by moving and such. So I'm hoping a dose of sun AND warmth this weekend will dispell the feeling that I somehow missed summer this year. I'll have to let you know when I get back whether it worked...!

More human than human

Friends, readers, curious bypassers...

What image does this phrase bring to mind? What could be "more human than human"? If I asked you this question, what would your answer be?

Impatient yet overloaded

I get to go away this weekend... which I'm very much looking forward to doing.

But in the meantime, I've got lots to do.

Which I don't really want to do.

I want the weekend to come soon, but I need it to wait so that I can finish off everything that needs to be done this week.

Two equal but opposite desires...

Hangin' out with the smart kids

I knew leaving my colleagues far behind and trying to write a dissertation from afar would be a challenge. But I thought it would be a challenge to stay focused, not that it might make me stupider.

Well, not really more stupid, but less articulate at least. I've been listening to Malcolm Gladwell's Blink, in which he proposes that split-second decisions can be the most accurate. He calls this rapid cognition and it results from something he calls the thin-slicing of experience. The reason thin-slicing and gut instinct can yield some of the most accurate information on which to base decisions is because they are processed subconsciously. For example, he found that gamblers playing a rigged game responded physiologically to the rig (sweaty palms, indicating increased stress) before they consciously figured out that the game was rigged.

This subconscious attention to the world also affects our interaction with it. In an experiment, researchers gave two groups of people 30 trivial pursuit questions to answer. Just before they were to answer the questions, the first group was told to think about what it would be like to work as a professor, while the second group were told to think about soccer hooligans.

Just thinking about intelligence (presumably a requisite to being a professor) yielded 55.6% correct answers in the first group, while thinking about a lack of intelligence (again, presumably a requisite for being a soccer hooligan) yielded correct answers only 42.6% of the time. Wow.

It wasn't just intelligence either. Test subjects given a linguistic test that included a high number of words having to do with aging walked slower after exiting the test room, and those with words about rudeness and agression were ruder to the examiner upon leaving.

So... maybe it would be of benefit to hang out with smart people... to think of myself as one of them... to admire how smart they really are.

Certainly couldn't hurt.

But I've left my academic community far behind, and try as I might, I don't belong to the ones here.

Might have more of a negative impact than I originally thought...

Tidbits

*I began this post almost a week ago before things went really hairy around here, so I'll give you the beginning and continue on from that point.

The bone marrow people think I'm a low risk donor, so they've decided that I'll move on to the testing phase of pre-screening. This means I have to go have blood drawn next week, which surprises me because this whole process has already taken a few weeks. I would've thought it would be faster since the sooner someone receives a transplant, the better, right?

William Gibson looks like a hippie farmer. Now, it's true that I've seen pictures of him before. But I'd never seen him in person till last night, and he looks and moves a bit like a hippie, and a bit like a farmer. I've met a few farmers before, and they have that same kind of look haunting their faces - I'd always thought it was a result of the unreliability of their business. After all, for a farmer, no matter how savvy a businessman you are, you're still at the mercy of the weather to some extent. This seemed to always inject a look that was one part concern, one part resignation into their faces.

But maybe I don't really know farmers that well. All I know is that Gibson had that same kind of look and could've passed for a praire farmer except for the retro-vintage Converse on his feet. Oh, and his writing is really cool!

One of these days I'd like to take a computer course that would explain to me in a bit more detail how this machine that I use every day, that I sometimes feel chained to, that frustrates me to no end at times, works. Just as I was starting this post, I ran into a problem that kept shutting down some of the functions of my system.

Now, I'm not afraid of trying to fix stuff myself, so since web access wasn't one of the problems, I googled the error message. The most prominent answer was that I'd picked up a virus, but as I kept reading, the only "people" claiming this was a problem were all pointing me to the same software - that I could purchase for the low, low price of $49.95 - that I could buy. So I had to wonder about that one, especially since I run virus scans fairly regularly with a product that I've been using successfully for years.

The other solution to the problem was to enter the registry and delete the files that had corruped. Now, I've actually done this before, even though for a non-techie person like me this is a scary venture, but I had a good set of instructions from several sources (including MS themselves) and it was successful. Only this time, the only instructions included were to erase a particular kind of file, whose designation was not provided. This meant I could go into the registry, but I'd have no clear idea which files I should delete. Not something I'm ready to mess with.

Logically, reformatting the hard drive to original specification should restore the corrupted files in their original form, yes? Yes. It did. But it also meant I had to back up all my data files, then reload them all (a process not quite complete) as well as reload all the additional software that I use (another process not quite complete). In consequence, I have been uploading but not producing much for the last few days. I guess there isn't an interesting observation there. Just some kvetching.

I have a greater appreciation for the time and care that goes into the production of a television show, or any other video production. Over the weekend, we shot a 20 minute segment for one of our elearning programs. It took about 10 1/2 hours.

Of course on a tv show, there are multiple cameras, so that if you change locations, you don't have to haul one set of lights, camera, monitor, associated cables, power units etc. to the new location as we did, which would make the process faster. And you would easily access backup equipment if a malfunction happened instead of having to drive across town to check that the equipment was indeed working. So we might have been able to finish a bit faster, but not by much. It is certainly a time-consuming production.

It was also really neat to see two professionals interacting in that kind of work environment. The talent and the cameraman we used had worked together before (in fact the talent was the person who recommended the cameraman to us), and the easy shorthand that they fell into was fascinating to watch. Perhaps it's just that film still holds a fascination for me that I was so impressed, but I was.

We're nearing the end of our semester at work (yes, we're off kilter from every other institution around us), which means students are starting to get desperate. I have one who is trying to do 10 weeks worth of work in 2 to catch up. Every time before this when students have tried to catch up like this, they've failed. But this guy just might make it - a week in and he's still on track. I'm rooting for him to do it, if for no other reason than to restore my faith in the human ability to transcend difficulties. Other students however are asking for bonus assignments to make up work done 6 weeks ago. Maybe I'm a hard ass, but I'm saying no. I've got better things to do than dream up additional work for them when they should've done the original stuff.

There you go. That's part of what's been going on lately. But it looks like things will slow down now, so I'll post a bit more often, at least for a little while...

Long hiatus

For those two readers (maybe three?) who regularly pay attention to this blog, this is just to assure you that I have not suffered any mortal trauma or anything equally dramatic. Just life which has conspired to keep me out of the blogsphere.

And now I see that Blogger is going to be down later today, so you might not get an update, but it will come eventually.

Transformer CellPhone

Some people obviously have a lot of time on their hands... I gotta wonder what those guns shoot...

Scholarly pursuits

There's been a scholarly conference in town this week. Although I didn't submit something to present, I signed up to attend because I'd been feeling like this dissertation from afar was leaving me without scholarly camraderie.

I've gotta say it's been really nice to sit in a room full of people who like the kinds of things I like and listen to them say intelligent things (and even get up the nerve to ask a (hopefully) intelligent question!)

But I also found myself distracted and annoyed at times.

Does it make me a bad scholar if my mind wanders during a particularly uninteresting presentation? Or am I only a bad scholar if in my wandering I ponder the next hockey game?

Am I just picky, or should I be annoyed that the person reading his paper at the front of the room is pausing to pick up his pen and make numerous grammatical corrections to it as he reads? I don't really mind the occasional tick in the margin, but if you're correcting three or four errors per page, I get the feeling you don't think the session is very important to you, and then I wonder why I'm taking the time to come listen to you!

And I've discovered, or solidified, a conference peeve - film scholars who can't be bothered to calculate that the five minute clip plus five minutes of fumbling with the technology actually adds ten minutes to their fifteen minute presentation. Especially when all four of them do it!

When you think of it, some of the things these very intelligent people do are really rather funny... but not in the ha-ha kind of way.

Knees and hands are two different body parts

Another good reason not to move to Edmonton. I don't want to think about what could happen when it's icy...

Discovery or coincidence?

Today I left home five minutes later than usual but got to work at the same time. Is it just coincidence and traffic was just lighter than usual today? Or have I discovered that I can get five minutes extra sleep every morning? I'd love for it to be the latter...

What is natural?

I've been trying to organize some of my research over the last several months into parts of a chapter that needs to get written and am discovering I have a linguistic problem I'll need to tackle.

What is natural?

In a common sense kind of way, we know what natural means. We know that "all-natural" cold medicines won't contain drugs that have had to go through strict testing (and thus are potent kinds of body altering substances). We know that "natural" childbirth as opposed to assisted also means no drugs are administered. We also know that "natural" on food ingredients is a signal that they have not been genetically modified, or had pesticides or herbicides applied to them (at least not ones that, again, require some kind of regulation for their production, sale and use).

But even that last paragraph starts to demonstrate the problem. We intuitively know what's natural and what's not, but when you start to actually define it, things get a bit fuzzier.

My dissertation is about emerging technologies that offer the possibility of altering humans. I usually don't finish that sentence, but I could certainly add "from their natural state." But what is that natural state?

If I take pseudoephedrine for a head cold, I feel like my brain doesn't function "naturally" and that I have a harder time recalling things or concentrating. So is the pseudoephedrine unnatural? But isn't the infection of my sinuses by a virus also unnatural? In the effort to restore my sinuses to 'normal' functioning, my brain feels like it's operating unnaturally. [I've had a cold this week, how can you tell?] Is the absense of infection or drugs to counter it the only natural state possible? A head cold is one thing, but what about a chronic condition?

Is disease natural?

Human disease is a part of the human condition. I'm not thinking individually here. From the individual's perspective, the development of a disease is unnatural. But from a species perspective, disease is a natural part of the human condition, just as is death. If I could engineer myself to never succumb to a disease, would that be natural or unnatural? What if everyone could be engineered to be immune to all diseases. Would that then be natural? Is it a case of the majority getting to define natural?

The question will be most pertinent when I come to the section on pharmacological visions of posthumanity. If I can take a memory-boosting drug, am I unnatural? If we had such a drug, would we have to test for it before exams like we do for steroids before athletic competitions? What about the argument that we should stop testing for steroids because it's just becoming the new norm? Would the same apply to drugs that alter our brains?

But there are things that affect our brains and how well they work. Vitamin deficiencies or malnutrition will result in stunted brain development. We can't really call that normal can we? But if we administered a drug that would counteract that retardation of development, would that then be normal? Can two unnatural acts equal to a natural state?

You see how confused I am getting?

Or perhaps I'm just making it a bigger problem than it really is.

Perhaps there's a way of writing an entire dissertation without using the word "normal"... but I doubt it. Even if I avoid the word itself, the concept is still a slippery one that I'll have to get a handle on.

Enhancements are another part of dissertation that run into the same kind of problems. In their most basic definition, cyborgs are a combination of flesh and machine. We know what the Terminator looks like, or the Borg, but what about things a little closer to home? Is a cochlear implant or a pacemaker a cyborg technology? They're both machine implanted in flesh. But neither are highly visible, so it's easy to "pass" as a natural human.

But Andy Clark makes the argument that our tools are enhancements of our natural abilities as well. So when I am wielding a tool, am I being unnatural? The common sense answer is no. What if that tool is implanted in my body like Kevin Warwick's implant? Is that still a natural? Or is the penetration of the body what makes it unnatural? You see where this is leading? What if I don't implant a mechanical device in my body but I use a drug that permanently changes my abilities. It's not unnatural like an implant, but common sense would say that a permanent change is unnatural. But I could also enact other permanent changes in my body, like weight gain for example. Is that natural or unnatural? What about a scar? Is it natural or unnatural? I might not have been born with it, but in the course of my body's natural repairing function, I might develop one.

One of the questions the dissertation asks is: how much change can the human body undergo until we begin to question whether it is a human body? The Terminator is easy to classify, but in the stages up until that point, a boundary has to be crossed at some point. I'm suspecting that what we define as a 'natural' human being might be the point at which we draw that boundary, which is why I'm trying to figure out what I might mean when I think of the 'natural' human being and an 'unnatural' one.

The RCMP always get their man...

... or in this case, their woman.

I picked up the mail the other day to find an envelope from the RCMP. My first thought was that I'd managed to pick up a multanova ticket. But then I realized I hadn't taken my car out of the city for weeks, so it couldn't be that.

I was intensely curious when I opened the envelope.

Turns out the RCMP were helping the Canadian Blood Services track people down. It seems that I'm a potential match for the Unrelated Bone Marrow Donor Program. I was surprised since I'd first signed up for the program probably a decade ago - in fact they have me in the system under my old name.

So there's a questionnaire, and then if everything matches up on it, some additional testing. Right now they say I'm a 60% match, which doesn't sound like it would actually be much good, but apparently it's close enough that they're doing the followup.

It's one of those kinds of things that you don't really expect to happen - a bit like jury duty perhaps (which I've actually managed to avoid till this point in my life) - so it was a real surprise to get the call. I don't know how I feel about it. If I am a match, I could really help someone. But if I'm not a match, I avoid what I understand is a very painful procedure.

I guess I'll just have to wait and see what happens.

Doing what you're supposed to

Confessions of a Community College Dean - a very good blog if you haven't come across it before - recently had a post about not doing what you're "supposed" to do with your degree.

I think it's possible before your degree to not do what you're supposed to do either. (Of course I think this because I do not yet have my degree.)

Not doing what you're "supposed" to in your academic career seems to be what I've been doing myself.

In my second year of course work, I attended a faculty-sponsored seminar in which we were explicitly told that it was not worth going to conferences or publishing unless we did it at the very best conferences and with the very best names. I found the talk disheartening, wondering how someone like me could ever get the very best names and places to pay attention to me.

But then I went on my merry way. I attended my second PCA/ACA conference later that year and had a great time. I met all kinds of neat people - established scholars, professors, and graduate students - who liked to study popular culture and I knew I'd found my niche. The warnings of that seminar lurked in the back of my brain, but I was enjoying the study of pop culture so much that I tended to push the warning back to the nether regions of my brain. (Not to mention the advice was doled out by the same individual who told me studying film was a waste of time... even though I already knew several people who were building promising careers around the study of film)

At my first PCA, my advisor recommended me and I presented part of a chapter from my MA thesis. For the second PCA, I returned even further into the past to resurrect my honors thesis from undergrad. See, at the time I'd written the thesis, the novel series I was writing on had only reached volume #4, but by the time second PCA rolled around, the full 7 volume set had been produced, and in paperback. I'd always wanted to revisit the work I'd done once the series was complete, and this seemed the perfect opportunity.

The paper went really well; the panel was even better; and getting to know the scholars working in the area was an even better experience. For third PCA, I presented on a different topic with a different group, but I hung out with the gang from the previous year for dinner and again enjoyed myself. PCA number four had me working with some of the same people in a different area.

So as the deadline for abstract submissions for my fifth PCA approaches, I'm again thinking of the networks I've connected with. I'm working hard on trying to figure out a paper that emerges from the dissertation to submit instead of working up something entirely new.

But the point of the story is that the panel chair for that second PCA convention just emailed me. She's signed a book collection deal, and remembering my presentation, has indicated she would like to include that paper in the book.

How cool is that?!

Okay, if you're not in academia, you might not think that's cool. But belive me, it's way cool!

By embracing this pop cultural connection, I may be eliminating myself from the upper echelons of academia; the Shakespeareans and the Classicists and other similar scholars may no longer want me in their clubs. I realize I'm painting myself into a niche which - like the careers of some movie stars - might be hard to break out of. But, you know, I'm enjoying the work I'm doing. And if you don't enjoy your chosen career, then what's the point? I'm beginning to suspect that I just might be comfortable building a career on the academic B-list.

A concert and a dodge

The Blue man Group is a very cool concert. The irony that I see them this weekend, in a place very far from their any of their home bases is not lost on me. Partially because I had to drive several hours to see them. But most especially because I lived in a regular show city and never ever saw them when I lived there. Mostly because there was always something more pressing that I needed to spend the ticket money on.

We began the long drive home, fairly late at night, down a four lane highway that we've both driven many times before. This highway is fairly busy, even late at night, so there were plenty of on coming headlights from the other side of the meridian to keep us awake and such.

Suddenly, about half way home, we came around a corner and the headlights coming at us seemed unusually bright. My first thought was that they were those new halogen type headlights - the ones that are so bright I wonder how they can be legal since they essentially blind all the other drivers on the road, something I think would be a hazardous condition that shouldn't be encouraged. But then the angle wasn't quite right, so I thought it was maybe a car on a crossroad, or a side road, whose headlights were coming at us at such a strange angle.

By the time we both realized that the headlights looked so bright and at such a strange angle, we were side by side with the vehicle, who was travelling the opposite direction in our left lane.

Shocked would be an understatement.

My first thought was for the car we had just passed, who was still behind us and who the driver travelling the wrong way up the highway would soon encounter. But when we turned to watch, it was apparent we were the clue that sunk in because the minivan was braking and pulling off the road. So at least there wasn't going to be an accident as a result of this person's wrong way driving.

That was a relief.

Realizing that we were lucky we weren't in the left passing lane was another relief.

I've always wondered when hearing about head on collisions in good weather why they happen. Living in a part of the world where most highways are straight and wide, and you can see oncoming traffic, often for miles, I wonder how people are unable to avoid such collisions.

But now I know.

We met this wrong-travelling vehicle coming out of a turn at the top of a hill. So we didn't see his headlights for long before our respective 110kph speeds rapidly ate up the distance between us. Because we were on a curve, it was also a little harder to determine the angles between us, the oncoming vehicle, and the position of our side of the road at the point where we saw his headlights.

But one of the biggest things that I suspect leads to head on accidents, even in clear weather is plain old disbelief. My brain generated a number of other explanations for the odd looking headlights when I first saw them. It was only when the other possibilities had been eliminated and it became evident that it had to be the unthinkable - that a car was driving the wrong way on the highway toward us - that my brain accepted that possibility and acted upon it.

Because let's face it, we've all had that experience of seeing lights on a crossroad, or a flash of light off a side window, or a shadow that has made us think there's a vehicle there that isn't, or that it's travelling differently than it actually is. (On a road trip one time, all three of us driving kept thinking there was a car in our blind spot when we'd shoulder check because the stupid rental car company had plastered a sticker on the rear side window and we kept thinking it was an object outside the car) It's just a momentary flash, but it happens often enough, that we doubt our own senses.

Seeing headlights coming toward you as your round a curve, the first thought is that it must be a trick of the light, as has happened at other times before. It's only when the visual evidence continues to mount that you realize this is indeed a situation that is out of the ordinary and the unthinkable could happen in the next moment. I can imagine that for some people, the realization that the unthinkable is indeed going to happen comes too late and they cannot avoid the collision.

Complacency and the belief that everything is progressing normally saves us from braking for things that aren't there (which would make us look like doofuses), but it also slows down our acceptance of the things that are there, especially when they shouldn't be.

Kids taking charge... in pink

This news story about a couple of teens who took action against bullies in their school is fabulous!

The students were reacting to an incident on the first day of school when a new student was harrassed and threatened for wearing a pink shirt. David Shephard and Travis Price, a couple of grade 12 students, went out and bought 75 pink shirts to hand out to students to send a signal to the bullies that their behaviour wasn't acceptable.

Now apparently there are several other schools in Nova Scotia where kids are undertaking similar "wear pink" days to protest bullying.

The greatest part about the whole thing is that this isn't adults telling kids what's good and what's not - it's the students who have spearheaded this campaign to stop the bullying. If bullies are ostracized for their behaviour, it will rapidly dampen the effect. It's when no one objects that bullying flourishes. That the students took on this problem is worth far more than all the PSAs produced about it.

Teeny, tiny cars

I read today in the newspaper that downtown Calgary is switching to an electronic pay system for parking downtown.

The rationale behind pulling out parking meters in favor of this new system is that people aren't constrained by where the meters are actually located. Rather, if you can find the space, you've got it. This idea is not new. One of my students proposed this revamp to parking in Boston several years ago. (Of course in Boston, this strategy is already employed in practice where you frequently see three cars occupying the space allocated to two meters.)

The theory is that you can fit more cars into the same space. Preliminary results here bear out the theory, though of course once we get several feet of snow, that might change.

Driving a car that requires less than 3m of parking space, means that if I can squeeze in, it's mine! Since I take up less than half the room of a halfton truck and many SUVs, that means I've got more options for parking than I ever did before. The university has switched to a similar park-if-you-can-fit-in strategy at some of its meters, which I discovered this morning on the monthly research run to the library.

There's also a rumor, not in the article I've linked to, but in the paper version of the paper that *certain* smaller vehicles and motorcycles will also recieve a 25% discount on parking when they register with the system. Double bonus!

Cats, chimeras and DNA

In Free Culture, Lawrence Lessig argues that what makes us human is our DNA. Writing about chimeras – people and other organisms with two sets of DNA because two embryos fused during development – he writes, “the very idea of DNA is that it is the code of an individual. Yet in fact, not only can two individuals have the same set of DNA (identical twins), but one person can have two different sets of DNA (a chimera). Our understanding of a ‘person’ should reflect this reality”. It is important to note that Lessig’s claim that our understanding of “person” should take into account the possibility that they do not have a single unique sequence of DNA rests on an assumption that DNA is what defines the human as such. His claim for DNA as the code of the individual is widely accepted, but DNA is also the code for individual animals, just the same as it is for humans. Consider for a moment that that DNA of an individual housecat differs from other housecats. Each household pet could be identified forensically by their DNA, just as we do in for humans in crime scenes. To find a cat that is a chimera, with two sets of DNA, would not lead us to question whether that cat is indeed a cat.

But according to Lessig, the human chimera should be taken into consideration when defining the human as an individual with a unique and single DNA signature. How is it that the category of person is challenged by the chimera, while the category of cat is not?

I guess I'm not necessarily expecting an answer - it's just a question that emerged from the reading.