Textual Practice
April 22, 2025
Saswati Swayamprava, Nagendra Kumar
ABSTRACT This article undertakes an examination of the subjective experiences of the artificial intelligence portrayed in Ian McEwan’s novel Machines Like Me. Addressing the ontological status of Adam, an artificial intelligence, the investigation employs David Herman’s strategies of recategorising characters as persons and nonpersons to highlight the phenomenological richness of the...
Textual Practice
April 3, 2025
Peter Krapp
ABSTRACT Parallel to the history of the occult medium of telepathy, there is a media history of thought transfer, across various technologies that in turn influence the conceptual inventory of psychology and neurology, literature and psychoanalysis.
Textual Practice
February 1, 2022
Laura Colombino
6 citations
The article sketches the philosophical theories of consciousness of the 2010s inspired by neuroscience and computer science, in order to relate them to Ian McEwan’s investigation of a protohuman and a posthuman mind, those of a foetus and a robot, in Nutshell and Machines Like Me respectively. McEwan engages inventively with the contemporary imaginary of the new brain sciences and tries to make...
Textual Practice
September 1, 2021
L. J. Fernandez
ABSTRACT The rapid development of the field of Posthumanism is testament to the field’s importance for contemplating the crucial questions of how we might overcome the various shortcomings of humanism. Yet, despite its productive insights and sharp anti-humanist critique there remains the question of translating these into a praxis. I argue that a critical posthumanist praxis remains an...
Textual Practice
August 8, 2019
Chris Danta
ABSTRACT Panpsychism is ‘the theory or belief that there is an element of consciousness in all matter’. An ancient idea in Western philosophy that predates the earliest writings of the pre-Socratics, panpsychism is currently being revived in a number of different disciplines in the humanities. One reason for this resurgence of interest in panpsychism in the contemporary humanities is that...
Textual Practice
2018
Patricia Waugh
5 citations
'Events occur in my mind', Spark has written, 'and I record them'. What does it mean to hear something that isn't there? Hearing inner speech or sounds, not as silent thoughts but as quasi-perceptual events in the world, confounds settled distinctions between perception, memory and imagination that structure our feeling of the real. This essay shows how her capacity for complex 'listening in'...