Guide to Manufacturing Bodies

This text first appeared as a short piece commissioned for an exhibit by Taryn Simon for the Prada Foundation.

Preamble

The human mind requires a human body and perceives itself only through the relationship between its body and other bodies. Our company’s advances in neuroscience and information technology have enabled us to scan, code, and store the sum total of data contained in an individual brain. Our current scope of activities does not include the fabrication of bodies to serve as hosts for our clients’ digitized minds. The following list contains three theoretical ways of manufacturing such bodies. Though it is important to note that the artefact or organism produced cannot necessarily be said to possess a human mind, it is nonetheless safe to say that the body is equipped with a mind that is derived from, but not circumscribed by, the contents of a human mind. This disclaimer appears in the waiver that all our clients are required to sign.

BODY 1

A compact electronic device with a chalcogenide glass hard drive capable of storing mind data in an object no larger than a small flashlight. The restricted size would also restrict the possibilities for sensorial communication, which would be limited to acoustic stimuli: an auditory sensor and an adjustable speaker that could mimic, to the best of its abilities, the timber and intonation of the client’s human voice. Such a body could be expected to produce a mind that is emotionally impaired but nonetheless exhibits strong logical skills and algorithmic efficiency. What the mind lacks in empathy would be compensated by the self’s adaptation to an increasingly mathematicized and mechanical world, detached from the organic murkiness of the flesh. In Timaeus, Plato attested that the divine, immortal soul—logos—is located in the head, while the entire body functions as its servant. Should that be the case, this method would require closely monitoring how the logos behaves without the rest of its body—that is, without any irrational, irascible parts for it to preside over. A body devoid of organs—and of organisms within organisms—might awaken in the digital mind a tendency to doubt its own existence. This method carries a high risk of psychological terror, which would be difficult to discern given the artefact’s limited emotional expression.

BODY 2

3D bioprinting has long been used to manufacture organs for use in transplants or plastic surgery. Incorporating quantum neural networks into this technology could make it possible for digitized human minds to be hosted in dynamic human-tissue generators. Housed in such a body, the mind would print, in real time, whatever organ, tissue, or secretion best conveyed their emotions or enabled further interaction with other bodies. The philosophical basis for this approach combines the encephalocentric and cardiocentric hypotheses found in the work of Pliny, the Elder. The Roman author and naturalist asserts that the brain is the “citadel” of sense perception and the “regulator of understanding,” while observing that the heart is “the first among the viscera that is formed in the foetus” and contains “the primary receptacles for the spirit and the blood.” It is in the heart “that the mind has its abode.” In a dynamic human-tissue generator, the mind would manifest not only in relation to the heart, but also in relation to other organs such as the tongue, skin, pancreas, ovary, and testicle, while expressing itself through blood, pus, bile, saliva, sweat, semen, and vaginal secretion. The organs and effusions would swell, wither, quiver, dribble, bubble, moisten, and rot. This body would be vulnerable to contamination from other bodies: organisms within organisms. This is a human body turned inside out, monstruous to human instincts, yet one that seeks out and thrives on affection, establishing a feedback loop between neural data banks and the results of its interfaces with other bodies. Although its morphology and body language are likely to be considered scatological and grotesque, it is worth remembering that the typical human body also communicates via blood, secretions, pheromones, and increases or decreases in volume. Tears dampen our eyes, our skin tingles when touched with passion, our humors simmer under the influence of hate, our breath reeks of sadness. The mind is formed and perceives itself because the heart beats, but who out there can quicken or quieten their own heart with thought alone?

BODY 3

When Aristotle claimed that the soul resides only in the heart, and that the brain is just a cold, insensitive mass with the sole purpose of cooling the excess of heat that the heart generates in the blood, he put forth the possibility of a consciousness that is pure body, pure organ, untethered from the “operational center” in our heads. Such a perspective allows us to question the role that petabytes of data extracted from a specific bundle of neurons—services offered by our company—actually play in the making of a consciousness. In order to make a copy of the self, data would need to be extracted not only from neural connections and memories, but also from the experience of the body and each of its components throughout every moment of their existence; that is, it would be necessary to be born and live in the exact same way as the other organism. For this reason, we would recommend the narrative body method, which is characterized by the transferal of semantic and syntactic patterns through all kinds of materials. It is as if every possible event—the murmuring of a brook, an orgasm, a compound fracture, the color produced by the micrometric scales of a butterfly wing, Virgil’s Aeneid, a plastic straw—bears a signature or an impression that simply requires a particular angle, or a little distance, for it to be recognized and appreciated. Such a consciousness resides nowhere; its body is an eternal and infinite substance that bristles under the winds of cause and effect. Do what you will with the data. Humankind creates nothing. At most, it learns.

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