Prompt 9

I think the most interesting body would be Armitage and whether or not he can be considered a body, if that’s just what it is, a body. We’ve briefed on what makes a human, whether it’s a body with no knowledge/desires/feeling or having those three things and not a physical body. Armitage seems to have the first, a physical body but that’s all he has. It’s machine like, there are no thoughts or feelings behind that body. Throughout this semester we’ve discussed the definition of body and compared and contrast bodies that are physically different. These bodies that we’ve looked at have physically different appearances because of their belief system, whatever it may be. Whether they desired to get a modification to follow a trend, be different, or abstain from them all together. But in Neuromancer we see the idea of having a body without that belief system, so does that still qualify as a body??
I would say that the relationship of body and technology isn’t necessarily a good one. Yes it allows for bodies to do something they’ve never been able to do before and by modified in ways never imaginable, but that’s when the already skewed line of what is considered “normal” because virtually invisible. It becomes kind of chaotic as we see in the book, people being in more than one body and place at a time. Technology does liberate the body, allowing this “out of body” experience to escape from the worries of the real world. But doing this through technology isn’t any different from how people do it today with drugs, alcohol or any other addictive substance. I feel that whether technology or another substance, they are all basically doing the same thing of having an out of mind/out of body experience.