Philosophical Analysis of the Image of "Artificial Man" in Literary Works of the XIX-XX Centuries

Abstract

Thanks to the development of modern technologies, there is a feeling that the machine can do anything: write a pseudoscientific article, perform household chores, and remind us of important things. Questions arise: what can't the machine do? What does it mean to be human today? The article examines the versions of how the border between the human and non-human in a person is interpreted in fiction. Such variations of "artificial man" as golem, robot, and artificial intelligence are studied. Created from different materials and animated by different methods, these creatures reflect different ideas about who a person is.

We propose two approaches to the idea of creating a "man — artificial man" — mythological and natural science, supported by posthumanist philosophy. The deanthropologizing tendency in literary works anticipates the logic of transhumanism. A person is reduced either to a biological datum (a set of genes, a game of hormones, neural connections), or to intelligence, competing with artificial intelligence and inevitably suffering defeat. The anthropological approach in works of art continues the mythological tradition. Man is thought of as a being endowed with consciousness, which is not reducible to the world. "Artificial man" is a double, an antipode, another, that is, absolutely different, in relation to which a person can establish his own identity.