The Brain Without the Body? Virtual Reality, Neuroscience and the Living Flesh

Summary

Immersing in a virtual reality model of a brain, stripped of body and flesh, provokes an uncanny feeling. This response suggests that subjective experience cannot be separated from the physical body. The digital brain appears empty of interiority, resisting full capture by technology. The experience highlights a phenomenal 'I' that remains tied to lived, material flesh, raising doubts that mind-uploading could preserve personal identity.

Study at a glance

Abstract

Since the early 1990s, the architect and artist Marcos Novak has been developing an experimental and transdisciplinary practice at a point of convergence between architecture, art, science, technology and philosophy, questioning the becoming of the digitally-enhanced body. With AlloBrain@AlloSphere, a virtual reality environment developed between 2005 and 2009 with the support of the Brain Mapping Center (University of California, Los Angeles), Novak proposes an immersive exploration of our brain spaces. AlloBrain is modelled from brain MRIs, extruded in the form of a three-dimensional volume. The experience offered is that of an immersion inside our heads. However, in this way of looking beyond the face, we find it hard to recognise ourselves. Projections or exteriorisations of a hidden interiority, the showing of these unknown territories of the body, of this anonymous and subterranean singularity, arouse an uncanny feeling in us. The explored interior is not that of the mind or of consciousness but, very strictly, that of the brain, more precisely that of a brain without a body, without flesh, a bare and digitally reconstructed enclosed space that yet appears empty of interiority. Are we dealing with a project that tries to explain the mind by mere brain matter, similar to the cognitive sciences or neurosciences? Still, the effect of uncanniness produced by the immersion in AlloBrain seems to result from the confrontation between this “naked brain” and our subjective experience, which seems unable to dispose of the physical body we inhabit and that inhabits us, too. Thus, what AlloBrain causes is a real return to the flesh, a lived-in and living flesh, highlighting a particularity that is nonetheless alien to us, because in reality something always resists. It not the thing that cannot be captured by digitisation the phenomenal “I” itself, the “I” by which we experience our body and the world? Such a hypothesis would give us ground to doubt that by avoiding the materiality of the body, by uploading our minds in the machine, we could remain the same.

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