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• 1 media/man as god.jpg 2017-11-29T14:04:30-08:00 Prosthetic Soul 19 image_header 2017-12-14T10:37:51-08:00
  
  “All is not lost, the unconquerable will, and study of revenge, immortal hate, and the courage never to submit or yield.” 
  
  ― John Milton, Paradise Lost
   

  The idea of the unconquerable will, the study of revenge, immortal hate, and the courage never to submit or yield all manifest themselves within the space of the internet. The Prosthetic Soul is, in essence, the will of the user, their morality, and the power in which it gives them. Humans have always been enamored by mind-body extensions through unions. Through man and their environment, man and man and/or community, and man and their religion. Man has and continues to be obsessed with these connections as a way to combat the human condition by immersing ourselves within these bonds/relationships.
  But the bond between technology and man has become more and more appealing as we progress into the digital age. To escape our human condition and transcend into something higher than death, higher than merely conscious, is an exhilarating thought. And it's this thought that drives mans' creativity and purpose. Freud notes mans' discontent with their basic form and soul in his piece  Civilizations and Discontents (1930) when he says, 
   

  Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs he is truly magnificent; but those organs have not grown on to him and they still give him much trouble at times. […] Future ages will bring with them new and probably unimaginably great advances in this field of civilization and will increase man’s likeness to God still more. But in the interest of our investigations, we will not forget that present-day man does not feel happy in his Godlike character.

  
  By applying our "auxiliary organs" we hope to attain the likeness of God. In his article "The Prosthetic God: Psychosomatic Extension in the Digital Age " Sebastian Groes says that "we’re searching for an ‘oceanic’ feeling – an sense of immersion that creates the sensation of wholeness. Hence the gods have become such a powerful imaginative force, as their omnipotence and omniscience embodies this sense of limitlessness and immersiveness." It is the idea of being all-knowing and all-powerful that drives us forward, the desperate want for the limitless possibility. And the prosthetic soul allows us a glimmer of this possibility. 
  
  Online you can be who you want and almost do whatever you want with little to no cost. To transcend the laws and restrictions of our human body/form and become something more powerful, knowing, and infinite is what it means to acquire the prosthetic soul. The soul, separate from the mind which has the emphasis on identity, is the manifestation of the will and morality within the prosthetic cyborg.