The theme which Hayles elucidates in her book My Mother was a Computer are pretty much in line with my own concerns in the context of the future evolution of consciousness in light of the integral yoga. Will technology accelerate the mental/vital consciousness to escape velocities where it transcends the need for a physical body, or will it facilitate environmental conditions for an increasingly more conscious embodiment of the soul. The later path of embodiment is the path I believe that one can extrapolate from the direction that the yoga points.

However, Hayles goes farther in this book then to just consider embodiment versus disembodiment, as the complexity of the new order of technologies lead her to consider the interface between embodiment and disembodiment, literary text and digital simulations, language and code, culture and technology. What she arrives at is a zone of inter-mediation, in which the hard definition between human and non-human begins to dissolve. I should like to take up exploring this notion of  inter-mediation in future SCI-Y dialog to see if we can get anywhere with a hermeneutics of technicity in light of the integral yoga. Perhaps we can highlight not only the perils and the promise of technology, but also envision how it might constructively facilitate the environment to realize the promise of the future according to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother.  Below is an excerpt from the first chapters of: My Mother was Computer

Hans Moravac and others have postulated our “post biological future” the expectation being that the corporal embodiment that has functioned to define the limits of the human future will in the future become optional as humans find ways to upload our consciousness into computers and leave our bodies behind. In How We Became Posthuman, I argue strongly against this version of posthuman, ending the book with a call to contest for a version of posthuman that would acknowledge the importance of embodiment and be conductive to enhancing human and non human life on this planet.

In the half decade since the publication of the book, computational technologies have penetrated even further into the infrastructure of developed countries. Pervasive computing, mobile communication devices, satellite networks and internet traffic have spread dramatically and corresponding economic, manufacturing, transportation, and communications technologies have been tightly integrated into mobile networks As a result the interplay between the liberal humanist subject and the posthuman begin to fade

Into the history of the 21^st century . In the twenty first century the debates are likely to center not so much on the tension between the liberal humanist tradition and the post human but on  different versions of the post human as they continue to evolve in conjunction with intelligent machines.

In juxtaposing the posthuman with the liberal humanist tradition, I argue that despite many important differences, some versions of the posthuman continue to reinscribe the disembodiement that was a prominent feature of the liberal tradition. Insofar as it associated self with mind and saw the body as a container for the mind’s operations. As new and more sophisticated versions of the posthuman have evolved, this stark contrast between embodiment and disembodiment has fractured into more complex and varied formations. As a result, a binary view that juxtaposes disembodied information with an embodied lifeworld is no longer sufficient to account for these complexities. Although I have not abandoned my commitment to embodiment it seems to me that the contemporary conditions call for understanding that go beyond the binary view to a more nuanced analyses. From my perspective this development requires repositioning materiality as distinct from physicality and re-envisioning the material basis for hybrid text and subjectivities.

Materiality is an emergent property created through the dynamic interactions between physical characteristics and signifying strategies. Materiality thus marks a junction between physical characteristics and human intentions.  …. This view of the universe goes hand in hand with what I call the computational Universe, that is the claim that the universe is generated through computational programs on a vast computational mechanism which underlying all of physical reality. For scientist making the strong claim for computation on as ontology, computation is a means by which reality is continually produced and reproduced on atomic and molecular scales. In a New Kind of Science Wolfram extends this claim to biological systems and, indeed to complex social and cultural systems. In this context My Mother was a Computer can be understood as alluding to the displacement of Mother nature by the Universal Computer. Just as Mother Nature was seen in the past centuries as the source of both human behavior and physical reality, so now the Universal Computer is envisioned as the Motherboard of us all.