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Category Archives: Transhuman

Transhuman 101 Moderna declares COVID vaccine to be an operating system

The Transhuman ideology is so terrifying that most people just cannot grasp its enormity. Transhumans fully intend to hijack the evolutionary process of genetic structuring in order to create Humanity 2.0. This means treating human DNA like computer code. TN Editor

Documents obtained from Moderna reveal that the so-called vaccine being peddled by the company is actually anoperating system. This startling admission confirms what vaccine skeptics have claimed that COVID is about control, not a virus.

It wont be lost on anyone who has done due diligence over this pandemic to see past the glib claims of paid-off politicians and compliant media that all is not as it seems.

To start, it is no coincidence that one of the key promoters of these new mRNA vaccines is none other than Microsoft billionaire, Bill Gates. Bill gave aTed Talk where he boastedvaccines can help cut global population by 15 percent.

Yes he saidcutpopulation. How does that work by deactivating these vaccine-implanted operating systems in us?

Well, psychopathic Bill couldnt fix his Microsoft operating system to prevent endless computer viruses, so why should we trust him now that he is spearheading what is seen as a major step towardstranshumanism. For those who care about what goes into their bodies, and those of their loved ones, see if you can detect something very sinister from what is being foisted upon a gullible public.

Over at TheCorbett Reportreaders can enlighten themselves as to the very real dangers of transhumanism the idea of a fantastic future in which humans merge fully with machines. Transhumanists take science as their religion and believe in a philosophy of absolute relativism that claims that individuals can change reality at will, and they seek to relativize the human being.

Certainly, everyone who holds strong religious beliefs, in whatever faith, will baulk at what is far from a benign doctrine. Transhumanism is at complete enmity with Christianity, Judaism, Islam, etc.

Do we really want to sacrifice our soul simply for the sense of security from a virus infection?

Over attapnewswire.comcontributorWeaverposts the following which is alleged to be from Modernas documents on the new COVID-19 vaccines. It reads thus:

We built Moderna on the guiding premise that if using mRNA as a medicine works for one disease, it should work for many diseases. And, if this is possible given the right approach and infrastructure it could meaningfully improvehow medicines are discovered, developed and manufactured.

Recognizing the broad potential of mRNA science, we set out to create an mRNA technology platform that functions very much like an operating system on a computer. It is designed so that it can plug and play interchangeably with different programs.In our case, the program or app is our mRNA drug the unique mRNA sequence that codes for a protein.

We have a dedicated team of several hundred scientists and engineers solely focused on advancing Modernas platform technology. They are organized around key disciplines and work in an integrated fashion to advance knowledge surrounding mRNA science and solve for challenges that are unique to mRNA drug development. Some of these disciplines include mRNA biology, chemistry, formulation & delivery, bioinformatics and protein engineering.

When we have a concept for a new mRNA medicine and begin research, fundamental components are already in place.

Generally, the only thing that changes from one potentialmRNA medicine to another is the coding region the actual genetic code that instructs ribosomes to makeprotein. Utilizing these instruction sets givesour investigationalmRNA medicines a software-like quality. We also have the ability to combine different mRNA sequences encoding for different proteins in a single mRNA investigational medicine.

We are leveraging the flexibility afforded by our platform and the fundamental role mRNA plays in protein synthesis to pursue mRNA medicines for a broad spectrum of diseases.

Within a given modality, the base components are generally identical across development candidates formulation, 5 region and 3 region. Only the coding region varies based on the protein/s the potential medicine is directing cells to produce.

Learn how ourResearch EngineandEarly Development Engineare enabling us to fully maximize the promise of mRNA to meaningfully improvehow medicines are discovered, developed and manufactured.

Using mRNA to create medicines is a complex undertaking and requires overcoming novel scientific and technical challenges.We need to get the mRNA into the targeted tissue and cells while evading the immune system. If the immune system is triggered, the resultant response may limit protein production and, thus, limit the therapeutic benefit of mRNA medicines. We also need ribosomes to think the mRNA was produced naturally, so they can accurately read the instructions to produce the right protein. And we need to ensure the cells express enough of the protein to have the desired therapeutic effect.

Our multidisciplinary platform teams work together closely to address these scientific and technical challenges. This intensive cross-functional collaboration has enabled us to advance key aspects of our platform and make significant strides to deliver mRNA medicines for patients.

The above may be found on Modernas website here:

About John OSullivanJohnisCEO and co-founder(withDr Tim Ball) of Principia Scientific International (PSI).Johnis a seasoned science writer and legal analyst who assisted Dr Ball indefeatingworld leading climate expert, Michael hockey stick Mann in the science trial of the century. OSullivan is credited as the visionary who formed the original Slayers group of scientists in 2010 who then collaborated in creating the worlds first full-volumedebunk of the greenhouse gas theoryplus their newfollow-up book.

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Cyborgs: The truth about human augmentation – BBC Future

At the height of summer, when London was baking in unseasonable heat, I made an ill-fated trip to the Serpentine lido in central London. The Serpentine is a small lake in the heart of the capital where bathers have cooled off since the 18th Century. Leaving my clothes by the side of the lake, I plunged under into the refreshing water, only to hear it crackle around me in a peculiar way. Id forgotten to take out my hearing aids. And just like that, the greenish waters of the Serpentine washed away my new-found hearing.

The next day the devices were still lifeless little pebbles, one red and one blue, and I was lucky that my audiologist had an opening the following evening. I expected to be put in the doghouse when I explained what had happened, but he was delighted. This tells me your brain has adapted perfectly to the devices, he smiled.

Theres a cost to this tightened integration, though. My brain is no longer tuned to life without prosthetics. Without my hearing aids, I hear worse than I did before I got them. The little electronic plugs have become an extension of myself. Although I can be physically separated from my hearing aids I can take them out and hold them in my hand my sense of hearing is not so easily picked apart. It exists partly in my ears, and partly in my devices.

So I am now a cyborg out of necessity, not choice. Being part machine is my resting state. Yet I dont feel much like Robocop or the Six Million Dollar Man. If I am a cyborg, shouldnt I feel more, well, superhuman?

Theres a big gulf between the fantasy vision of cyborgs, and the current reality of being dependent on an implant or a prosthetic in day-to-day life. If were to separate the two, we ought to pay close attention to those who are living in that world already.

For this last column in my Beyond Human series, I spoke to a variety of very different people who I encountered this year. Each have embraced the idea of human enhancement, from an artist who hears colour to a man who can start a motorbike with a chip implanted in his hand. What secrets can they share about life as an enhanced human?

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Transhumanism: The Final Frontier? – Evening Standard

I

ts a sunny September afternoon in present day London and Im talking to a woman who thinks Im an ape-brained meatsack. To be fair, Dr Elise Bohan, 32, who is really very nice, believes everyone herself included is an ape-brained meatsack. A senior research scholar at Oxfords vaunted Future of Humanity Institute, she has spent half her life thinking about the promise and perils of artificial intelligence, the limits of human wetware (your brains, bodies and all the mushy bits in between), and how we avoid getting steamrollered by the smarter-than-human machines lurking at the edge of tomorrow. As the author of Future Superhuman: Our Transhuman Lives in a Make-or-break Century, she is trying to do something about it.

Being told that my flabby, pasty body is illequipped to keep pace with a world of robot workers, lethal autonomous machines and smart AI systems that know us better than we know ourselves isnt surprising. Although we rarely recognise it, says Bohan, the 21st century is already a transhuman era: think smartphones, the cloud and our digital second skins, algorithms that know how we want to work out and what we want to google. Our biological bits are struggling to keep up. AI helped Moderna design and manufacture a Covid vaccine in 42 days flat. I, meanwhile, cant remember where I left my iPhone charger 10 minutes ago.

Which is where transhumanism comes in. A transhumanist, Bohan says, is someone who believes in being something better than human. Think of TV shows such as Black Mirror, books like Yuval Noah Huraris Homo Deus and films like Ex Machina and youre in the right ballpark. Its a philosophy. Its a quest. Its a necessity. Its about technological transcendence. Things that make you go hmmm. As Bohan puts it: It strikes transhumanists asobvious that humanity could be better.

If were lucky, humanity gets to be the parents of something magnificent

Whos in the club, I ask? Theres Ray Kurzweil, appointed Googles director of engineering in 2012, who popularised the concept of the technological singularity (the idea that were heading for a rapid intelligence explosion due to exponential improvements in information technology). Elon Musk? Transhumanist. Bill Gates? Transhumanist. Mark Zuckerberg? Big old transhumanist. Musks big play is Neuralink, a secretive company he founded in 2016 to help human and machine intelligence by developing an electronic brain implant, a Fitbit in your skull with tiny wires. Musk told the Joe Rogan podcast in 2020 that it is five to 10 years away. His plans, he says, include giving humans the option of merging with artificial intelligence by exchanging thoughts with a computer augmenting their mental capacity. You might have seen the video of its monkey implanted with the chip playing video game Pong using only its mind. In January it advertised for a clinical trial director to run tests on humans. Small matter that at least eight of the monkeys have died.

I think its a bit grim. This isnt sexy technology, agrees Bohan. Musks SpaceX rockets and Tesla cars are a lot more du jour. Transhumanism has a terrible image problem, she says. Its not fuzzy. Its not what we want to hear. But the idea and Musk is hardly alone here is that we get to piggyback and come along for the ride and be involved in the evolution of that form of digital consciousness. What it means to be human, from our brains and bodies to our values and ways of life, is poised to be transformed as we move from a purely biological species to a techno-human hybrid. Its a very different kind of trans debate. Will I need a subscription fee to buy the best brainwaves? Wont the rich simply get richer, lining their superbodies with, I dont know, literal stardust? Pass. Transhumanism is not merely this life-extension project: lets upload, lets live forever, lets just rack up the billions, says Bohan. So much of it is focused on making the world a better place in a sustainable way. Then why, I ask, does it all feel so undemocratic? A bit bermensch. When people accumulate too much power, it rarely goes well. The thing about history is that the great movers have all been undemocratic, Bohan says. Usually, its tectonic plates or pathogens or the availability of domestic arable crops. Human beings love to think of history in terms of rational actors, kings, emperors, goodies, baddies. I think this is a really interesting moment of history because we so want to believe that were in control.

Plus, she says, democracy hasnt done much to fix climate change in the past 30 years. Sooner or later mankinds trajectory will throw up a doomsday scenario we dont have the tools to deal with, she says: nuclear apocalypse, lab-made virus, rampant AI. Its like were engaged in a complex juggling act. First two balls, then three, then four. As time wears on, the balls are supplanted by live grenades that can detonate on impact. Quick, catch the next one its labelled nukes. And the next pandemics. Dont drop a single one! Good, AI is coming soon.

AI and automation threaten factory jobs, driving jobs heck, any jobs. Wages will tumble. Traditional family models will fall apart. Life scripts will be torn up. Dreams will turn to dust. An eruption of disruption, already underway. Its not panning out for so, so many, she says. And the anger is palpable. Overeducated generations, frankly, dont know what theyre doing. Meanwhile, theres a crude social media landscape of today like Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok its awful, its brain junk, its vapid, I dont know how anyone finds it fulfilling, but its addictive enough for people to be invested in curating their identity and existence in these virtual worlds. Imagine what happens when Mark Zuckerbergs Metaverse finally turns its trillions into something that doesnt look drawn by a toddler with a crayon up its nostril. Well never log off. Which brings us on to another fascinating conundrum: Ive used the Oculus Rift, Ive had virtual sex, quote unquote, and its so immersive, says Bohan. She believes we are 10 years away from enjoying fluent and emotionally enriching conversations with Alexa and her kind. She talks of AI characters conscious? Alive? Who can say? that will evolve from best friend to life partner, sing lullabies, make love. Its wild stuff. But then again, theres already Microsofts Chinese chatbot Xiaoice (pronounced Shao-ice) designed with a focus on high emotional intelligence a simulated 18-year-old with 660 million users, 25 per cent of whom have confessed their love to her. I think a growing subset, particularly of young men, will be opting into this technology, the result being that it skews the sex ratios in the human dating pool, making men ever more scarce. The end of men? Just maybe.

I like my humanity. Im a happy-ish meatsack. I like the sound of rain on the window; I like long, muddy walks and the smell of gorse. I like looking at bell heather and bog asphodels. I like the idea of children I might have one day. I might bore them about flowers, too. I like my friends and my family, I value my weaknesses and my wilfulness, I suffer theirs gladly. I want to think this is all bollocks and billionaires, and that my little life might just be left alone. Its hard to think about transcendence without thinking about endings. I dont like them at all.

Funnily enough, all those impulses I share, says Bohan. Im happiest reading books, talking to my friends, being in the ocean, being outdoors. A quiet simple life Im very big on. Its in my interest to ignore all of this. Maybe I have the means and opportunities to block a lot of this out. [But] I dont think if you have children you can afford to block it out because the ramifications for their development and schooling and so many other things are really important.

She thinks this is bigger than us, as individuals, anyway. That she needs to warn us, that we get busy techno-living or get busy homo-dying. Im talking about future generations for trillions of people yet to be born, more people than have ever lived on this planet. Her hope? That the most beautiful things about humanity do get to survive far into the future and do potentially go on to do amazing things that are beyond the reach of you or I today, that are beyond the reach of the merely human, which doesnt mean its a project of celebrating the demise of humanity. If were lucky, humanity gets to be the parents of something magnificent that can explore the wonders and the mysteries of the universe and consciousness. Her goal is to make us take these ideas seriously, that we dont take it personally, that we dont sulk. I say come friendly bombs, fall upon Silicon Valley. But what do I know? Im obsolete.

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PolitiFact | Transhumanism nanotechnology COVID-19 vaccine conspiracy …

A headline on a video widely shared on Facebook used multisyllabic words to make an alarming claim about the COVID-19 vaccines:

"Dr. Carrie Madej: Why Is RNA-Modifying Transhumanism-Nano-Technology Inside the COVID-19 Vaccines?"

The short answer to the question: It isnt. The vaccines dont contain any such thing.

The post was flagged as part of Facebooks efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Facebook.)

Its part of a baseless conspiracy theory about the vaccines being part of an effort to change humans through technology.

"None of the vaccines contain nanotechnology of any sort, let alone 'transhumanism nanotechnology,which isnt even a thing," said Mark Lynas, a visiting fellow at the Alliance for Science and Cornell University.

Planning to evolve humanity

Madej describes herself as an osteopathic internal medicine doctor who stands for "freedom, truth, great love," and who is "practicing the truth in Jesus through medicine." She also indicates she is no longer practicing medicine, but rather "dedicates her time to educating others on vaccines, nanotechnology and human rights."

Madej has made multiple claims about the COVID-19 vaccines that fact-checkers have rated false.

In the 50-minute video, Madej described attending business owner meetings in metropolitan Atlanta several years ago in which the participants discussed "transhumanism," which she said is "taking the human body and making it better" through methods such as "genetic modification, nanotechnology, melding the human body with artificial intelligence."

The COVID-19 vaccines, she suggested, are part of this effort.

"The people that are pushing these agendas" are also "pushing these injections on everybody around the world. They go hand in hand," she said. Their plan "is to change what it is to be human, and their goal is 2030."

Madej said she viewed the Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccines with a compound microscope and observed indications of "superconducting materials," or a "liquified computing system."

She also said she observed "tentacle-like, spider-like organisms," and that people told her they were pond-water parasites.

We rated as Pants on Fire claims that the Pfizer vaccine contains "a deadly parasite" and "living particles" that could germinate in the body.

We cant say what Madej was looking at under a microscope or what she saw. We messaged Madej on Facebook, but did not get a reply. Madej does not list contact information on her website or on her Instagram, Facebook and Twitter accounts. We called two phone numbers listed online for her; neither were working.

A jumble of scientific terms

The only links between Madejs description of the vaccine and whats actually in it are the term "RNA" and the prefix "nano."

RNA ribonucleic acid is a molecule similar to DNA that carries coded genetic information to a cell. The Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines use a form called messenger RNA, or mRNA, to carry genetic information about the coronavirus to the bodys cells to teach the immune system to identify and prepare to fight off a COVID-19 infection. It does not modify a persons DNA or RNA.

The mRNA technology dates to the 1990s, though this is the first time it has been used in widely disseminated vaccines.

The Johnson & Johnson vaccine does not use mRNA. Instead, it uses a disabled adenovirus to deliver instructions to help the body recognize the coronavirus spike proteins and activate the immune system.

Lynas at Cornell said mRNA vaccines "have proven incredibly safe and effective and the technology is also looking promising for many other diseases and cancer."

Nanoparticles are not nanotechnology

The term "nano" is widely used to describe things that are very small, such as iPods and cars, but scientists use the prefix more specifically to refer to things on the scale of individual atoms.

Nanotechnology, says the National Nanotechnology Initiative, is the "application of extremely small things" for uses in fields such as chemistry, biology and physics. These can be structures or even tiny machines.

In the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, the mRNA is contained in a "lipid bubble," or a shell of fat, thats described as a nanoparticle. That just means its very small. That doesnt make it nanotechnology.

"Even though the term is used here to imply that nanotechnology is being used to modify your RNA, that is completely false," said Cindy Prins, a professor of epidemiology at the University of Florida. "The mRNA in the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines doesnt have any effect on ones DNA or RNA. It doesnt become a permanent part of the cell."

Prins said Madejs explanation of what she says she observed "is ridiculous. She says she is using a compound microscope, which can be used to look at cells or bacteria, but certainly will not show nano-scale structures."

Translating 'transhumanism'

Transhumanism is the belief in changing and enhancing the human body through technology.

Lynas said "there are people who believe we should try to transcend human biology and upload human consciousness to computers but they are a fairly marginal group and dont have anything to do with vaccine developers, in my knowledge."

Prins said: "I have been vaccinated and can guarantee that the only modification I have is immunity to COVID-19."

Our ruling

Madej said the COVID-19 vaccines contain "RNA-modifying transhumanism nanotechnology."

There is no evidence that the three vaccines used in the U.S. contain any such thing. Two of the vaccines use mRNA technology that does not change the bodys DNA or RNA or alter humans permanently.

The claim is false and ridiculous Pants on Fire!

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Former GOP candidates push baseless QAnon conspiracy theory that Hurricane Ian was created to punish DeSantis – The Independent

While Florida residents and emergency crews survey the devastation from Hurricane Ian, which continues to barrel along the East Coast, two former far-right congressional candidates floated a baseless conspiracy theory that the federal government created the storm to punish and target Republicans.

Lauren Witzke, a QAnon-supporting conspiracy theorist who was the GOP candidate for US Senate seat in Delaware in 2020, said she has no doubt that technology exists to manipulate weather that could be used to target Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.

We know the technology does exist, she told former GOP congressional candidate Deanna Lorraine on her far-right conspiracy theory streaming channel, above a caption reading Biden Builds Transhuman Cyborg Army Using Immigrants.

Of course they would be willing to do something like this to target red states. I have no doubt. The technology exists to manipulate weather, Ms Witzke added in a clip captured by watchdog group Right Wing Watch. I know Florida is prone to hurricanes, however this developed to [a category 5 or category 5 storm] overnight, and it does seem to be hitting the conservative areas.

She said she is not putting it past the elites to target something like this towards Florida as punishment for eliminating Covid-19 vaccine requirements and getting rid of child grooming, referencing the states law prohibiting classroom discussion of LGBT+ people and issues by smearing its critics as groomers.

These huge hurricanes always seem to target red states, red districts, and always at a convenient time, typically right before elections or, you know, because possibly Ron DeSantis has been stepping out of line a lot and fighting the deep state, said Ms Lorraine, who received less than 2 per cent of the vote in a race against House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in 2020.

Their claims echo similarly unhinged-from-reality statements central to the QAnon movement in the wake of Hurricane Ida in 2021, which devastated coastal Louisiana with impacts felt throughout the south and East Coast.

QAnons big tent conspiracy theorist movement includes references to deep state-controlled weather manipulation events but fail to address the climate crisis, political figures who deny it, increasingly powerful storms fuelled by climate change, and a lack of critical infrastructure investments to combat them.

Nearly two million people in Florida remain without power after Ian made landfall on Tuesday.

The states death toll also continues to rise as emergency responders survey the damage. Officials have reported at least one confirmed death and 20 unconfirmed deaths in three counties.

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Former GOP candidates push baseless QAnon conspiracy theory that Hurricane Ian was created to punish DeSantis - The Independent

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Is the body key to understanding consciousness? – The Guardian

In 2018, billionaire Silicon Valley entrepreneur Sam Altman paid a startup called Nectome $10,000 to preserve his brain after he dies and, when the technology to do so becomes available, to upload his memories and consciousness to the cloud.

This prospect, which was recently popularised in Amazon Primes sci-fi comedy series Upload, has long been entertained by transhumanists. Although theoretically possible, it is rooted in the flawed idea that the brain is separate from the body, and can function without it.

The idea that the mind and brain are separate from each other is usually attributed to the 17th-century mathematician and philosopher Ren Descartes, who believed that the body is made of matter, and the mind of some other, non-physical substance.

Modern brain research rejects the distinction between the physical and the mental. Most neuroscientists agree that what we call the mind is made of matter. The mind is hard to define, but the consensus now is that it emerges from the complex networks of cells in the brain.

But most people still view the mind and brain as being distinct from the body. In 2016, four prominent brain researchers published an article summarising what we know about consciousness. It begins: Being conscious means that one is having an experience to see an image, hear a sound, think a thought or feel an emotion.

It is, however, becoming increasingly clear that the mind/brain and body are intimately linked, and that the body influences our thoughts and emotions. Being conscious does not just mean having awareness of the outside world. It means being aware of ones self within ones surroundings. The way we experience our body is central to how we perceive our self.

Phantom limbs are a striking demonstration of the importance of the body for self-consciousness. They were described in the mid-16th century by the barber-surgeon Ambroise Par, who reportedly amputated several hundred limbs a day during the Italian war of 1542-46.

Verily it is a thing wondrous, strange and prodigious, he wrote. The patients who have many months after the cutting away of the leg grievously complained that they yet felt exceeding great pain of that leg cut off. At that time, however, few survived the operation, so the phenomenon was seen only rarely, and dismissed as a delusion.

Advances in medicine and military technology changed this. The invention of a bullet called the Mini ball with its greater accuracy, range, and muzzle velocity, increased the number of amputations, while the introduction of anaesthetics and antiseptics improved the survival rates of soldiers who went under the knife.

And so it was that the neurologist Silas Weir Mitchell, who amputated countless arms and legs on the battlefields of the American civil war, came to see that phantom limbs are the rule rather than an exception, experienced by the vast majority of amputees.

The medical community was still sceptical of the phenomenon, however, so Mitchell initially described his observations as a short story, The Case of George Dedlow, published in the Atlantic Monthly in July 1866. The fictional titular character was a composite of the hundreds of thousands of soldiers who were maimed and mutilated during the conflict. He lost all four limbs, one by one, to become a useless torso, more like some strange larval creature than anything of human shape, reduced to [a] fraction of a man.

Mitchells story was so vivid that readers took it as factual, and believed that he was a real patient being treated at Philadelphias South Street Stump hospital. Many wrote him letters of support, some tried to visit him, and some even raised money for his care. But the story played a large part in bringing the phenomenon into the realms of medical science, and Mitchell went on to become the first elected president of the American Neurological Association.

Mitchell recognised phantom limbs as a disturbance of bodily self-consciousness, in which the amputee retains awareness of the missing limb, and feels as if it is still attached to their body. In some amputees, the phantom disappears within weeks or months of amputation. In others, it persists for decades.

Phantoms do not appear only in the form of missing limbs. Women may experience phantom breasts after mastectomy; men can experience phantom erections after amputation of a cancerous penis; and there are reports of phantom eyes, noses, teeth, and even phantom haemorrhoids, bowel movements and gas after surgical removal of the rectum.

Phantom sensations occur because the brain creates a dynamic model of the body by integrating tactile and visual information with limb position signals from the muscles and tendons. This model, variously called the body schema or body image, is crucial for both the perception and control of the body. But when a limb or other body part is removed, the schema is not properly updated, and so it retains an imprint of the missing part. As a result, the individual remains conscious of the missing part often, even more so than of their existing body parts.

Most of us could imagine few things worse than having a limb amputated. But some people want nothing more.

Take Australian Robert Vickers. Before I was 10 years old I knew my left leg somehow didnt belong, Vickers told ABC Radio National in 2009, and that my body would not be as I felt it should be until I had the leg amputated precisely halfway up the thigh.

Vickers harboured this strange desire, and suffered in silence, for more than 30 years. It made him severely depressed, and he received psychotherapy. He was prescribed antidepressants, tranquillisers, and antipsychotics, and received electroconvulsive therapy, but to no avail. He tried, without success, to damage his leg in various ways, in order to force an amputation.

Then, at 41, he submerged the unwanted limb in dry ice until the pain became unbearable. His wife drove him to hospital, where he received the amputation he had wanted for so long. I left hospital two weeks later with my desired stump, and life changed for the better from that day. In the 24 years since, I only regret not doing it sooner.

Vickers is perhaps the best documented case of body integrity identity disorder (BIID), an extremely rare condition, of which fewer than 500 other cases have been reported to date. For most of his life, Vickers believed his experience to be unique, but others suffering from the condition describe it in similar terms.

All report a fascination with amputees, and a desire to amputate, from an early age. The desire usually becomes obsessive, to the extent that they will try self-amputation. Use of dry ice appears to be the most common method, and some have used homemade guillotines or shotguns. In another well-documented case, a 79-year-old New Yorker travelled to Mexico and paid an unqualified doctor $10,000 to amputate his leg. He died of gangrene a week later.

BIID first appeared in medical literature in a 1977 study published in the Journal of Sex Research. The authors of this study including Greg Furth, himself a wannabe amputee described the condition as a paraphilia, or an abnormal sexual behaviour, in which the stump is fetishised because it resembles a phallus, and named it apotemnophilia, meaning amputation love.

Some BIID sufferers do indeed report a sexual aspect to their desire to amputate. But they invariably describe their experience in terms of self-identity. One participant in Melody Gilberts 2003 documentary Whole says that he finally became a person late in life after blowing his own leg off with a shotgun. Another participant told the film-makers that by taking the leg away, Im actually more of a person than I was before Ive corrected the body that was wrong. Vickers has stated that he felt incomplete with his left leg, and that he only became whole after its removal.

The condition was renamed body integrity identity disorder to reflect this. BIID is a disturbance of bodily self-consciousness with a neurological basis, as are phantom limbs. There is evidence to suggest that it occurs because the affected limb is not incorporated into the body schema as it develops in early childhood. Amputation is not offered as a treatment for BIID sufferers, but it could be argued that making it available to them would minimise their risk of self-harm.

Research into bodily awareness is leading us to rethink the nature of consciousness. Our understanding of how the brain works will progress only when we stop observing the brain in isolation, and start thinking of it as one part of a system that includes the body and its environment.

An understanding of how brain and body interact is critical for understanding the phenomena of phantom limbs and BIID. Such interactions also play a key role in mental health conditions such as anxiety and depression, and in eating disorders such as anorexia nervosa. All of these conditions cause symptoms in the body that may be accompanied by disturbances in how the brain interprets those symptoms.

Yet the links between the brain and body are still under-appreciated. Only by taking the body into consideration will we gain a better understanding of these conditions and, it is to be hoped, develop effective treatments for them.

The new understanding of bodily self-consciousness leads us to some surprising conclusions. If bodily awareness is the basis of self-consciousness, then it follows that bumblebees, and even robots, may possess basic consciousness.

A study published in 2020 by researchers in Germany showed that bees can accurately judge gaps between obstacles relative to their wingspan, and reorient their bodies accordingly to avoid inflight collisions. Researchers at Columbia Universitys Creative Machines Lab have developed a starfish-shaped robot with an in-built body schema, which can adjust its gait after having a limb removed. The latest version of this robot creates its own body schema from experience.

If self-consciousness is based in bodily awareness, then it is unlikely that a lab-grown mini-brain could ever become conscious, as some ethicists have claimed. By the same token, transhumanists claim that we will one day gain immortality by uploading our brains to supercomputers will probably always be science fiction.

Body Am I: The New Science of Self-Consciousness by Moheb Costandi is published by MIT Press (22.50). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply

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