Sunday 1 March 2020

Bernal: The Flesh

See Bernal: The World.

Once again, we list Bernal's ideas to show parallels with Anderson's:

longer lives;
new human species;
cyborgs;
technological telepathy;
post-organic intelligences;
composite minds;
artificial life;
disembodied consciousness;
original humanity preserved as a relic.

This is a brief summary. Read Bernal's details. But, at the end of his chapter on "The Flesh," he goes right off the deep end:

Finally, consciousness itself may end or vanish in a humanity that has become completely etherealized, losing the close-knit organism, becoming masses of atoms in space communicating by radiation, and ultimately perhaps resolving itself entirely into light. That may be an end or a beginning, but from here it is out of sight.
-copied from "The Flesh." (see the above link.)

Unconscious humanity is a contradiction.

1 comment:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

There's also Julian May's JACK THE BODILESS, recently reread by me. The only way Jon Remillard could find of surviving the cancers destroying his body was to disincarnate himself, shedding his dying body, and keeping only his physical brain. Jack used his "metapsychic" powers to create an apparent body from molecules of air. But he considered this merely second best, far preferring to have a real body.

Ad astra! Sean