SOURCE: “Deleting the Body,” in Electronic Eros: Bodies and Desire in the Postindustrial Age, University of Texas Press, 1996, pp. 16-49.

In the following essay, Springer discusses the social implications of the disembodiment celebrated by cyberpunk.

Can thought go on without a body?

—Jean-François Lyotard¹

When René Descartes compared human beings to machines in the year 1637, he maintained that humans would always be superior to machines because humans possess the unique ability to reason. He wrote that although “machines could do many things as well as, or perhaps even better than, men, they would infallibly fail in certain others, by which we would discover that they did not act by understanding or reason, but only by the disposition of their organs.”² In 1992 Steven Levy, writing about research into computerized “artificial life,” identified the quality that he perceived as uniquely human: “Our uniqueness will lie in the ability to...