Page - 45 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 02/01

“This Voice Has Come for Your Sake” | 45www.jrfm.eu 2016, 2/1, 35–47 standing of human beings as they take in the world, as adaptable and given to neural plasticity. His example of a person running to catch a fly ball shows that sensing is not a simple interaction but “opening a channel” to the world, where information keeps flowing in and the person keeps adapting to it.21 Voice and hearing, so essential to the biblical worldview, are apt symbols of the hu- man condition of contingency. Voice reveals age, illness, and mortality. If one speaks to elderly or sick people on the phone, their voices reveal their condition. A person near death often cannot speak. A large part of our grief at the loss of a loved one is our inability to hear that person’s voice. Our selfhood is bound to voice. This article began during a period when I was recov- ering my voice after a long viral illness. My experience had been severely diminished by the weakness of my voice, affecting daily relationships, expression of emotions, participation in my communities, and potentially, my livelihood as a professor. With- out my voice I could not be my real self. For good reason the metaphor of “finding one’s voice” appears in feminism, the arts, and psychology, implying an expression of the true and vibrant self. Enhancement of hearing and speaking can go small, as individuals use constantly improving wireless technology to replace or improve hearing, speech-generating de- vices to replace voices that have been lost, or amplifiers to improve audibility. All such enhancements require a period of incorporation until, as Clark notes, “our best tools and technologies literally become us”.22 Anyone who sees using progressive lenses can likely remember the first day wearing them, when simply walking down stairs was difficult. Enhancing the voice can go large via communications technology, and social media can help bridge the gulf of place and time, even language. Consider the little question at top of the computer screen “Want me to translate?” or Skype, which reduces sepa- ration by making it possible to see and hear loved ones and enter into their daily lives. When enhancement goes large, social media allows one to hear large numbers of voices and ideas and to present oneself to the world. One can invent oneself on social media, raise money for charity, campaign for a candidate, publish an essay, advertise one’s skills, and more. Transhumanism looks to enlarge on both scales. This movement to enhance hu- man life via science and technology ranges from improving health, perception, and cognition to uploading the brain of an individual as a way of surviving death and even, according to Ray Kurzweil, resurrecting a loved one.23 While some, like Hans 21 Clark 2013, 115. 22 Clark 2013, 124. 23 In an interview, Kurzweil predicted that by extracting DNA from his father’s grave, adding memories of him from Kurzweil and others, information one day will be coordinated to reconstruct the man, Kushner 2009, 61.