Ghosts and Shells: Is Transhumanism Cartesian?

This is precisely what makes it so odd that, juxtaposed with this penchant for reductionistic materialism, transhumanist imagination also embraces, at least in its more quasi-religious or existential forms, a Cartesian notion of the self as not bound or defined by the material reality supporting the self — a “ghost” in a “shell,” as the Japanese franchise, unambiguously an expression of transhumanist imagination, proposes.

The reductionist side of transhumanist thought lies in the notion that the mind, and more fundamentally the “self,” comprises a system that can be fully replicated, thus becoming equivalent to the original system.