Aesthetics: A Critical Review Of Galatea

The “evolution of human-created technology” (2005, p. 7), according to Ray Kurzweil, will bring forth a posthuman society in which elaborate thinking machines will “enable our human-machine civilization to transcend the human brain’s limitations” (2005, p. 20). Indeed, many scholars agree that Galatea 2.2 highlights “fascinations and anxieties about the possibilities of computer technology to construct a human consciousness or mind” (Worthington, 2009, p. 111). While this may be the generic topic of Galatea 2.2, many scholars ignore not only the novel’s implicit emphasis on the disparity between artificial intelligence and human consciousness but also its underlying attention to the nature of (human) cognition. Especially, Katherine Hayles points out that Galatea 2.2 “hover[s] between two notational systems, referencing both the human and the posthuman” and suggests that “an unbridgeable gap separates the human woman from the posthuman computer” (1999, p. 263). To this line, Richard Powers “situates his novel at the intersection of the posthumanist and humanist discourses, and probes the posthuman approach to the mind-body problem” (Campbell, 2004, p. 1). Taking on Hayles’s and Miranda Campbell’s hints above, this paper aims to probe the intersection between posthuman and human, particularly the unbridgeable differences between artificial and intelligence, as

Contextualization

The act of contextualization is constantly underlined as a unique human quality in Galatea 2.2, suggesting the unbridgeable difference between human and artificial intelligence. This is because the act of contextualization—an “active [re]structuring of memory and experience . . . can be understood as questioning the nature of consciousness” and “what it means to be human” (Bould & Vint, 2007, p. 87). Galatea 2.2 demonstrates that “individual humans make meaning and for the most part learn languages through massive exposure to individual acts of parole—to context” (Chapman, 2015, p.