[1] From: galloway@archives1.mdah.state.ms.us (9)
Subject: Re: 11.0231 exteriorising mind, and the cybercafe
[2] From: BRUNI <jbrun@eagle.cc.ukans.edu> (25)
Subject: Re: 11.0231 exteriorising mind
--[1]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Thu, 14 Aug 1997 08:16:57 -0500
From: galloway@archives1.mdah.state.ms.us
Subject: Re: 11.0231 exteriorising mind, and the cybercafe
Willard,
Sherry Turkle's latest opus, Life on the Screen, speaks a little bit
to this theme. IMHO, for most westerners, who no longer spend much
time exploring the timeless and boundless "inner space" that we have
called "spirituality", being online in cyberspace--which we endow with
the same timelessness and boundlessness--is an analogue and
substitute, but like other spiritual exercises it can be taken to
excess.... Aren't there people who suggest that cyberspace is Teilhard
de Chardin's noosphere come into being?
Pat Galloway
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Date: Thu, 14 Aug 1997 14:56:25 -0500 (CDT)
From: BRUNI <jbrun@eagle.cc.ukans.edu>
Subject: Re: 11.0231 exteriorising mind
> how difficult it sometimes is to, as I put it, shrink back into
> the physical body after sending my mind out into the world through the
> Internet.
Ever since Descartes's postulation of the mind/body split, we seem to
have had a fairly rigid conception of what defines the physical "body."
This belief, when extrapolated to the experience of cyberspace, leads us
to assume that we lose, or cannot sustain, the experience of a "real body"
once we enter cyberspace.
This means, then, that bodies in cyberspace are somehow seen as
"different" from bodies in real spaces. Indeed, the body, in Gibson's
popular description of cyberspace, found in his cyberpunk
novel *Neuromancer*, becomes nothing more than "meat."
Leaving the body--a desire that comes right out of Western
metaphysics--is, however, a rather privileged notion; for only those who
have the access to powerful computer-based technology can take part in
this illusion. The belief that one can become "bodiless" in cyberspace,
furthered by high-tech slight-of-hand, merely and conveniently "forgets"
that the body is always there, only partially "hidden" from us and the
larger social world (that determines what bodies are and can be) as we sit
in front of our computers...
John Bruni
English Department
University of Kansas
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