ENHANCEMENT AND CONVERGENT TECHNOLOGIES: RESPONSIBILITY IN ADAPTED SPORTS? (THE SUPERCRIP HEROES OF POSTMODERNITY)

Abstract

Biopotentiation is many things; in every known era there have been people actively engaged in improving their bodies, both by learning and perfecting certain attitudes with training, and by researching techniques and procedures to obtain better results in particular activities. A problematic case is that of athletes - particularly the Paralympics - who want to increase their skills to obtain better results; essentially there are three ways to do this: get better equipment, train by refining techniques and / or with effective fitness machinery, by biopotentionig (drugand technological doping, gene therapy, etc.). All these means (devices, training, bio-enhancement), by retroacting on our cognitive apparatus and on our body, explicitly give us the possibility to change ourselves through their use. In Paralympic sports where the best athletes are defined supercrip, we find a strong use of super-technological devices; in the common narrative, these disabled athletes are seen as postmodern heroes. In the common narrative, these disabled or superhuman athletes are seen as postmodern heroes.  This study wants to focus attention on this narrative, and asks whether the binomial technology /athlete is immune from problems. The horizon could be the use of Converging Technologies, in particular Behavioral Neuroscience, to solve the question.