Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: This article examines how Internet technologies reconfigure human sensory experience and induce decorporation—the experiential dissociation of consciousness from the physical body. Drawing on Marshall McLuhan’s media theory and theological anthropology, the study demonstrates that digital immersion amplifies certain senses (vision, hearing) while anesthetizing others (touch, kinesthesia), disrupting the sensory balance essential to integrated human perception. This sensory reconfiguration, combined with prolonged physical stasis before screens, produces a dualistic self-experience wherein consciousness appears detached from bodily existence. The analysis identifies ideological support for this phenomenon in transhumanist philosophies that reconceptualize personhood as information rather than embodied reality. Against these neo-gnostic visions, the article proposes a techno-realist framework grounded in Christian theological anthropology that affirms both technology’s formative power and the irreducible significance of embodied existence, calling for technological asceticism and practices preserving psychosomatic unity.
Source: Religions
DOI: 10.3390/rel17010002
Authors: Anamaria Filimon-Benea, Ioana Vid
Institution: West University of Timişoara
Language: English
Subfield: Philosophy
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $2,172
OpenAlex ID: W7116731503