The body electric in the age of virtual reality and transhumanism: Forces changing the West’s notions of self, identity and humanness
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This article begins by exploring the relationships connecting Walt Whitman’s ‘body electric’, Marshall McLuhan’s ‘discarnate man [sic]’ and Neil Postman’s ‘citizen of technopoly’. It then examines the disruptive effects that electric technologies have had on western culture’s notions of ‘self’, ‘identity’ and particularly ‘the body’, especially the development of Virtual Reality systems, social networking and transhuman technologies over the past three decades. A survey of new wearable and immersive devices, advances in artificial intelligence, and invasive biotechnical procedures reveals increasingly questionable attempts to replace the human body by machines. These endeavours are supported, notably, by some of the world’s wealthiest investors in artificial intelligence and biotechnology, statesmen, media barons and members of the military – the forces of technopoly. The article concludes that, despite the efforts to replicate, improve or even replace it, the body is essential to our humanness.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.036 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".