Human consciousness and prosthetic temporality: On the way to new technological humanities

Abstract

In Greek myth of Prometheus and Epimetheus, the two figures of promêtheia and êpimêtheia represent the “temporalization” of “advance” and “withdrawal” and reveal a double movement in human temporality: the forward movement of protective prostheticity, and the backward movement of reflective consciousness. The issue of memory and prostheticity in the originary knowledge in the myth of Prometheus and Epimetheus reminds us of what David Chalmers called “qualia,” which represents the hard problem of the phenomena qualities of a conscious mental state. When Stieglerian “originary prostheticity” is brought together with David Chalmer's hard question of “consciousness,” the coupling of knowledge and non-knowledge of promêtheia and êpimetheia will lay bare its double mobile dynamic qualities of forgetting and remembering. We are recently witnessing this epochal breakthrough, which promises to open onto pathways toward a new age of artificial intelligence. What most of today's theories of human cognitive enhancement fail to see is the technogenic and epiphylogenetic origin of human consciousness. Hence, in an era of pandemics and precarity, humans need to materialize new ways of coupling humanities and technology beyond artificial intelligence and critical posthumanism.