-Bodyscape: Art, Modernity and the Ideal Figure by Nicholas Mirzoeff 
-Mind: A Brief Introduction

By John R. Searle

-How body was viewed after it got labelled as the ghost in the machine? Time: 
Renaissance
-Industrial Revolution: Emergence of new technologies and terms for the body  

-Future body. Dystopian future and fear of becoming cyborgs.

-Conclusion

Final structure
Introduction ->  Ancient Greek Philosophy ->  Medieval ->  Renaissance -> Enlightenment -> Industrial Revolution -> Present times -> Conclusion

with popularising the influential idea that the incorporeal component of human  beings are a unified essence of the self that – although Descartes still referred to it as a soul – corresponds more to a contemporary conception of the mind than the various kinds of soul or souls referred to by the philosophers of ancient Greece, for example.

As reflected in his famous pronouncement cogito ergo sum,Descartes understood the immaterial res cogitans – the stuff of thought – to

be the true basis of the self, while the body was nothing more than a clever 

machine that served as a tool for the soul/mind and was clearly divided from it.

Descartes’ understanding of what the body is subscribed to the ‘mechanical philosophy’, which saw the human body as fundamentallya machine.  It was a complex and cunningly engineered machine, without a doubt, but a machine nonetheless, whose lungs worked likebellows and heart worked like a water pump.

However,

the idea that the mind was immaterial and fundamentally different nature to our material selves, separate – and potentially separable – from the body struck many as implausible and was opened to ridicule. 

problems: the steam engine, the motor car, the aeroplane, moon lander or

personal computer are emblematic of a certain kind of society and mode

of thinking and working. But the figure of the machine is also crucial to the

of genetics and even human thought and consciousness.


The kinds of machines considered to be like bodies have changed

over time, so are the qualities considered definitional to bodies.  This process has accelerated and become more pervasive with time, through Cartesianism, functionalism, Taylorism, Fordism, computationalism, and onwards.

The idea that living bodies are composed

of machines piloted by computers is a widely accepted assumption in both

scientific and popular understandings of the nature of life and mind.

The parallels between the human body and these mechanisms is neither accidental nor the result of some natural

law, but rather arises through an intentional reshaping of the environment to

complement the human body. The most powerful example of this tendency

is the process by which the computer, a device created to mimic a certain

human mental capacity (the capacity for computation), comes to be treated as a

dominant metaphor for the operation of the brain and thought more generally.

Our tendency to understand our environment in

human terms lead to an anthropomorphisation of machines. In most cases, those machines are 

created for mimicking or replacing human labour and it is thus inevitable that these new technological artefacts will become strongly associated

with the human body.

The body is both a subject and an object, but an important historical trend has been the evolution and influence of various ways of understanding the body as

pure object, the object of a subject that resides elsewhere but has the power to animate, control and scrutinise it.

Much of the challenge in trying to give an account of the body comes from a need to negotiate the division between body as object and body as subject.

The appearance of ‘the body’ as a focus of concern in the late twentieth century is associated with the work of Michel Foucault. In the books such as Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975).  Foucault  cast the body as constituted by an institutional gaze.

But Foucault’s account is similar to theCartesian tradition in its depiction of the body as the object of an alien and alienating scrutiny.

in 1964, Derek J. de Solla Price argued that mechanism doesn’t spring simply from the drawing of analogies between machines and the natural world,but rather results from an innate human desire to create artificial reproductions

of the natural world, which drives us to create artefacts that cannot help but

invite comparison with the natural world they reproduce (de Solla Price 1964).

required level of sophistication, generate their own energy, something which,at least since Aristotle, has been associated with life. 

The hostility towards the flesh originates in Greek philosophical traditions that argued that, ‘if we are ever to have pure knowledge of anything, we must get rid of the body and contemplate things in isolation with the soul in isolation’ (Plato 1993: 128)

the informatic environment of the Internet, creates a wider sense that machines

and computers are interchangeable with bodies and brains.

In the 1980s, roboticist and futurist Hans Moravec predicted a future

scenario, in which human consciousness would

be ‘uploaded’ into superhuman artificial bodies, which could make us immortal

by freeing us from our frail flesh, which, not being an essential part of ‘us’,

could be discarded without any impact on who we are.

In “Mind Children” Moravec provides a chart in which he tries to explain such things as: DNA, bees, sperm whales, the national telephone system and the human brain in terms of information.
Moravec’s chart originates with a belief that the

word ‘information’ refers to some special stuff, something imperceptible and

immaterial but simultaneously objectively and powerfully real, that underlies the

post-Cartesian position. Thus, information is the modern ghost in the machine.

N. Katherine Hayles has used the term ‘virtuality’ to refer to a perception that our material selves are becoming increasingly absent or redundant in the age of information and this sense of being ‘virtualised’ is underpinned not only by computational models of cognition but also, for example, a belief that our natures are encapsulated in stored genetic code. 

Paradoxical state

Conceptualisation of new machines heavily influenced by our existing

understanding of our own bodies, but our understanding of our own bodies then, in turn, being inflected by our understanding of these machines.