Prosthetic Consciousness: Neuroscience and the Making of the Cyborg Subject

Identity is not a fixed biological essence but an ongoing process shaped by neuroplasticity, memory reconstruction, perceptual interpretation, and affective response. Drawing on Andy Clark and David Chalmers's theory of extended cognition, the article argues that smartphones, virtual reality, prosthetic devices, and digital avatars have become extensions of human cognitive and bodily life. Combining Donna Haraway's and N. Katherine Hayles's posthuman theories with neuroscience, it describes the modern self as a prosthetic consciousness continually generated through interactions between brain, body, environment, and machine—neither purely organic nor technological but a cyborg identity that is now an empirical and philosophical reality.

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Abstract

This article explores the evolution of human identity in an era marked by neuroscience, digitalization and cyborg embodiment. Starting at the most basic neuroscientific model of how memory, perception and empathy are innate to consciousness, it retraces the many steps that create ‘the self’. It contends that identity is not a biological fixed essence but rather a process, moulded by neuroplasticity, memory reconstruction, perceptual interpretation and affective response. It goes on to expand this with a discussion of Andy Clark and David Chalmers’s theory of extended cognition, giving the robust examples of smartphones, virtual reality, prosthetic devices and digital avatars as becoming extensions of human cognitive [and] bodily life. Theoretical concepts of the cyborg, introduced by Donna Haraway and to a large extent supported by N. Katherine Hayles in her posthuman theory, can be employed to examine the contemporary subject as simply one amalgamation of mixed matter consisting not only of neurons and bodies but also of technologies and codes. The “modern self” this article describes is neither organic nor technological, but a prosthetic consciousness that is ever ongoingly generated through the play between brain, body, environment and machine. Combining neuroscience with posthuman theory, the research provides a framework for what is now an empirical and philosophical reality of the twenty-first century; cyborg identity