Cyberspace was born in science fiction. Since then, much of what fiction has anticipated has become real. Nevertheless, much of public and even academic discourse on cyberspace to a great extent is still embedded in phantasies. Using the term "cyberplatonism", I have ironically adressed such mythologies and fiction in the discourse of bodies and disembodied selves in cyberspace (List 1996).

In this paper I try to come to term with this issues in a more systematic way. To do so, it would be necessary to start with an elaboration of the most crucial features of a theory of selfhood and embodiment. And, as the syndrom of "cyberplatonism" is in important respects the result of the dominance of the often-quoted cartesian dualism, this should be an account of subjectivity, self and body that avoids the errors the cartesian paradigm is flawed with.

The framework I propose is a phenomenological one, referring to some of the crucial concepts of Franz Brentano, the founder of Phenomenology, by Henri Bergson, as Alfred Schütz, a later phenomenologist has read him, the seminal thoughts of Merleau-Ponty who has made emodiment the crucial point in his phenomenology of perception, and of the late works of Francisco Varela, who has taken a critical turn with regard to the debates between cognitivst defenders of the computational model of the mind and its connectivist critiques by drawing on Merleau-Ponty and non-western traditions in the philosophy of mind.

In such a framework, a theory of selfhood and embodiment will adress as their main features the following issues:

1) An account of subjectivity as reflexivity in terms of selfwareness and self-consciousness.
The capacity to conscouisly conceive of oneself as a subject, a person, and the ascribe to oneself properties or to imagine of oneself as being an individual with clear boundaries against a context that is nonsubjective, a context of objects, has been since Descartes' famous statement of the ego cogito, ego sum the defining criterion of subjecitivity. Today the representational structure and function of the mind is explained in terms of a neuroscientific model of the brain as a representational mashine. It should be mentioned that cybertechnology as presented in the texts of Gibson, Rucker and Sterling are pressuposing exactly such a model of the mind, the model of strong AI that maintains that human intelligence and consciousness is explainable algorithmically, with some large number of rules and procedures (MacFadden 1994, 336).

2) Phenomenology introduced the crucial term to account for the structure of the mind responsible for its capacity to represent the world, its objects, and finallly itself: the term "intentionality", a term that relates this capacity to the experiential sphere of subjects.

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This is a shorcut. The fulltext is here to download as a RTF-file: [LINK]
See also "gehen / going": [LINK]

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