Cyborg Affect (Mechademia 3)

"If it is true that our gods and our hopes are no longer anything but scientific, is there any reason why our love should not also be so?"
-- Villiers de I'Isle-Adam

"If humans have no memory and no body, in what sense are they still human?"
"おもい"... "thought" or "feeling/emotion" (=affect)
"Even if we are already resigned to the loss of [the body and memory], I believe that affect remains. It may be some kind of feeling toward a particular woman, or toward the dog who lives with you, or toward the body you have lost."
-- 押井守, director of the "Ghost in the Shell"

"The transmission of affect, whether it is grief, anxiety, or anger, is social or psychological in origin. But the transmission is also responsible for bodily changes; some are brief changes, as in a whiff of the room's atmosphere, some longer lasting. In other words, the transmission of affect, if only for an instant, alters the biochemistry and the neurology of the subject. The "atmosphere" or the environment literally gets into the individual. Physically and biologically, something is there that was not there before, but it did not originate sui generis: it was not generated solely or sometimes even in part by the individual organism or its genes."
-- Teresa Brennan