10. The Myth of Thinginess: Some Thoughts on Uploading Consciousness

Few science fiction motifs are more ubiquitous than consciousness transference. Its uses range from the comic through to the philosophic. The cinematic image of two people with linked metal caps on their heads via which their minds are swapped stretches far enough back in popular culture so as only to be remembered in black and white, as does serious speculation on what a person might do after waking up in someone else's body. Though practically unrealistic, these modern myths make intuitive sense as they reflect our tendency to identify ourselves with our minds as opposed to our bodies—to see the body as a container for our essential being, but not as integral to that being itself. Similarly, speculation on the real possibility of uploading human consciousness to a technological scaffolding of some kind has gained increasing traction in popular discourse over the last few decades and is currently a matter of not just serious investigation but anticipated attainment. And here again, at the level of popular culture, the image seems to be one of transference—taking as given that once a suitable technological medium is developed, a person's consciousness can be moved from one container to another. That is, we tend to assign some degree of thinginess to consciousness itself—to the mind. We assume that some THING is being transferred from one medium to another, perhaps with perfect fidelity and perhaps not.

For instance, when I posted the following short talk on the subject of consciousness uploading by Steven Kotler (link) to the Facebook page devoted to a course in Human Nature and Technology, those students who responded tended to do so with concern. There were the usual questions of whether we “should” be undertaking such a venture, as well as some questions about how accurately an actual consciousness could be copied onto a non-biological medium, assuming the medium to be something analogous to a hard drive and the consciousness in question to be something analogous to data. There was also some interesting speculation on the possibilities that such a process might hold, both existentially and intellectually, for the long-term survival of whatever it is that makes us us—for instance the exploration of space across distances uncrossable in a single human lifetime. What every comment had in common though (for reasons of student privacy, I will not reproduce them here), was that same assumption that some THING would be transferred from one container to another, that the stream of the person's awareness would consist of a single line starting at whatever point one's memory began, continuing through the duration of the original body, then bridging into a second, artificial body or sequence of bodies.

This assumption is deeply embedded in Western culture, with its frequent association of selfhood with some singular metaphysical entity, which for the sake of simplicity we can call the soul. But to be honest, I've long been critical of this seemingly commonsense assumption. My criticism is rooted in the understanding of consciousness not as a thing in itself but rather as an activity in a complex system (for a discussion of this idea, see above entry “Well Bless My Cyborg Soul). The mind, as far as our best cognitive science has been able to discern, is produced by the brain—and produced not as a single being that drives the system but rather as an emergent property arising from many discrete elements located across the system, many having evolved millions of years apart from others. The mind is, in other words, a part of the brain's behaviour in the way that grasping is part of the behaviour of the hand; it is simply one of the things the brain does, not something that anything is. The notion of transferring consciousness in this sense is thus not a matter of moving a thing from one container to another; there is, literally, nothing to move. Rather, as consciousness is dynamic, transference might be usefully thought of as training one system to behave in a manner functionally identical to a prior system, even in such areas as data storage and memory construction. Should the copying and training be complete, cognition originally active in a single system would then be active in both (or all) systems. You would, at that point (and maybe that point only), be literally in two (or more) places at once, quite possibly looking yourselves in the visual receptors.

Insofar as such transference may offer a portal to immortality, it is important to bear this last possibility in mind: because nothing would have moved from the first medium to the second, the You still running in its original biological system—call this one Bio-You—would be no less mortal than before while the You now running in the technological system—call this one Techno-You—might be looking at a much later expiration date. From that moment on, your functional identity would cease: Bio-You would continue to function as before, collecting memories and experience, gradually changing away from what never really was a steady state, until it either failed internally or was rendered non-functional by some outside cause, i.e. died by either illness or accident. Meanwhile, Techno-You would also change, taking your shared memories and experiences forward and thus, with every moment, becoming less and less identical with the shared You at the moment of transference, but no less You for all those changes as both systems, not just Techno-You, would be in perpetual flux. In fact, given the superior accuracy of technological to biological memory, it is arguable that after enough years had passed, Techno-You would be more fully You than Bio-You relative to the transference identity; old brains, after all, tend to forget things. Thus, You both would and would not become radically extended. Bio-You would of course die; all cerebral activity and thus all mental activity would cease; no consciousness would carry forward. At the same time, Techno-You might be alive and well, and no less real for all of Your state-of-the-art systems. In fact, You might easily end up attending Your own funeral, simultaneously dying and not yet knowing the experience of death, as much a stranger to yourself as You are to any other individual and as all other individuals are to You.

But what would be the meaning in such an existence? It is a commonplace that the meanings of our lives arise from their brevity: that whatever we want to do with our time, we'd better do it fast. Time runs out and is therefore precious, and how we spend it matters. Were we to achieve radical life extension, say on the order of thousands of years, we might suppose that this sense of urgency underlying so much of what we do would be removed, and with it, the source of much of the meaning that we experience during our fleeting few decades. Personally, I've always found this position to be ripe with the sweet sweet stench of self-satisfied bullshit.

Let's set aside the question of full blown immortality as practically improbable and just dwell on radical life extension in a technological medium, which may be a realistic possibility. At first, in this case, the above argument may seem to have some traction: we tend to value things in proportion, at least in part, to their rarity. The more rare: the more precious; the less rare: the less precious. Were we to find ourselves with orders of magnitude more time, it follows by this logic that each parcel of time would be orders of magnitude less precious, the tendency being toward virtual meaninglessness. The problem here, though—or one of them—lies in the seeming assumption that this is the only way to value time: that the IS of our current lifespans constitutes an OUGHT, or at least a pretty insistent SHOULD. It has long seemed to me, though, that this position does little more than assign a moral gloss to the status quo by suggesting that our biological limitation constitutes some sort of moral limitation. But how do we know that if we were to have radically extended lifespans we would not also develop radically extended horizons for achievement? Are our dreams not in some way a priori constrained by this same limitation that supposedly gives our lives meaning? The limit of what we can aspire to cannot be assumed equal to the limit of what we could aspire to. In fact in this case, CAN might end up being a fairly small subset of COULD. Is COULD immoral because CAN? Is TEN immoral because ONE?

Looked at in this light, the possibility of radically extended horizons points not toward a reduction in the value and meaning of a life, but toward an opening up to possibilities both quantitative and qualitative that our current lifespans don't allow us to seriously consider. Our mistake seems to be in assuming our current and contingent limits, which arise from nothing more than our immediate physicality, to be teleologically binding. The life that can be imagined and enacted over eight decades, the possibilities allowed and denied by that limit, would certainly wear thin and probably meaningless after a few centuries. But to impose an 80-year horizon on our imaginations while standing on the brink of something orders of magnitude greater, and then project the resulting meaninglessness onto that heretofore unnavigable span of years, makes as much sense as standing in the shallows, looking out over the waves, and saying to ourselves, “This is all the ocean has to offer; the whole ocean is only more of this; I really shouldn't build a boat.”

Life is always embodied—life is something bodies do—and we have no idea how meaningful a radically extended life span might be until we have lived it in our own bodies, or in whatever bodies we may make for ourselves. And as with any normal lifespan, some will be used well and meaningfully while others will not. In some cases, the years will certainly become a torment of tedium, but this is no more an argument against continuing to lengthen our lives than is the possibility of five or six extra maybe-meaningless decades to a neolithic person looking at a thirty year expiration date. The value of expanding our horizons, even of expanding them through new and alterable media while leaving our biological selves staring behind us in confusion and wonder, lies in the explorations we might make, not in those we might fail to make.

9. Blind Willy Wordsworth and the Scar’borg Blues Machine

Over my decades-long personal meditation on human relations with technology, I’ve occupied many positions. In my teens and early twenties, I suppose like a lot of people with an appreciation of natural beauty combined with a growing awareness of the environmental costs of industrial society, my thoughts tended toward the easy demonization of technology and the equally easy nature/technology dichotomy. This was, and for many still is, a comfortable position. It allowed me to distance myself from the worst excesses of industrialization—excesses from which I continue to benefit—while at the same time maintaining a sense of integral humanity bound up with a notion of actual or potential purity. It allowed me to create a narrative in which I, and by extension everyone, was navigating a world of traps and illusions threatening to tempt us away from our essential selves. Especially after discovering the poetry of William Wordsworth and the other English Romantics, these thoughts took up much of the bus and subway commute between the apartment I shared with my father and sister in Scarborough and the University of Toronto’s downtown campus, where I was pursuing an undergraduate degree.

Riding the Bloor line in from Warden Station, feeling in my waking gut the rhythm of wheels on rails and the rocking of the subway car—crush of rush-hour commuters and smells of coffee and cigarette-breath—I'd vacillate between losing myself in reading and losing myself out the window: “Nature never did betray / the heart that loved her,” a screen of low earth embankments rising to a concrete cave mouth, “well pleased to recognize / In nature and the strange language of the sense, / The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse, / The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul / Of all my moral being,” pillars and tracks, pillars and tracks, pillars and tracks, “In darkness and amid the many shapes / Of joyless daylight.” It's easy to imagine oneself an outsider in a great machine, inside an alien imposed clockwork architecture at odds with the impulses of blood and instinct, aspiration and vision—to feel ourselves swallowed by systems within which we live and think. It was simple and comforting to not see these systems as reflections of humanity and humanity as a reflection of these systems, to imagine that there was something more integral to memories of long paddles in northern marshland or hikes through wooded October hills than to these daily commutes into the heart of the city—or rather, as I archetyped it, The City.

But what were the systems of thought and perception that had set the fault line for such an intimate fracture in my psyche? How, as a young adult, had I come to feel so isolated within the very world in which I moved? Well, as so often happens when we look at the roots of our thoughts, the answer comes down to myth. We live, after all, in a world of myth—we see through myth, think through myth, aspire through myth—and whether we like it or not, doing otherwise may be impossible for us. Myth is the narrative, sometimes changeable and sometimes ossified, underlying the stories we tell ourselves about who we think we are. In my case, the main two myths were, in my informal nomenclature, the Myth of Human Purity and the Myth of Radical Individuality.

There are many ways of approaching the Myth of Human Purity, so for the sake of brevity I'll refer to the version that has exerted the greatest influence on my society: that underlying the Abrahamic religions. According to Genesis 1:27, Yahweh made humans “in his image” as the pinnacle of his six-day creation. According to the myth, we were created last and best; there is something of the divine in us that sets us above the rest of the world both animate and inanimate. This Myth of Purity leads logically to a subordinate motif, The Myth of Dominion, which incidentally receives a most influential articulation in the next verse of Genesis: “God blessed them and God said to them, 'Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.'” The gist of these two bits of scripture is arguably this:

1. Humans are different from, and superior to, the rest of the world.
2. This difference, rooted in superiority, gives us authority over the world.
3. The quality that defines our difference is non-physical, but arises from a transcendent source.
4. Human distinctness is thus absolute.
5. Therefore, insofar as the world or things of the world exert power over us, our non-physical essence is at risk of corruption.

As this is not a theology blog, my purpose is not to go into the finer points of the argument. Rather, it is to try to understand the effect that such thinking had on the development of my own psyche. And as near as I can tell decades after the fact, the effect was to set the fault line mentioned above. To see myself, and thus humanity, as beings distinct from the context for our flesh-and-blood existence was to see, or at least assume, an unbridgeable gap—an absolute set of categories that set us apart from everything else. And the more years went by, the lonelier our position on one side of that binary seemed: the deeper the chasm separating my psyche from the rest of the world grew. It is difficult to articulate how absolute that division appeared—how far outside the world that notion of special creation seemed to place us. And it is similarly difficult to articulate the spiritual consequences of positing the human as the subject, and everything else as the object, of both observation and thought. Whatever else the world becomes in this view—and there are many interesting arguments on the subject—it becomes, from a human perspective, an external means to an end.

As for the Myth of Radical Individuality, its fullest articulation is rooted in the Western Philosophical tradition, most especially in the political philosophy of the European Enlightenment, and can be summed up as follows. The quality that distinguishes humans from all other living beings is reason, or maybe we should call it Reason. Because we alone among temporal beings possess Reason, we alone possess Free Will, so while plants undertake no action at all, and other animals act only on desire and will, or on instinct, we, because we can think about cause and effect, can imagine the consequences of our actions, and can hold ourselves in mind as object of thought (i.e. we have self-awareness), are unique among living things. We alone have identities, and we alone are capable of moral and thus immoral actions. We alone are capable of acting with purpose and of choosing to align ourselves with purposes outside of ourselves. Our identities in this quick sketch are rooted in Reason, and thus we alone, as self-contained freely willing beings, are responsible for them. In this conception, Reason gives us a means to know and affect the world through conscious thought and action, but it also lets us know that we are separate from what we perceive and affect. There is Nature, and there is Us. And within Us, there are Self and Other. These two myths combine, I think, to form a context for profound alienation. We are in the world, as the saying goes, but not of it. We are superior to it, and yet subject to its forces—spiritually and intellectually above and yet materially embedded.

The Romantic conception of Nature expressed here through Wordsworth is one attempt to overcome this alienation. Wordsworth proposes—and he is not the first to do so—an understanding of human consciousness in which the Nature we perceive, occurring as it does in our own minds, is a combination of objective reality and subjective experience. He proposes as well that Nature is not merely a neutral field of data or worse, the face of a sinful, fallen world, but rather the source of our moral and spiritual being. It is from Nature that we learn the organic and intertwining relationships of things, and from nature that we learn how to attune ourselves to those relationships and thus place ourselves, with all of our subjectivity, into a broader living web of ever-expanding connections. Through contemplating the logic and texture of our unique experience of objective reality, we become able to understand others' uniqueness as well and thus become, or at least have the opportunity to become, empathetic moral beings.

For this reason, I suppose it's unsurprising that a young man already inclined toward alienation through both temperament and experience might, when first encountering Wordsworth and contrasting his thought to the myths of Purity and Radical Individuality, come to experience The City as an alienating construct. Inclined by the overt mythology and covert assumptions of post-Christian society, his eyes looked out at the world as an object to which his conscious being gave him superiority—as something above which he could hold himself even as he worked his way through it. He maintained an unexamined distinction between mind and body, seeing his individuality as rooted in the former, often to the extent that mind could hold itself aloof from flesh through rationality and self-discipline. Questions of personal virtue were non-physical questions that had to be answered in the isolation of the intellect. And then, while living across the street from a housing project and immersing himself daily in the stink and grind of public transit, along came Wordsworth to tell him that the environment in which he lived, itself a product of that disembodied dominating rationality, was divorced even from worldly Nature and thus doubly corrosive to his spiritual and moral being.

Well, fuck.

But why, then, was it always a little exciting when, just west from Warden Station, the subway plunged from above-ground to below-ground? Why did that sudden darkness always feel like a homecoming?

There is truth in darkness. The choice to use light as a metaphor for truth is culturally driven, probably pragmatic—certainly a function of the fact that our brains devote more space to processing visual information than they devote to the other four generally recognized senses combined: where we might see The Light, a dolphin might hear The Sound. But as Walton in Frankenstein fails to realize, the light half of the arctic year is not the only half. And as our hypothetical dolphin friend might tell us, The Sound can only have meaning in the context of The Quiet through which it propagates. An a priori association of light with truth, even metaphorically, constrains as much as it enables our capacity to understand ourselves and our world. We make our illusions out of light, but our blood flows in darkness; under the City, below its roads and schools and malls and offices and museums and hospitals and parks, wires run, sewers bubble, and wheels screech.

But we are the ones who make the wheels and fill the sewers and lay the wires. We are the ones who design the parks, who build the hospitals and museums and offices and malls and schools and roads. The tendency to make these things seems to be a part of our nature. In fact, were it not for our ancestor species' facility with early technology—hand axes, fire—our species would not even exist. Our paltry skeletal musculature, our feeble jaws and thin-enameled un-fanglike teeth, our inept guts—these bodies alone would never have withstood the pressures of natural selection. They have been sculpted by millions of years of stone and fire to the point where we can now tell ourselves, and believe until we know better, that we are not apes. These mutations that define us spring from the technologies that went before them: we are not merely what we are born to but also what we make. That is our nature; that is Nature.

And this, it occurs to me now, is why I have become uncomfortable with the Romantic notion of Nature as something opposed to the City—the notion that in modern urban life we are doing something that is unnatural and therefore corrupting. This false dichotomy places Nature outside City limits pretty much by definition when in fact there in nothing more natural to humans than making things and living in community. The lone rational actor of Enlightenment political philosophy is as much a fiction as the pure human being distinct from and above the surrounding world. We evolved in community; we evolved as tool makers. We have never been alone, and in our current form, we have never been without technology. Those squealing wheels are the voice of our psyche every bit as much as our most inspired and insightful poetry.

So to return to old Willy Wordsworth, a slight revision may be in order: “Nature never did betray / The mind that understood her.” And to understand nature, or rather Nature, is to understand precisely this: that while we arise from it, it also arises from us. Nature with a capital N—Nature in the Romantic sense as it functions in popular awareness—is a category on one side of a slash, one half of a binary: nature/technology, nature/culture, nature/artifice. Yet these binaries are products of consciousness. They are tools for thinking, not facets of the world distinct from our experience of it. While we may find it useful to think in terms of a nature/culture binary, for instance, we should also recognize that the capacity to even frame such a construct arises from our nature—that our culture is a product of our nature, which in turn is a product of earlier forms of culture, and so on back through countless recursions and multiple species. To distinguish between the two absolutely is to participate in a type of myth to which the Western world in particular is prone. Of course a myth may be useful—and arguably no society can function without them—but being useful will never make them true: they are tools no less than are hammers and measuring tapes, and like measuring tapes and hammers, their forms constrain what can be achieved with them. And when we recognize that the Myths of Purity, Dominion, and Radical Individuality are just that—myths—then we may also realize the capacity to set them aside as we would set aside any other tool and, in doing so, set aside our alienation as well. If I were able to go back thirty years and speak with that troubled lost young man, it is something like this that I would like to be able to tell him.

8. Cyborg Selfhood and the Texture of Identity: Danielle's Baby meets the 16^th Canadian Regiment

     i

We live in the shadow of the First World War. While World War Two, with its accompanying Holocaust on one continent and its nuclear culmination on another, may be a more obvious candidate for the defining conflict of the age, it was the “Great War” that made the mid-century totalitarian regimes possible, and the Great War as well that redefined our notions of heroism, our notions of the distinction between combatants and non-combatants, and our notions of the place of the human being in the conduct of warfare. It was this conflict that introduced the world to war as an industrial process—a process whose output, mass-produced as certainly as any car on Henry Ford's production line—was dead bodies, shattered minds, and devastated landscapes. And it was this conflict that, on the largest scale imaginable at the time, introduced the notion of the soldier as subordinate to his weapon, not in a dry academic sense but rather in a sense immediate and visceral to the men on the front lines: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iec7Xoos6JA. The war produced casualties previously unheard-of: about 37 million all told, including 16 million killed and 21 million wounded (http://www.princeton.edu/~achaney/tmve/wiki100k/docs/World_War_I_casualties.html)—to say nothing of the psychological damage for which no reliable statistics exist.

But it is not to recount the large scale history of the War that I am writing this post: other writers have done that. Nor do I intend to take a partisan stance: the war was endorsed in the classrooms, promoted in the media, and preached from the pulpits on both sides. Both sides devoted their full energies and industries to developing ever more efficient ways of killing and demoralizing the human beings opposing them: weaponized aircraft, aerial bombs, more powerful artillery, tanks, chlorine gas, mustard gas, phosgene gas, and flamethrowers to name the obvious.

Instead, I'd like to share some Wilkie family history. But even there, information is limited. Exactly why my grandfather, both of his brothers, and all of my grandmother's brothers enlisted, some in Scotland and others in Canada, is something I can only guess at. Patriotism, nationalism, romanticism, or a simple yearning for adventure and glory? None of that has come down to me. All I have are a few dozen photographs, a lifetime of reading, and a few word-of-mouth stories recollected from conversations with my now-departed dad. From that uncertain mix, though, I think I can reconstruct a fair sketch of my Uncle Arthur.

     ii

Born in Edinburgh sometime in the 1890's, Arthur Lindsay emigrated before the War and, according to my dad, volunteered shortly after his new country's declaration, enlisting in the 16^th Canadian Regiment (Canadian Scottish). From here, it's possible to trace him at least in general terms. I know that he was at Ypres in the spring of 1915 when his regiment, along with the 10^th Canadians, stood its ground against the first large-scale use of gas while the French Territorials with whom they shared that part of the line fled their trenches. I know that when the German shock troops came over expecting little more than corpses and downed men drowning on their own bubbling phlegm, they instead found unbroken ranks of Canadian infantry, their faces still wet from breathing through piss-drenched handkerchiefs, with machine guns manned and bayonets fixed. And I know the effect that the 2^nd Battle of Ypres, as that encounter is called, had on my country's identity.

What I don't know is how Uncle Arthur passed most of his life after the guns first into silence and then into obsolescence. But this big blank space between his military service and his final years has never been empty for me. It has held, and continues to hold, the potential pasts of all the other men whose names I don't know, who also got out of the War alive. Work and family. Summer vacations. Maybe slow weeks at a cottage or weekend afternoons at the beach. Backyard barbecues, family gatherings, and Christmas dinners. Weddings. Christenings. Funerals. Saving for retirement. Service clubs and civic obligations. Annual uniformed parades. Tobacco. Whiskey. And a great deal of silence about what had gone before.

Where his story resumes is in the Veterans' Home in London, Ontario: psychiatric ward. In his last years, he seems to have forgotten who he was. No longer answering to Arthur, no longer recognizing his family name Lindsay, he now responded only to Tommy. And it was as Tommy, not as Arthur, that he died. For years, I carried that transformation in my head as part of our family history and so, at least in some small way, as part of who I was. But as the years passed, I continued reading and thinking about the War, finding in its horror and filth not just an understanding of my family but, I believed and still believe, a way of seeing through the illusions we put up around ourselves. Then, while reading Lynn MacDonald's 1915, a recounting of the first full year of the War largely as told by combatants, it struck me that foot-soldiers fighting under British command were called “tommies.”

I knew then exactly what had happened to Uncle Arthur: as his brain failed, and the person he'd once been ebbed toward non-existence, another identity emerged. Not an individual identity—not a “person” in Locke's sense (see the first post on this blog)—but a collective identity: one component in a flesh-and-steel machine that had sprawled south from the English Channel to the Swiss border. It also occurred to me that, although my uncle had physically survived the War, the identity “Arthur Lindsay” had finally become one of the last casualties of the trenches.

     iii

These realizations are now long past: I've been sharing some version of them in the classroom for the last 12 years. But I'm beginning to realize that the tragedy of Arthur does not end where I've typically left it. Just as the First World War reveals a truth that humanity hides behind its many thin and comforting illusions, so the senescent re-configuring of an old soldier's self reveals a truth behind the smaller-scale illusions embedded in our birth certificates, passports, tax receipts, and hopes for immortality.

What is the relationship between who we are and who we perceive ourselves to be? Even at the most basic level to be articulated in the modern Western world—Descartes' famous realization that “Cogito ergo sum” (“I think, therefore I am”), problems emerge. Descartes arrives at this minimal piece of absolute certainty through a process of systematic doubt, moving through the unreliability of all received knowledge and all suppositions that he cannot directly confirm, and the fallibility of the senses and thus any observations made through them. Since that time—and arguably for a good deal longer—the unitary thinking subject has been the foundational unit in Western philosophy and politics. And on its surface, the logic is compelling: insofar as one must first exist in order to think, it follows that thinking is a reliable indicator of existence.

But the argument breaks down when applied to the identity of the thinking self. To put it in grammatical terms, there is a necessary disjuncture between subject and object. That is, in order to perceive myself thinking, I have to hold in mind an image of myself—not necessarily a visual one—engaging in thought. But it is impossible for a being held in mind and the being who is holding it in mind to be identical: one is an image constructed by the other while trying to represent itself to itself. There is thus a gap between the perceiving self and the self perceived:

I think, therefore I am unstable.

What this means in terms of self-knowledge is that we can never know more than an incomplete representation of ourselves: a construct written on the mind by influences both internal and external. Necessarily, that representation will evolve, but there is no guarantee that its later versions will be more accurate or “true” than their predecessors. The gap remains, an unknowably wide event horizon surrounding an ever-receding center—the intellect's own black hole. Or to paraphrase Shakespeare's Iago, “We are not what we are.”

The Cartesian self has problems not just at its heart but on its edges as well, specifically in determining where and what its edges might be. Part of the difficulty is that, as Michael Shermer observes, for sound evolutionary reasons we are all natural dualists. The image of the mind as non-material spirit stuff has a lot of traction not only in our culture but also in our species. And if this entity is non-material, the notion of fixing it in space, and perhaps in time, verges on the absurd. But if we follow the evidence and its implications (see previous posts)—the fact that the mind fails and can be fooled in predictable ways when parts of the brain are damaged or sensory perception challenged, the fact, as Andy Clark notes, that the brain does not distinguish between a body part and a thoroughly mastered tool—then we can posit tentative borders for selfhood. On the other hand, if the boundaries of the self as constructed by the brain vary with the experiences of a lifetime, then the problem arises again in a different form: if our identities can be shown at the most basic physical level not to be bound by their immediate biological frameworks, how far outward or inward, and with what degree of permanency, can they extend and endure?

I won't try to pin those questions down just now: for the current meditation, it's enough just to shake loose the often-unconscious assumption that who we are is necessarily knowable, non-contingent, and fixed. It's the notion of the contingent, non-Cartesian identity that I'd like to explore, particularly as it relates to Uncle Arthur. This understanding of selfhood raises questions about the value of experience, and of his particular tragedy, and the degrees to which his identities are bound up with the systems in which they became submerged.

     iv

I'll never know how Arthur Lindsay thought about himself, or the kinds of questions he asked himself huddling in a louse-infected bunker, lining up in a trench waiting for the whistle, or running across a broken landscape into rifle and machine-gun fire with a bullet in his chamber and a mounted bayonet. Nor can I know how close his image of himself came to the unknown and unknowable reality. All of the pieces, and the relationships among them, that made Arthur himself to himself are gone, the events that in the end buried one identity under another in the same aging skull now a century in the past.

But if there is nothing eternal in us, if no part of our identity is separable from physical and social determinants, and if the very notion of “I” is a story we tell ourselves about ourselves in a lifelong feedback loop with no fixed referent or location, then what does it matter that every now and then, one of these life-long improvisations suddenly changes tempo and morphs into a completely different kind of thing? To be clear, I'm not presenting this question as a straw man argument: it falls into a common category of questions, all of which draw upon the same flawed reasoning: In the absence of immortal spirit stuff, how can there be meaning in life? If we are “only” biological machines, what basis can there be for morality? In the absence of transcendental existence, how can anything mean anything at all? Or to rephrase these questions in the affirmative: Some eternal principle is required for meaning to exist. However, this line of thought sidesteps the fact that that both meaning and the capacity to make it—i.e. the capacity for symbolic thought—are demonstrably linked to the functioning of the cerebral cortex. So if our capacity to make and experience meaning is innate to our biology, meaning itself is necessarily biological, not metaphysical or transcendent. It arises from the emergent phenomenon of consciousness and thus can be understood as a property of the physical world.

Like all the men with whom he shared the line and against whose lines he alternately charged and defended, Arthur was a product of his time and place. There's nothing new in this observation, nor in the resulting observation that most people alive today would, in the same circumstances, have behaved in the same ways as the people of his generation, no matter how deep their present conviction of the war's foolishness, waste, and ultimate moral bankruptcy. This conclusion though, which follows from the premises of an organism's behavior being determined by genetics and environment, and our own genetic consistency with the people of just a few generations ago, dovetails smoothly into the cyborg notion of distributed identity or embodied consciousness.

The notion here is that identity is not centered at any one point but rather distributed across the knowing system, which at minimum consists of the lobes of the brain but in fact can include not just the biological apparatus but any social or technological scaffolding that contributes in an integral and un-self-conscious way to the experiences of knowing and selfhood. An easy example might be an enactment of the identity “musician,” an identity impossible without the requisite knowledge—for instance the ability to make a given instrument produce a given set of sounds as naturally as a fluent speaker produces utterances or a fluent writer writes them down—not forming or even being aware of the constituent motions and details but rather enacting the desired result with, at times, no more thought than one might give to breathing. In this case, both the hardware and the training that goes into mastering it are integral to the embodied identity. Biology in isolation from technology and social context cannot account for that. In other words, it is precisely those things not present in the physicality of our brains that allow us to be, or imagine ourselves to be, anything more than physically deficient apes.

So sticking with our hypothetical musician, let's make her a member of a band. While each band member has an identity outside of their musical collaborations, the medium of music, along with their shared relationships with it, each other, the named identity of the group, and its relationship with the public, defines a collective identity of which any one member is a single module. And as anyone who has followed any band over a long career will know, the collective identity often sustains itself quite well as various modules detach or burn out and are replaced by fresh components. Substitute violence for music and weapons for instruments, and congratulations: you just joined the army. This analogy provides a mechanism for understanding Uncle Arthur on the one hand, and understanding both myself and my fellow bipedal apes on the other.

     v

Picture Arthur as a young man. He has grown up in a large comfortable family, gone through the usual late Victorian and Edwardian public education, made the long and supposedly permanent crossing of the Atlantic, and embarked on a settled, productive life as a citizen of the Empire. He still lives under the Union Jack, still considers himself British, and enjoys the company of people like himself. A Presbyterian from a long line of Presbyterians, he goes to church regularly and understands the centrality of work to who and what he is. He doesn't talk about these convictions as there is no need to do so—they are familiar, self-evident, and thus quietly assumed. Also assumed is his place within the Empire, not just politically but ideologically: the knowledge—and for a young middle-class white man from Britain it was taken to be knowledge—that the flag that flew over 40% of the world's land mass and, effectively, over most of its oceans, did so by the legitimate use of power guided by both human and divine justice. He has his being, both biological and non-biological, through the Empire—quite literally, he lives through and by the Empire—and inversely, the Empire lives through him and people like him: a holographic polity played out both externally and internally.

Then: the War.

And with the War: a rapid re-configuring of not just who but also what he is. His horizons contract both geographically and spiritually while his bonds with the men who now share and largely define his world intensify. The high ideals for which he has been taught to value the Empire are stripped from him in the first bombardment as he comes to know the un-euphemized conclusion of his own society's industry. He learns that his life is worth less than the continued operation of any given piece of artillery as he is easier and cheaper to replace. At the same time, both his training and his experience teach him that his function overlaps those of the men and machines with whom he shares the front, his life now in the hands of people who had recently been strangers on the one hand, and on the other, of the masses, velocities, and trajectories of grenades, bullets, and shells. Math—his life is in the hands of math. He is part of a machine stretching from the North Sea to the Swiss Alps, facing another version of itself across a narrow and shifting gap—or maybe simply another part of itself: a single apparatus set to work devouring a generation as it feeds itself with itself.

But no machine processes input without producing a corresponding output, and all machines are constrained by both their designs and, prior to these, their underlying assumptions. The most important assumption for our purposes is the I/NOT-I distinction as this is foundational to any human conflict. Also important to remember is that, though the machine's output may be more homogeneous, less nuanced, than its input, it is nonetheless just as real.

These are the terms in which I've had to reconsider Uncle Arthur's tragedy. Where until recently, I've seen this in terms of a true identity being overwritten by a false one, the bleaker but more tenable conclusion is that Arthur and Tommy were equally real. And in being equally real, they were also equally non-existent. As Robert Pepperell notes, the mind, contrary to the predominant religious and philosophic assumptions that have misguided the West for millennia, is best understood not as a thing but rather as an activity: just as walking is an activity of the legs and other parts, so the mind is an activity of the extended knowing system centered on, but not necessarily confined to, the brain. And just as any given instance of walking cannot be said to exist once the legs have stopped moving, so any given mind cannot be said to exist once the system from which it emerges stops functioning.

It follows that our identities can also be understood as actions rather than actors, with the actor recognized not as the self-conscious being but instead as the extended physical system that performs the gestures of selfhood. In a fully developed, well rounded identity, those gestures may resemble a dance, as they did for instance in Arthur's case. But as the enacting system is damaged, or as it wears down, that dance can degenerate into a lockstep, or a limp. But a limp is no less real than a dance: both are articulations of the systems from which they arise, and neither has any continuity beyond its system's operation.

On the bright side, the limits of the system are unclear—our boundaries uncertain, the I/NOT-I distinction, if it exists at all, more of a fluctuating field than a hard and fixed line. We are not—or at least need not remain—imprisoned in the psychological and social mechanisms that define and seek to contain us. Nor need we remain, or see ourselves as being, constrained by our superficially obvious edges. Our brains do not differentiate between body parts and fully mastered tools (Clark 2008), without which many of our identities would be impossible. Nor need we assume that the indeterminate field of identity negotiation does not overlap, and even contain, other selves with whom we have relationships, or that the fields centered on other people do not overlap and contain us. We extend into groups—army units, musical bands, families, intimate friends—and those groups themselves, as well as the people who make them up, also extend into us. We extend as well into our physical environments, especially those parts with which we are deeply familiar. With all of these extensions branching from our brains through our bodies, tools, social circles, and locales, the notion of the isolated, self-contained conscious being, so central to both our apparent common sense and guiding ideologies, becomes at best questionable and at worst untenable and destructive. Or perhaps this insular identity really is possible, but only through an act of self-amputation that has become so commonplace that its innate psychological violence is invisible to us. The wound is so ubiquitous that we may never even notice we are in pain.

If, however, we recognize the relational nature of our beings and identities, then we no longer accept the necessity of this amputation. Further, we embrace, or at least have the option of embracing, the possibility that our selves overlap and interweave with other selves as well as the environment and technological frameworks through which those selves arise. Such a move, if taken to its conclusion, can re-configure the basis for both moral relationship and self-interest. If there is no absolute boundary between I and NOT-I, between me and you, then I can't say with certainty that your well-being is not my well-being, that my community's well-being is not my well-being, or that the well-being of the socio-technological scaffolding through which our identities are embodied and enacted is not my well-being as well. That is, the insular personality of Hobbesian and Lockean, or even Rousseauvian philosophy, to say nothing of the rational and self-interested lone actor beloved of contemporary neo-conservatives, is little more than a mutilated stump of a person.

     vi

As I began with a story about death, I'd like to conclude with a story about life. Recently, while attending the FREDtalks conference at which I presented a preliminary version of this meditation, I learned that a friend of mine is pregnant. My immediate reaction was joy for Danielle as she was obviously happy, but then it occurred to me that I was already in a moral relationship with her child, and further, that insofar are there is no hard boundary between me and her, there is also no hard boundary boundary between her extended identity, obviously including her baby-to-be, and my own. Her child is thus a facet of my own being just as I am a facet of its being, and its ultimate happiness is not entirely separable from mine. That connection is not a mere abstraction. Rather, the Enlightenment notion of the self as an isolated and self-contained being is the abstraction—a particularly cold abstraction—that denies the richness of both subjective experience and objective fact.

It's in this organic, technological, and perpetually extending web of selves or self that Uncle Arthur, Tommy, an unnamed unborn baby, and “I” meet up. Maybe it's possible to peak out from under the shadow of the First World War, and maybe it's not. We'll probably never know whether we've managed it. One thing is clear, however: the logic behind both the ideologies and the mechanisms that made that war and its many consequences possible is a logic of perpetual reduction, perpetual separation, at once drawing lethal lines between US and THEM, and building up collective identities in which only the least nuanced facets of our subjective uniqueness can have any place, in which our Arthurs are melded into Tommies, the textures of our minds and experiences flattened to a level better suited to the collective impulse toward dominance. In this sense, the difference between flesh-and-blood Tommies and the collective hive-mind of an entity such as Star Trek TNG's Borg is merely one of metaphor, and perhaps not even that.

Danielle's baby presents another option, no less collective on the one hand but on the other, expansive rather than reductive in terms of the texture of experience and identity. Here, boundaries are transcended rather than enforced at the edges, and interwoven rather than detonated in the interior, self-interest fusing with empathy to the point that the mindsets, at least in potential, merge into a single impulse toward well-being. Our identities are always already embedded in others, and theirs in us. The more fully we embrace this in-born mutuality, the richer and more nuanced our identities will have the chance to become. And while I have not yet explored these ideas to their furthest conclusions, I'm beginning to wonder whether just this kind of shift in perceived identity is what we need to start addressing the social ills currently besetting North-American democracy, with its increasing tendency toward economic inequity in the name of some truncated neo-conservative individuality—the pursuit of perpetually increasing wealth at the cost of perpetually contracting moral horizons. We can do, and be, better. And recognizing the non-existence of the boundaries that separate us may may offer a way of moving past our mutual alienation—toward learning how to address one another with a greater emphasis on the music we can make than on the range and power of our guns.

7. Cyborg Anxiety: Part Two: We Are Not the Middle of Anything

Much of the unease surrounding the figure of the cyborg may stem from the religious and philosophic roots that underlie the dominant intellectual traditions in the West. These include the three Abrahamic religions and much of the Greco-Roman philosophic inheritance, as well as the notion of humanist individualism upon which modern Western democracy is largely premised. The religious and philosophic traditions of the East, however, tend to suggest an understanding of both time and identity much less apt to engender fear where the possibilities of fluid and composite selfhood arise.

So what is it about the Judeo-Christo-Islamic constellation of religions that makes people so edgy about the purity of their identities? Why do some people find cyborgs so damned scary? One possibility is that in all three of these world views, identity is singular. Each individual is responsible for his or her unique relationship with Yahweh-God-Allah. We are born at some point in linear time into a world that had a known beginning and is understood to be moving toward a prophesied end. In two of these faiths, moreover, it is only at the termination of linear time that the final disposition of all souls will be known. Necessarily, then, who we are matters a great deal. The stakes are high, and we need to get it right.

The religions originating in India, however, offer the basis for a different narrative. In both Hinduism and its offshoot Buddhism, time is not linear but cyclic. So rather than positing an origin some 6000 years before our present day (according to a literal reading of the Genesis myth), these thought systems envision an uncreated cosmos rolling through eternity in cycles within cycles, the largest of which dwarf the actual 13.72 billion year age of the known universe. Within these cycles, the cosmos arises and declines and arises again in perpetuity. And even within the current cycle, the scale and significance of which are both miniscule within the unfathomable chasm of the whole, there is no sense that humanity occupies a privileged position: we are neither the central nor the crowning gems.

It is not just the cosmos that runs in cycles; the circular understanding of time informs the understanding of personal identity as well. Both Hinduism and Buddhism, for instance, posit reincarnation. From the assumption of multiple lives, it follows that any given life is not a zero-sum game. We exist on the wheel of Samsara—the wheel of rebirth—and our current incarnation is probably neither our first nor our last. This position alone allows for both a looser and a more subtle understanding of identity as is casts into doubt the notion that any given life, let alone any given moment in a life, might embody the definitive or pure essence of our “self.” Identity is spread over an unfixed and perhaps unimaginable expanse of time. The effect seems to be a stratified conception of selfhood with each spin around the wheel adding another layer: more experience, more knowledge, more understanding.

Yet even this more complex and more interesting notion of personal identity does not mark the limit of the difference between the East and the mainstream West as both Hinduism and Buddhism stress the illusory nature of the distinction between self and other, or even between self and world. In the Chandogya Upanishad, for instance, the notion of the self as a discrete entity is explicitly dispensed with. This upanishad addresses a wide array of related topics ranging from existence itself through the boundaries of personal identity and beyond. At one point, in a dialogue between a boy Svetateku and his father Uddalaka, the father asks his son to pass him the fruit of a banyan tree. The fruit is then broken open to reveal the seeds inside, one of which is broken open in turn. Uddalaka then asks Svetateku what he sees:

“Nothing, sir.”

“Dear boy,” he said to him, “that finest essence which you do not perceive, from this very essence, dear boy, that great fig tree arises. Believe me, dear boy, that which is the finest essence, the whole universe, has That [tat] as its soul. That [tat] is Reality. That [tat] is the Self, and That is you [tat tvam asi], Svetaketu!” (6.12.1-3)

In the Upanishads, the Sanskrit demonstrative tat (that) is used to refer to the ultimately unspeakable source of all being that permeates both sentient and non-sentient matter as well as space itself. That is the source of consciousness, the infinite source of our finite lives, and thus ultimately the source of anything that we might want to call a “self.” We have being and knowledge only through That, and in death it is to That that we return, at least temporarily. The notion of the isolated unitary self, therefore, is one of the greatest illusions that the initiate must overcome on the path to true understanding. What the boy Svetaketu must learn here is not merely to expand a sense of self rooted in his own time and place beyond its apparent boundaries but rather to both know and feel that his isolation in a single subjective perspective is an illusion. He must learn to decenter his notion of himself—to see himself in everything and everyone around him, and even in the space between things. Similarly, he must learn that other selves—in fact all other selves—are also present in him.

A similar situation exists in Buddhism. Here, I'll take the Diamond Sutra, one of the cornerstone texts of Mahayana Buddhism, as my representative work, but in this case as well as with the Chandogya Upanishad, numerous other options are available. In this brief sutra, cast as a dialogue between the Buddha and an advanced disciple named Subhuti, the speakers peel back layer after layer of social convention as the teacher leads the student toward a clearer understanding of reality. Nearing the half-way point in the conversation, Subhuti, his understanding now awakened, says of the enlightened people of the future that

“they will be free from the idea of an ego-entity, free from the idea of a personality, free from the idea of a being, and free from the idea of a separated individuality. And why? Because the distinguishing of an ego entity is erroneous. Likewise the distinguishing of a personality, or a being, or a separated individuality is erroneous. Consequently those who have left behind every phenomenal distinction are called Buddhas all.” (XIV)

Shortly thereafter, building on the same theme, the Buddha informs his student that “Bodhisattvas who are wholly devoid of any conception of separate selfhood are truthfully called Bodhisattvas” (XVIII). What emerges from the sutra as a whole is a sense of all categories, and thus all boundaries, as illusory products emerging from the inability of language to represent or express reality directly. Identity from this perspective is a product of discourse, not an actual thing in itself.

The Taoist writings of early China present a similar picture. Here as well, the notion of the stable self comes under question. Both the Tao Te Ching and the Chuang Tzu dwell upon the root unity of all things, and upon the insufficiency of language, or even reason itself, to adequately grasp that which it tries to grasp, be it the whole of existence or an individual identity. Of the many passages in the Tao Te Ching that might illustrate this tendency, I've settled on part 13, which begins “Honor is a contagion deep as fear / renown a calamity profound as self” (TTC 13). The notion of honour as a contagion is a little startling as most of us are probably accustomed to thinking of this attribute as a virtue, but even more startling is the implied relationship between honour and fear—a relationship made clear by the parallels in the next line in which “renown” takes the place of “honor” and “self” takes the place of “fear.” (Exact translations vary, but the structure is pretty consistent.) Implied is a connection between fear and self that gets at the root of Western cyborg anxiety. While the visceral response of immediate fear stems from the survival instinct we share with most other animals, fear as it arises from thought is only possible in the context of a differentiated self. That is, in order to be worried about our boundaries, either physical or psychological, being violated, we first need to have a pretty strong sense that those boundaries actually exist and that we know at least roughly where they are. If that sense of boundedness is let go, the basis for any unease over their transgression evaporates as well:

When all beneath heaven is your self in renown

you trust yourself to all beneath heaven,

and when all beneath heaven is yourself in love

you dwell throughout all beneath heaven.” (TTC 13)

Similarly, it is only without a sense of distinct selfhood that one can “Inhabit the furthest peripheries of emptiness / and abide in the tranquil center” (TTC 16), or in other words attain or return to that sense of primal unity that language and reason necessarily fracture.

Chuang Tzu is also skeptical about the notion of selfhood, as becomes apparent in numerous passages in the work attributed this most jovial of all Chinese philosophers. For the sake of brevity, I will limit my discussion to one:

“We invest each other with selves. But how can we know that what we call a self is really a self? We dream we're birds soaring through the heavens. We dream we're fish diving into the depths. So when teachers like me speak—how can we know if they're awake or if they're dreaming?

“A pilgrimage can't compare to a good laugh, and a good laugh can't compare to simply letting yourself go. Once you're at peace, letting yourself go and leaving change behind, then you enter the solitary mystery of heaven.” (CT VI 12)

Here, in the 4^th century B.C., the notion of the self as a social construct has one of its clearest articulations. Identity here is not merely an illusion arising from language: it is a project undertaken by communities. It is the means by which communities distinguish their members from one another, and in the absence of community, it makes no sense at all. But because identity is a social construct rather than an an integral state or quality, it is always unstable and thus can never be a source of certainty. Rather, it is a source of isolation by its very nature, and as such is best let go. The “solitary mystery of heaven,” then, is not solitary in the sense of a single self alone; it is solitary in the sense that the boundaries of the self have completely dissolved.

Of course, the underlying assumptions of most religions, Eastern or Western, differ from those involved in the cyborg approach to identity. The former are dualist while the latter either assumes a materialist understanding of the world and human nature, or at least does not make a dualist assumption. I highlight this difference to make clear that I am not asserting any supposed transcendental truth in Hinduism, Buddhism, or Taoism any more than I would do with Judaism, Christianity, or Islam. For my thesis to hold, though, it is not required that the assumptions underlying some Eastern religions or philosophies be true—it is merely required that they be believed in their own communities, and that they be more compatible with a cyborg approach to identity than the assumptions underlying the Abrahamic religions or the Platonic and Aristotelian philosophic traditions.

So I am not adopting a Buddhist, Taoist, or generalized and clichéd “Eastern” perspective. But even given the inversion of these worldviews' assumptions that a cyborg understanding of selfhood involves, there is enough common ground to account for the lower degree of cyborg anxiety, or even of a more general technological anxiety, in the East than in the West. From Hindu, Buddhist, Taoist, and cyborg points of view, identity even as immediately embodied is mutable. The boundaries that separate ME from NOT-ME are illusory—the products of assumptions and traditions that originate in the artifice of culture or in the necessarily limited perspective of my own apparent subjective position in the world. They are not absolute, and while I may knowingly or unknowingly allow them to define me, there is no transcendent necessity that they do so. From either point of view, my boundaries can expand, contract, or vanish.

In the thought-worlds of the East, therefore, identity is not the insular phenomenon that most of us in the West take it to be. Bound by neither time nor space, it is flexible in ways that many living in the shadow of either Western religion or the main stream of Greek philosophy might easily find unsettling. The individual—that fundamental construct of our intellectual inheritance—threatens to expand to the point of disappearing into its web of parts, perceptions, and relationships. Given the instability of the very notion of selfhood, it would make little sense for a person raised in these thought-worlds to be overly concerned about the intrusion of technology into social or physical spaces traditionally assumed to be the domains of flesh, blood, and mind. We are unstable and ever-changing hybrids by our very nature, and as such have no need to fear another element or two thrown into the mix.

6. Cyborg Anxiety, Part One: Me, Myself, and Not I

We exist under the illusion that we exist as we perceive ourselves to be. This illusion, at least in the West, underpins not only our senses of self, but also our personal, legal, civic, and moral relationships. As such, it is, for many, psychologically necessary at the individual level. It may also be necessary at the levels of both community and government. But that something is necessary does not make it real. That we want something to be the case, does not ever mean that it is so—no matter how badly we may want it.

In an earlier post, I brought up the topic of cyborg anxiety: the unease that many people feel about the figure of the cyborg. Specifically, I mentioned an abiding fear of both the machine without and the machine within. That is, our most common fears where cyborgs are concerned seem to be twofold: first, that actual, tangible machines threaten our identities and autonomy, and second, that our mental processes are themselves becoming mechanized through our immersion in mass culture—mass education, mass economics, mass politics, mass media. So in the current post, I would like to begin exploring this ambient unease.

Our discomfort with external machines is the easiest to address. They are visible signs—signs of change, signs of powers often beyond our abilities to comprehend, perhaps also signs of our perceived insufficiency and weakness. Workers worry, legitimately, that their jobs are being taken by machines: whole categories of artisan industry have disappeared from modern society in any but a living-museum context. Weaving, blacksmithing, bookmaking by hand—these and other crafts, while popular at renaissance fairs and other orgies of anachronism, no longer play any significant social role. More importantly, manual labourers numbering in the millions have been replaced by robots, or had their positions eliminated in favour of machines that allow a single worker to do what once required many sets of hands. Of course, this situation is not a recent development: at the height of the Roman Empire, a paleolithic maker of hand-axes, no matter how expert in his craft, would have faced serious challenges in the job market, and rightly so: he was no longer making anything for which anyone had a use. New technologies are always replacing old, and the skills of one generation are often made irrelevant by the technologies, capacities, and priorities of the next. Where once I might have felt a little melancholy over this fact, years of listening to people of older generations, and increasingly people of my own, lament the good old days when the ever-changing world had not yet changed beyond their will or ability to keep up, have left me pretty bluntly callous: We are dynamic creatures in a dynamic world, and change is a fact of our existence. Painful sometimes, yes, and often even tragic—but an integral condition of our being.

Our most serious anxiety, however, is our fear of the machine within. This fear appears to take two forms: the fear of our minds becoming mechanized, and the fear of our sense of “self” being disassembled. For the last century or more, education systems in the West, and particularly in North America, have been increasingly geared toward serving the needs of industry rather than fostering individual excellence or deeply analytic thought. Our schools resound with bells whose primary purpose is not to announce the change of periods but rather to accustom us, from an early age, to responding instantly and thoughtlessly to bells. Our politicians speak of schools as training-grounds whose primary purpose is to feed the machinery of our economies, and increasingly post-secondary institutions and our governments themselves are becoming beholden to private capital—our people less and less citizens in democratic polities, and more and more functions in systems designed first to generate and then to isolate wealth. Our individual agency is increasingly under threat.

So it is not surprising that the image of a human body permeated by, or integrated with, an explicitly machine-like system should provoke anxiety. The suggestion, for example, of nano-machines rearranging our genes, hormones, and thoughts, or of a human form penetrated by wires and other more arcane components, strikes me as an apt symbol of the soft systems that have reached so deeply into our psyches as to constitute simultaneously alien and integral elements of our identities. To what degree are our thoughts our own? To what degree, if any, are we unique and morally significant beings?

Not least of the worries here is the question of free will. If the thing that I think of as “I” does not end where I think it ends, if it extends beyond apparent boundaries while simultaneously incorporating bits and pieces of the outside within itself—both concrete and abstract—is it even possible for me to form a compelling and consistent image of “me”? Or does the image slip into the periphery of my mental vision every time I try to look at it straight on? In the absence of such an image, the stable point required to confidently assert any freedom of thought or action simply does not exist. If I cannot say that any given thought or impulse arises from something called “me” as opposed to one of the many systems permeating my intellectual, emotional, and moral being, can I take credit for my achievements? Can others blame me for my misdeeds? If “I” have become part of a larger system—or if that is what we have always been—do I have any basis at all to assert my own experience and meaning?

But it is the de-unification of our identities that, at least in my classroom experience, tends to provoke the strongest adverse reactions. It is not just that we want to have or believe in some part of ourselves that is “pure” in the sense of being true or real independently of external pressures and agendas; we want or need that part to be singular. Indivisible. And for a large majority, we want or need that singular indivisible part to be free, even, of our bodies. So when cognitive scientists point to different parts of the brain as being responsible for different facets of the mind, when they observe that the internal models of the external world upon which we base all of our judgements are the flawed and contingent constructs of a very physical organ, when they point out that the cerebral mechanisms by which we learn to use tools and other prostheses are exactly the same as those by which we learn to use our limbs and digits, the reaction can be quick and hostile. The scientists are not explaining, or so the reaction goes: they are explaining away—as if there were some tacit contract not to ask questions beyond a certain point, and a corresponding option to disregard the evidence if it happens to contradict some dearly held belief.

In short, the sheer demonstrable physicality of the mind, and its accompanying modularity, can render untenable any intuitive, commonsense, or metaphysical understanding of the self. Wherever we look, we just aren't there—nor are we ever quite absent. Or to push a little further, I might refer to Robert Pepperell's suggestion that the mind is not a thing at all, but rather an action: just as walking is an action of the legs (and its associated systems or prostheses), the mind is an action of the brain (and its associated systems or prostheses). The mind, in this view, has no being at all, any more than a walk, a swim, or a nap can be said to have being. It is ephemeral—existing not in itself but in the gaps between neurons, the imperceptible no-place between the observing brain/body and the observed world. And it can be disassembled one cell, one lobe, one fleeting moment of lost certainty at a time.

So where does that leave us? If the mind is not a stable thing, then identity takes on the character of a dance. We move through space, time, and community to the rhythms of our environments, merging with the technologies of restoration and enhancement. We spread our selves across our own perceptions and those of the persons with whom we interact face-to-face or at a distance. We are here briefly, in fragments and in constellations, and then we are not. And in that brief flicker of presence, we know ourselves as ethical beings—as desiring and fearing and suffering beings. It is at this level, I think, rather than at the mythic levels to which so many of us are attached, that we are most able to form moral relationships. That “I” may not be reducible to a single and self-consistent essence, and while “you” may remain forever inaccessible both to me and to yourself, does not mean that we have no basis on which to relate. We move with and through each other, blurred and wavering. And it is from the movements rather than in the things that are moving, that we might find our selves peaking out.

(... to be continued. In Part Two, I plan on looking at some of the philosophies of East Asia and exploring the hypothesis that these systems of thought are less apt to engender a sense of cyborg anxiety than are the dominant world views in the West. In the meantime, comments are welcome.)

5. Well Bless My Cyborg Soul

“But soon,” he cried with sad and solemn enthusiasm, “I shall die, and what I now feel be no longer felt. Soon these burning miseries will be extinct. I shall ascend my funeral pile triumphantly, and exult in the agony of the torturing flames. The light of that conflagration will fade away; my ashes will be swept into the sea by the winds. My spirit will sleep in peace; or if it thinks, it will not surely think thus. Farewell.”

The speaker of the forgoing quotation makes assumptions that will be familiar to the majority of human beings: that he is alive now and will soon die; that dying will be unpleasant; and that some part of his being will, or at least might, survive his passing. Or in short, he entertains the possibility that he has a soul. Also worth noting is that he is presently suffering. That is, he experiences, and knows himself to experience, pain. This also is a common human phenomenon, as it is largely through reflecting on our own suffering and its causes that we come to understand both ourselves and our world, and the value of a compassionate relationship between the two.

The speaker, however, is not human: these are the final works of the Monster in the 1818 edition of Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein. The character, then, is a product not of “nature” as commonly understood, but of technology: as a hybrid of biology and technology, he is a cyborg according to any current definition of the term. And as I've mentioned in an earlier posting on this blog (entry # 2), he also meets Locke's definition of personhood, namely the possession of reason, self-awareness, and memory. The question of souls, though, may appear to be a different matter. In my teaching on cyborgs, I've come across some concern on the subject of the soul. Do made beings have souls? Can made beings have souls? Does this question conceivably draw a line between the purely human, if such a being exists, and the bio-tech hybrid? At some point, given a progressive hybridization, might a human be understood to have lost her or his soul? I've long suspected, and in the most recent run of the Human Nature and Technology course at STU had it more or less confirmed, that a major source of discomfort in our society with the image of the cyborg, and the prospect of increasing biotechnological hybridization, centres precisely on the question of souls. And so far in my own reading in the field of cyborg studies, I've seen little explicit mention of the subject.

I suppose the first thing to do is to lay out what I mean by “soul” as the term is almost as slippery as “nature.” While it might be tempting to work with a specifically Christian conception of the term, I am going to avoid this temptation in favour of a more general understanding. After all, nothing in Shelley's novel identifies her own sense of the term with any specific religious doctrine. The Monster, in his final words, seems to appeal to a basic dualism that pervades most cultural traditions, East and West. That is, he at least entertains the possibility that some essential element of our identities is not bound to any physical substance, but rather is metaphysical in nature. It is this basic metaphysical claim that I wish to address. And to be clear, I will not be making a case in this entry for or against the existence of the soul. Rather, I will be making a simple appeal for intellectual consistency.

So ...

Let's begin with the fact that there is no empirical evidence for the existence of the soul. If there were, arguments for the soul would not be metaphysical: they would be physical. So any claim for a supernatural dimension to our being must be based on something other than evidence—whatever that might be. The sheer ubiquity of the belief in some part of us that is not bound to our physical form, moreover, is no argument for the correctness of the position. To accept such an argument is to fall victim to an informal logical fallacy known as the argumentum ad populum fallacy, or in more colloquial terms, the bandwagon fallacy. It is also, as I think anyone reading this blog will recognize upon self-reflection, extremely difficult to imagine a future from which all facets of ourselves are absent. Knowing our bodies to have relatively short expiry dates, it is therefore normal to project a non-physical type of consciousness onto the world both present and future—and in many case, particularly in the East, past as well. And while some particularly brilliant thinkers, such as René Decartes, have argued for the existence of the soul through intensive and systematic skepticism of all outward or physical things as opposed to the apparent existence and unity of the thinking self, such arguments fall apart when confronted with the findings of modern cognitive science, principally that the apparent unity of the mind is, itself, the illusory product of several discrete systems working in the brain. Descartes cannot be faulted for his conclusions here: he simply did not have access to our data, or to the technology that made it possible.

But what does this have to do with Frankenstein's Monster? The Monster is, after all, a made thing: a product of human hands. Here is where the intellectual consistency part of this entry comes in. The Monster's point of view on this matter is essentially our own, with the single exception that he has no illusions of a metaphysical origin: having read the words of his creator pertaining to his creation, he knows himself to be the product of physical mechanisms, much as evolutionary science subsequent to the novel's publication has shown us to be as well. And yet he imagines, and allows for the possibility, of the metaphysical. There is no evidence for his supposition—and he does at least have the intellectual integrity not to assert it as a fact.

So given the lack of evidence for a soul, what is the difference between the Monster and us? Quite frankly, there is none. The Monster has as much claim to a soul as does any human being on the planet. This is not to say that souls do not exist: it is to say that the intellectually honest reader of this novel is faced with a choice between two positions: to deny the Monster a soul is to deny a soul to any human being, while to claim a soul for oneself is to allow the Monster the same.

The next and most obvious question is, “So what?” And I think this is one of the most important questions that the novel raises, because of course the question extends not just to the monster but to any potential intelligent machine as well. That is, when we finally build a machine that has intelligence comparable to our own, we will have no more or no less reason to assume ensoulment with our creation than we do with ourselves. To assert that another intelligent entity does not have a soul while claiming a soul for oneself is to assume for oneself a special or privileged position in the absence of any supporting evidence. This is an essentially racist position—a position that James Hughes in his 2004 book Citizen Cyborg labels “human racism”—and as such is no less morally culpable than racism directed at any other being that qualifies for personhood. Any intelligent machine that we make will be of a kind with us simply by virtue of its intelligence, and thus in community with us. Any a priori assumptions about the presence of a soul in us and its absence in the thinking and self-aware product of our science will certainly lead to a mythically based presumption of superiority—and our own history tells us, over and over again, where that road leads. Further, should such a creation ultimately become more intelligent than us, this discriminatory position would be roughly analogous to a homo habilis asserting its superiority over homo sapiens by virtue of some particular characteristic that it had but that we do not have, without taking into account the many gains that have been made over the last two million years of evolution. That is, to create a definition of “soul” that can only be met by homo sapiens would be to proceed ontologically. Such an argument would have about as much to do with the world outside the arguer's head as does any other ontological argument, for instance those of Anshelm or Descartes.

So ultimately, what am I getting at in this rambling little entry? I suppose it is this: given the equivalence of any argument either for the soul or against the soul where a multiplicity of intelligent beings, born or made, is concerned, the question is utterly irrelevant. If I have a soul, then so do you, and that's just peachy. And if you don't, then I don't either, and that's fine, too. In any case, the question can have no bearing on how we treat or respect each other. Or as Confucius put it in the sixth century B.C., “Do not do to others what you would not have done to yourself.” As our machines progress more and more rapidly toward intelligence, this moral admonition becomes increasingly relevant to beings other than humans. There is likely to come a point, quite possibly during the current century, when to hit or not to hit the “off” switch becomes one of our most pressing ethical questions.