The interaction between human beings and intelligent machines has challenged the traditional understanding of what it means to be "human." In his novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, phillip k. dick rethinks human identity through the positioning of human beings within a technologically mediated reality that displaces the biological body and the spontaneity of human sensation. Written in 1968, dick's novel anticipates the effect of a technologically mediated culture on the formation of a posthuman identity. dick's fictional juxtaposition of the human being and the organically anthropomorphic android complicates conventional implications of embodiment. Androids are physically indistinguishable from human beings and the only identifiable difference is the human ability to feel empathy, which is encountered prosthetically through an "empathy box." In Do Androids Dream? the body is bled of any definitively human quality while human internality is mediated by the machine. Using dick's novel as an illustration of the process of human redefinition, "Cyborg Bodies and Digitized Desires: Posthumanity and phillip k. dick" argues that the posthuman state is a disembodied condition informed by what is deemed "digitized desires."
"Probing the Posthuman: Richard Powers� Galatea 2.2 and the Mind-Body Problem ." Miranda Campbell.
Miranda Campbell discusses and argues that Richard Powers' novel Galatea 2.2 is situated at the intersection of the posthumanist and humanist discourses. Campbell examines Powers' approach to the mind-body problem, his interrogation of the limits and limitations of posthumanism, and its dissolution of the importance of the body, difference, and agency. In the posthuman setting of the Center for Advanced Science of this novel, scientists integrate the mind into the body through its designation as a mechanically functioning brain. At the Center, the binary of human and machine begins to erode with the creation a self-conscious computer. Following in the path of N. Katherine Hayles, Powers resists the collapse of difference between human and machine, and retains the importance of embodied experience for both subjectivity and for political action. Campbell asserts that Powers' novel foregrounds the ways in which the mind-body problem persists in our dualistic culture in spite of posthumanist attempts to collapse the distinction between these two entities.
�'Who Are You?': Alien Resurrection and the Post-human Subject." Ximena Gallardo C.
Traditionally considered a monster in outer space series, the four films comprising the Alien saga: Alien, Aliens, Alien3, and Alien Resurrection, contain a vision of the Alien creature as an agent of human evolution that, taken to its logical extreme in Alien Resurrection, produce an uncommon posthuman subject: the Alien/Woman protagonist named Ripley. In the following article, Ximena Gallardo C. explores the introduction of the series' conception of human evolution through fusion with the Alien as a driving theme in Alien. It then briefly follows through Aliens and Alien3, to focus on how Alien Resurrection creates an intricate posthuman narrative that interrogates our desires, fears, and, most importantly, our definitions and representations of who or what constitutes the posthuman.