"Too often the pressing implications of tomorrow's technologically enhanced human beings have been buried beneath an impenetrable haze of theory-babble and leather-clad posturing. Thankfully, N. Katherine Hayles's How We Became Posthuman provides a rigorous and historical framework for grappling with the cyborg, which Hayles replaces with the more all-purpose 'posthuman.'[Hayles] has written a deeply insightful and significant investigation of how cybernetics gradually reshaped the boundaries of the human."Erik Davis, Village Voice

"Could it be possible someday for your mind, including your memories and your consciousness, to be downloaded into a computer?In her important new bookHayles examines how it became possible in the late 20th Century to formulate a question such as the one above, and she makes a case for why it's the wrong question to ask.[She] traces the evolution over the last half-century of a radical reconception of what it means to be human and, indeed, even of what it means to be alive, a reconception unleashed by the interplay of humans and intelligent machines."Susan Duhig, Chicago Tribune Books

"This is an incisive meditation on a major, often misunderstood aspect of the avant-garde in science fiction: the machine/human interface in all its unsettling, technicolor glories. The author is well positioned to bring informed critical engines to bear on a subject that will increasingly permeate our media and our minds. I recommend it highly."Gregory Benford, author of Timescape and Cosm

"At a time when fallout from the 'science wars' continues to cast a pall over the American intellectual landscape, Hayles is a rare and welcome voice. She is a literary theorist at the University of California at Los Angeles who also holds an advanced degree in chemistry. Bridging the chasm between C. P. Snow's 'two cultures' with effortless grace, she has been for the past decade a leading writer on the interplay between science and literature.The basis of this scrupulously researched work is a history of the cybernetic and informatic sciences, and the evolution of the concept of 'information' as something ontologically separate from any material substrate. Hayles traces the development of this vision through three distinct stages, beginning with the famous Macy conferences of the 1940s and 1950s (with participants such as Claude Shannon and Norbert Weiner), through the ideas of Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela about 'autopoietic' self-organising systems, and on to more recent conceptions of virtual (or purely informatic) 'creatures,' 'agents' and human beings."Margaret Wertheim, New Scientist

"Hayles's book continues to be widely praised and frequently cited. In academic discourse about the shift to the posthuman, it is likely to be influential for some time to come."Barbara Warnick, Argumentation and Advocacy

Read an interview/dialogue with N. Katherine Hayles and Albert Borgmann, author of Holding On to Reality: The Nature of Information at the Turn of the Millennium.

An excerpt from How We Became Posthuman Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics by N. Katherine Hayles

Prologue

You are alone in the room, except for two computer terminals flickering in the dim light. You use the terminals to communicate with two entities in another room, whom you cannot see. Relying solely on their responses to your questions, you must decide which is the man, which the woman. Or, in another version of the famous "imitation game" proposed by Alan Turing in his classic 1950 paper "Computer Machinery and Intelligence," you use the responses to decide which is the human, which the machine.1 One of the entities wants to help you guess correctly. His/her/its best strategy, Turing suggested, may be to answer your questions truthfully. The other entity wants to mislead you. He/she/it will try to reproduce through the words that appear on your terminal the characteristics of the other entity. Your job is to pose questions that can distinguish verbal performance from embodied reality. If you cannot tell the intelligent machine from the intelligent human, your failure proves, Turing argued, that machines can think.

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Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, prologue