|
Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
Digital Media Tree this blog's archive OVVLvverk Lorna Mills: Artworks / Persona Volare / contact Sally McKay: GIFS / cv and contact |
View current page
...more recent posts
There is an excellent essay by Ian Hacking in the excellent new issue of the UofT mag with the not so excellent name, Idea&s. Hacking writes about technology ushering us back into Cartesian ways of conceiving mind and body. He talks about a huge range of stuff including organ donation, Japanese attitudes to organ donation, genetics, Body Worlds, cyborgs and brain death. It's not online. Here's a couple of tidbits:
For quite some time, our popular culture has had a vision of creatures that are neither human nor machine, but some mix of the two. Yet the ethnographic facts about these fabulous beings are not what one might expect. They have a far more entrenched role in Japan than in the West. This fact is of curious interest in connection with brain death.
[...]
We think that a person who is maintained simply by machine and who has no consciousness is finished. We say, oddly, that the person has become a vegetable. We mean that there is nothing there but a mechanism. Hence, there is no longer a person there in the hospital bed. We are content to say, "brain dead, so dead indeed." Note how Cartesian we are. The soul, we think, has flown; now there is only a body kept going by chemistry and mechanics."