Fresh from the press: Find my paper on Embodiment and Disembodiment in Contemporary Cinema in the Yearbook of Eastern and Western Philosophy, ed. by Hans Feger a.o., published with de Gruyter!
Abstract: The Metaphor of the Net. Embodiment and Disembodiment in Contemporary Cinema
In this paper present an overview on how we currently visualize human vs. artificial intelligence. I analyze images depicting the transcendence of the human or posthuman life-forms in recent Sci-Fi movies. Such cinematic imaginations of future life I take to be significant for the contemporary conditio humana. I examine how movies like Her (USA 2013, Spike Jonze) or Transcendence (USA 2014, Wally Pfister) portray embodied human intelligence and compare this to images of artificial intelligence. These images are analyzed according to how they are connected and what underlying ontological assumptions can be found. My hypothesis is that disembodied intelligence has become a central topos in contemporary cinema. In contrast to that human intelligence is bound to be outdated, because of its being embodied. Disembodied and distributed intelligences are imagined as netlike, just as a global neural net, that exists without larger bodily structures. The paper takes this dialectic relation to the human body as a central conundrum of contemporary concepts of intelligence.
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