4. A Meditation on Modular Identity
(Adapted
from a slideshow through which I introduce students in Dr. Andrew Moore’s and
my class on Human Nature and Technology to the figure of the cyborg)
The
image of the cyborg invites some interesting and challenging questions. What is
our relationship to technology? What role does technology play in identity? Can
we even have selves in the absence of technology, or are the biological and
technological so closely interwoven in us as to be inextricable? What, then, is
“human”? Then there are the metaphysical questions. Is our nature purely
material, or is there a part of us that exists outside of, or beyond, the
material realm? And if so, does our cyborg nature impact our relationship with
that?
The figure of the cyborg has become familiar
at the level of popular culture, and is increasingly becoming the subject of
serious scholarship in both the sciences and the humanities. The term itself
dates only to 1960 and a paper written by Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline.
Their objective was to propose modifications to the human body in order to
prepare it for space exploration, with the intent to augment the biological
body in such a way that it could function in an alien and hostile environment.
They contracted the word “cyborg” from the term “cybernetic organism” and
defined these seemingly new constructs as “self-regulating man-machine
systems.” Since 1960, the quantity and the variety of these figures, both real
and imagined, have increased to the point where the image of the cyborg has
become an effective critical tool for the examination of human nature. During
this time, several variations on the original definition have been proposed.
David Hess, in his 1995 discussion of “Low-Tech Cyborgs” defines the construct
as “any identity between machine and human or any conflation of the
machine/human boundary.” More recently, Andy Clark succinctly labels them as
“hybrid biotechnological selves” (2003). What these and other definitions share is the
configuration of the organic and the technological into a single system.
Another typical feature is a sense of uncertainty as to where the border
between the two might lie, and whether the notion of such a border even remains
necessary.
James Cameron’s 1984 movie The Terminator addresses a widespread
anxiety regarding the relationship between humans and machines. The image of
the grinning, red-eyed machine-skull initially hidden under a layer of human
skin has become a pop culture icon, instantly recognizable even to many who
were not born when the film made its debut, and the fear that humanity will
someday engineer a superior artificial intelligence is not unreasonable. While
it does not necessarily follow that this intelligence would attempt to
annihilate its predecessor species, the possibility is both provocative and
haunting, and has given birth to much speculation both inside and outside of
the realm of science fiction. A less obvious but perhaps more threatening facet
of this image is its depiction of the machine within, evoking the fear not that
we are threatened by machines but rather that we are becoming machines,
ourselves.
This
fear lies at the heart of Star Trek: The Next
Generation’s Borg. The Borg are a race of beings bound together by a
unifying technology that both permeates and surrounds them, enveloping them in
a group identity or hive mind in which there is no room for individuality. The
Borg expand by conquering new planets and assimilating their people, injecting
their conquests with transformative nano-machines and submerging their
biological selves beneath a layer of hardware and software that links them to
the collective. To many viewers, the Borg are the most unsettling antagonist in
the Star Trek mythos, I believe
because they embody both a fear and an acknowledgement of humanity’s
relationship with technology—a genuine unease about the borders of our own
identities, and the stability of those borders. How much of “me” originates
inside me, and how much is imposed from outside? Is there a part of me that is
inviolate, or is the whole system subject to invasion and revision? As we make
more and more powerful machines, are our machines re-making us?
The answer to that last question is pretty clearly “yes.” Consider the
pilot of an Apache attack helicopter. The helicopter’s armaments are slaved to
the helmet and turn with the pilot’s head, with the result that the pilot can
shoot whatever he can see, the weapons effectively becoming an extension of his
or her will. Helicopter and pilot become a single unit, what Chris Hables Gray
refers to as a “man machine weapon system,” the object of much contemporary
military research. While the power relations are not the same as those in the
Borg, with the human will directing the technology rather than vice versa, the
biological/technological relationship is still intimate, and the enacted
identity impossible without both components closely interfaced. Pepperell (2003, 2005) takes this argument
further, observing that the human body has no fixed boundaries when examined at
a sufficiently high resolution. A logical conclusion of this indeterminacy is
that the boundary of the human body is at best problematic and quite possibly
illusory. Both Pepperell (2003, 2005) and Clark (2003, 2011), moreover,
recognize that consciousness, rather than being limited to the brain, emerges
from the system as a whole. That is, consciousness is a process, analogous to
the boiling of water in a kettle, rather than an identifiable thing that can be
tied to a fixed location, and as such its working is distributed across body
and environment.
A more extreme example, and one more closely in line with the coining of
the term “cyborg” as a “self-sustaining man-machine system,” is the figure of
the astronaut. While we might tend to think of the astronaut as the person, and
the space suit as mere equipment, the case is not so simple. As with the Apache
pilot, the identity “astronaut” is impossible to enact in the absence of the
relevant hardware, which encases the human body in a self-contained
environment. And this is to say nothing of the software—the technical skills
and expertise that the human component must master in order to operate the suit
and carry out whatever function the assembly exists to perform. None of these
elements can be absent if the identity in question is to be present. So again,
we are left wondering, where does identity reside?
One possible answer is, in the brain. The brain may
indeed be necessary, but is it both necessary and sufficient? Is it the sole
component of identity? Were this the case, then the science fictional scenario
of transplanting a brain into either another body or a machine would involve no
change in self. “You” could still be completely “yourself” in your body,
someone else’s body, an artificial human-like body, or a container that
resembles a tank, a skyscraper, a space ship, or something that has yet to be
imagined. The problem with this image, though, is that the brain itself is an
arbitrary construct.
Huh? What the hell is that supposed to mean?
Let me put it this way. Considering that the entire
nervous system—brain, spinal cord, and our whole network of nerves—is
continuous, the breaking down of the system into discrete parts, while useful
in discourse, is problematic when we look beyond the conventions of language.
Or to put it philosophically, the brain is epistemic, not ontological. While
the distinction brain/not-brain is useful, this distinction is not a function
of the body, but rather a function of our own systems of thought. It exists in
our minds, and in our written and visual texts, but nowhere else.
Actually, the common
tendency to locate identity in the brain appears, to me at least, to be a
physical manifestation of the mind-body dualism that informs—I’m tempted to say
plagues—so much of Western religion and philosophy. Mind-body dualism, for
those of you not familiar with the term, is simply the belief that the mind has
an existence separate from the body, and that our essential being, therefore,
is not physical, or at least not wholly so, i.e. that we are metaphysical as
well as physical beings. While brain-body dualism, as opposed to mind-body
dualism, does not address the metaphysical, it does treat the brain as a
separate and special thing, making it roughly analogous to a driver, whose car
is not integral to his or her identity. The intimate interweaving of the
nervous system throughout the body makes this position difficult to maintain.
Another position, and one that is in keeping with much of
current cognitive science, is that consciousness is embodied. That is,
consciousness does not depend only on the brain, but also on the body of which
the brain is a part. Our experience of identity, from this perspective, is
largely an experience of a particular body’s relationship with its surrounding
environment. In this sense, identity is a distributed phenomenon, covering both
the brain and the rest of the body. This understanding of identity as a
distributed phenomenon intersects in some curious ways with John Locke’s
definition of personhood. Rather than offering a genetic or biological
definition, for example membership in the human species, Locke offers a
functional definition. He refers not to what a thing is, but rather to what the
thing does, defining a “person” as “a thinking intelligent being, that has
reason and reflection, and can consider itself as itself, the same thinking
thing, in different times and places” (Locke, Essay Concerning Human
Understanding, II xxvii 9). That is to say, it possesses reason,
self-awareness, and memory. We might also consider philosopher of consciousness
Daniel Dennett’s suggestion that “I am the sum total of the parts that I
control directly” (Dennett 1984). In a rejection of Cartesian dualism, Dennett
identifies consciousness not as an immaterial substance that has an eternal
existence independent of any physical phenomenon but rather as the activity of
a physical system.
Direct control, however, is not limited to the body. Clark (2003, 2011)
refines the concept through his proposed idea of “transparency in use.” By his
reckoning, a tool—or even a body part—can be either opaque or transparent. It
is opaque when the user needs to focus on the item itself while trying to
perform a particular task, as for example an inexperienced musician must
concentrate on the details of the instrument in question when trying to make
music, or as an infant must concentrate first on its fingers to learn their use
before it can employ them in any deliberate manner—learning curves that
incidentally involve precisely the same mechanisms at the level of the brain
(Clark 2003). To an accomplished musician, on the other hand, the instrument is
transparent: he or she focuses not on the instrument but on the desired outcome—the
music—and simply produces it in the same way that a person who wants to open a
jar of peanut butter simply opens the jars rather than consciously directing
every joint and muscle movement. Another example is a prosthesis that enables a
person to enact an otherwise unattainable identity. The identity “runner” is
not possible without the ability to run, and running for a one-legged person
requires a prosthesis whose use must be learned in the same manner as a
biological limb or a guitar. Therefore, the prosthesis (or a prosthesis)
is integral to the identity in question in precisely the same way that a
musical instrument is integral to the identity “musician.
But just how far beyond the biological body, and through
how many media, can personal identity extend? Clark (2011), working from
Gallagher (1998), proposes the idea of the “body schema” in answer to this
question. While the more common phrase “body image” refers roughly to the
picture of the body maintained by an individual at the level of conscious
awareness and as such is highly subject to cultural influences, “body schema”
is “a suite of neural settings that implicitly (and nonconsciously) define a
body in terms of its capacities for action” (Clark 2011 39). The brain, Clark
explains, distinguishes between “near space” and “far space” according to what
can be acted upon by the entity defined by the body schema, and what cannot. I
need to be clear that this distinction is both physical and demonstrable.
Certain neurons in the primate intraparietal cortex that initially fire only
when a potential stimulus comes within reach of the hand, even in the presence
of an unmastered tool, will, once the tool has been mastered, fire when that
same stimulus comes within reach of the extended body-tool system (Clark 2011
38, ref. Maravita and Iriki 2004 79). As far as the brain is concerned, in
other words, a tool is as good as a hand, or conversely, the hand is just
another a tool. The biological body is thus a platform to which modules can be
added at need, and whose initial components, such as limbs, are in fact
replaceable.
In the slide above, the identity “carpenter,” “handyman,”
or “tool guy” is mediated by a prosthesis: the drill is at one technological
remove from the human body, but all three elements contribute to the identity,
with the drill, after sufficient practice, becoming a piece of transparent
technology perceived by the brain to be in the near space and thus becoming
incorporated into the person’s body schema. In principle, there is no distal
limit to what the brain, with sufficient practice, can recognize a near space
and thus make a part of its working model of the body. Or to speak more
precisely, the distal limit is a function of the speed of light, a matter to
which I will return.
It may be useful to consider Australian performance
artist Stelarc, seen here, in a picture taken in the early 1980s, writing the
word “evolution” with three hands simultaneously. The third arm is connected to
sensors positioned over muscles on his thigh and abdomen, and he controls the
arm by moving these muscles. By the time this picture had been taken, Stelarc
had attained sufficient control over the extra arm to be able to use it as
unselfconsciously as he would use any other body part. It had, for him, become
transparent (Clark 2003), and fully incorporated into his body schema. The
extra arm thus functions not merely as a tool but as a component in a unified
system. Here, we have gone from restorative cyborg technology to the technology
of augmentation.
The question of selfhood thus becomes a question of borders. Where, as I
asked above, does “me” end and “not me” begin? This question can be understood
in two ways. The first and perhaps more obvious is, “How permeable am I?” The
second is, “How permeable are you?” Is there a part of the self that is
categorically distinct from all other beings and things? It is comforting to
think that there is, but evidence for such an inviolable island-self is pretty
hard to come by. The brain, as we have seen, actually makes the me/not me
distinction not on absolute grounds, but rather on a functional basis,
incorporating such props, tools, and prostheses as usefully present themselves.
This observation, though, still leaves open the possibility that, while items
can be incorporated or discarded, the inner workings of the system remain
hermetically sealed and, in a sense, pure.
Not all thought systems, however, construct such borders.
As indicated above, such dualism is a product of Western philosophy and
religion. Such clear distinctions do not exist in Buddhism. The Diamond
Sutra, for instance, identifies even such constructs as the self and the
world as illusory—as mere categories of thought. That such categories are built
largely through language lends credence to the Buddhist position. Clark
identifies language as a “cognitive technology,” a mental tool that we use to
symbolize the world both inside and outside of ourselves, without which we
could not engage in complex mental processes or be able to formulate thoughts
about our relationships with the world (Clark 2003, 2011). Insofar as our
“selves” exist in a web of language, they are products of cognitive technology
and thus not distinct from any other object on or through which that technology
might work.
Going further back still, the Hindu Chandogya
Upanishad offers a similar understanding in the recurring pronouncement, Tat
tvam asi (“You are that,” or more accurately, “That you are.”). The refrain
initially occurs in a conversation between the character Śvetaketu and his
father Uddalaka. It is spoken by Uddalaka as his son looks out upon the world,
suggesting a unity between the perceiving subject and the object perceived.
That is, the subject/object distinction is an illusion, and all things are
united in a universal whole. In this context, it is worth noting that in
Eastern and South-East Asia, the figure of the cyborg provokes little anxiety.
Not so in the West. Another iconic pop culture cyborg,
Robocop, from the 1986 movie of the same name, offers a useful illustration of
our conflicted view of cyborgs, especially once the mechanisms of state and
corporate interests become involved. In this film, Officer Murphy is killed in
action. Elements of his body, including his brain, are incorporated into a new
hybrid construction, Robocop. Most memories of his previous life are not
present to his awareness, and he is tightly constrained by his new programming.
The reconstruction and programming are both carried out by Omni Consumer
Products (OCP), a multinational corporation that has been contracted to provide
law enforcement for a crime-ridden and violent Detroit. Over the course of the
movie, Robocop discovers corruption within OCP itself, but finds that his
programming prevents him from combatting it. Meanwhile, he is experiencing
flashbacks of his life as Murphy. The result of these and other story elements
is a conflict over his identity. The conflict is played out both internally and
externally and culminates in his electrocuting himself in order to burn out his
programming and reclaim his freedom of will.
Flash forward to 2011, and the protests surrounding the
Toronto G-20 summit. Here, too, we see the playing out of numerous distributed
identities. And here, too, we see the strands of both outer and inner machines
weaving over and into human flesh. In this image, for instance, despite the
presence of numerous bodies, there are arguably only two functioning
identities: police and photographer. Each is composed of multiple elements,
some visible and some not. The most obvious are the police. Though each man and
woman in that riot gear is arguably a discrete being, their individual
identities are merely components in the identity that defines them
collectively. Outwardly, their bodies are encased in uniforms and armour, and
it is this armour that they present, as a united front, to the protesters. Yet
even this is not the limit of the elements that define the identity “police
officer” in Toronto 2011. Their helmets and uniforms brand them as “police”
while their service numbers place them, piece by piece, within that larger
social machine. Look broader still, and we see the institutions and ideologies
of which this particular line of officers is merely one facet. And given that
many of the protesters believed—rightly, in my opinion—that the government
delegates at the summit were acting more in the interests of corporate
wellbeing than in the cause of the public good, the institutions and ideologies
in question are not necessarily those of representative democracy but rather
those of an increasingly corporatist elite. Thus, what seems at first a great
gulf between the police officers and pre-electrocution Robocop is reduced to
the magnitude of an aesthetic twitch.
More interesting, though, is the other visible cyborg
identity in this image: the protester/photographer. While one might be tempted
to see the identity as located exclusively in the young man holding the camera,
in fact it is distributed across a system that incorporates both of these
elements and, like the collective identity of the police line he is
confronting, extends well beyond the visual field. The obvious line of thought
is that the identity “photographer” is impossible without a camera in precisely
the same way that the identity “runner” is impossible without legs of some
kind. But let’s look beyond the obvious. Even if we stick to the man and the
camera, there is no clear boundary between the two. Having spent much of my
life with a camera in my hand, and having cut my teeth on black and white
photography and spent much of my adolescence working in our basement darkroom
processing surveillance photos for the private investigation industry in
Toronto, I can speak with some authority on the effect that looking through a
camera lens has on the mind and perceptions of an experienced photographer.
First, when I look through the eye piece of a single lens reflex (slr) camera,
such as the one in the picture here, while I do not technically see in black
and white, my perception of light intensity is magnified to the extent that, in
my mind’s eye, I know what the black of white version of the visual field will
look like. Such is not the case when I look at the same scene with my naked
eye, or even when I remove the camera from my eyes without changing the angle
of my head. Similarly, while looking into the eye piece, although no
three-by-three grid is present to my biological sight, I see the visual field
in terms of just such a grid—the essential compositional map of any photograph.
Moreover, though my field of vision is narrowed from what is present to naked
sight, what I see, I see more clearly: I am more aware of details and the
relationships between them, to the extent that, when traveling or hiking for
example, I do not feel that I have seen a place completely until I have seen it
through a lens.
So how does this apply to the photographer pictured here?
In seeing through a camera, he is seeing through a
technological medium that both restricts and enhances his vision, changing it
qualitatively and, in a very real sense, for the better. He is also signalling
to the police that he is not a mere individual: that he is a part of a larger
body, and that in this moment, he is functioning as one of that body’s many eyes.
What the camera says to the mechanisms of power is not “I see you” but rather
“we see you,” or perhaps most importantly, “you are seen.” In that sense, it
functions similarly to the police armour: the camera is protection, and every
protester knows this.
Of course, not every costume is a uniform, nor does every
costume conceal. Readers familiar with the character Batman will know that the
real identity is Batman while Bruce Wayne, the man without the costume,
is the disguise. In the context of the comic, this assertion is not merely
metaphoric; it is functional. Integral to Batman’s identity is not just his
training and his high-tech equipment, but also the fear that he inspires in his
adversaries. And this fear is tied to the suit. Perhaps more importantly, the
image that the costume projects comes closer to the character’s interior state
than do the face and typically dapper wardrobe of the Bruce Wayne persona.
The relationship between inner and outer states
is even more explicit with Iron Man. The alter ego in this case, Tony Stark,
has a weak heart, which itself relies upon the suit’s technology in order to
keep beating. In this case, then, the technology is both interior and exterior
to the biological body, with heroic and basic life functions dependent upon it.
More broadly, the Iron Man identity is not limited to a single suit with fixed
parts: rather, a variety of suits and a wide array of purpose-built attachments
contribute to the overall embodiment of that particular modular self, which,
given Iron Man’s capacity to control multiple suits at a distance, cannot
absolutely be said to occupy a single or fixed chunk of space.
Cyborgs are thus not merely people using tools: they are composite
constructions that, right down to the biological and even neural levels, embody
unified functional identities. While human bodies and human brains may be
integral to these identities, by themselves they are not sufficient. The
enhancements that we adopt, be they fictional flying robotic armour, or real
space suits or deep sea diving suits, are not merely tools to be used: they are
modules or extensions that open up possible identities, and possible ranges of
effect, that would otherwise remain inaccessible.
They extend our capacity for action both spatially and
functionally. For instance Raytheon, the company that built this prototype
military exoskeleton in 2010, says that the robotic suit enables its wearer to
easily lift 200 pounds for several hundred repetitions without tiring, and
repeatedly punch through three inches of wood
(http://blogs.scientificamerican.com).
The suit as currently configured is obviously too cumbersome to be used in
combat, but subsequent models will almost certainly be more dexterous as well as
a good deal stronger. A company of such human-machine weapon systems would
offer advantages on the battlefield that might easily prove decisive against a
much larger force of unenhanced soldiers.
Of course, augmenting
the human body with high-tech metal enhancements is hardly a new idea, and was
already ancient by the age of the knight in shining armour. Still, it is worth
pausing for a moment on this interesting figure, and not just because it is a
cultural icon. As with the figure of the astronaut, it is tempting to locate
the identity of the knight in the occupant of the armour, but in this case, even
a casual examination will reveal at least a tripartite composite. Obviously,
the human occupant is essential, and there were certainly several functions
that the man minus his armour could perform. But at a time when the main
function of a knight was martial, the combat-enhancing components cannot be
ignored: the armed and mounted knight was the medieval equivalent of a tank. In
this sense, the horse, too, becomes a part of the functional identity—and the
horse, too, was often enclosed in metal. And this is to say nothing of the
weapons, such as the lance, that were designed specifically to be used while
mounted: to deliver the full force of the charging conglomeration to a point
the size of a spear-tip, several meters ahead of the two biological components.
But the armour was
not merely a module in a weapon system: it carried social meaning in its own
right, pertaining to both social class and personal aesthetic taste. And again
as with the figure of the astronaut or the Apache pilot, the making and using of
such equipment drew upon the full range of both art and craft that the society
had to offer. In this sense, identity is not so much a unitary phenomenon as a
nexus of strands of varying natures, that in themselves are far too numerous to
name. One may well wonder not so much where to draw the line, as whether there
is any line to draw at all.
Not all enhancements, however, are made of metal. Steve Rogers, the
secret identity of Captain America (admittedly my least favourite comic book
hero) is a physically frail man who could not pass an army physical. It is only
through injections of an experimental “super-soldier serum” that he is able to
assume the strong, quick, and nearly invulnerable body that defines his heroic
identity. It is worth noting in this context that DARPA (Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency) in the U.S. has only recently abandoned its search
for the “metabolically superior soldier.” During the 1990s and early 2000s,
experiments were carried out in an attempt to produce soldiers who could go for
extended periods of time—days or even weeks—without food or rest (For an
enlightening discussion of these experiments, see Joel Garreau’s Radical
Evolution, 2006.). In effect, though, what the people at DARPA were trying
to create had its origin in a 1941 Marvel (then Timely Publications) comic.
The question of
pharmacological enhancement has been mainstream for decades now, and is one of
the highest profile issues facing the world of contemporary sports. Associated
with the doping question, is the question of what constitutes a “real”
performance. Most amateur and professional sports, for instance, carry strict
bans on the use of performance enhancing substances, striving, or at least
appearing to strive, to foster pure human physical excellence. Athletes caught
using banned substances face expulsion from their sports, and in some cases
life-long stigmas, and countries whose Olympic teams attract an inordinate
number of doping charges face international embarrassment. Few non-violent
offences, in fact—arguably none, except possibly for being a banker in
2008—attract more open public disgust than athletic doping. That said, the
steroid-enhanced gentleman on the left in the picture above really can curl
more than my body weight, and Lance Armstrong really did complete the Tour de
France faster than any of his competitors, seven times.
One way of testing our assumptions is to apply them to an
analogous entertainment industry and see whether they still hold. The music industry
is a good example. Both popular music and high-profile sports produce
superstars whose public identities are based on their ability to either outdo
their competitors or dazzle their audiences with the audacity of their
performances. For example, Jimi Hendrix was recently recognized by Rolling
Stone Magazine as the greatest rock guitarist of all time. Setting aside
the question of why neither Robert Fripp nor Steve Howe even made the top 10 (Rolling
Stone is well known for its long-standing anti-prog bias), it is worth
considering Jimi as the cyborg figure that he was. In terms of cyborg
interfaces, the obvious place to look is the guitar. Arguably in no other hands
was the guitar a more transparent piece of technology than in his. His playing
style was intuitive and yet—when things were going well—perfectly controlled:
the sounds that emanated from the overworked amp were the sounds in Jimi’s
head. The guitar was as much a part of Jimi as his vocal cords, and quite
possibly more so.
But it is not his guitar that I want to focus on: it is
his headband.
The twenty-first century pop industry also has more than
its share of cyborg identities. Though no longer at the peak of her career,
Britney Spears is worth considering as a general example. Most people, whether
fans or not, have heard Britney Spears sing, or at least think they have. Yet
to anyone who has ever heard her speak, the cyborg nature of her stage and
recording persona is immediately apparent: while she speaks like a human being,
she sings like an incarnation of an adolescent robot sex slave fantasy. True,
there is some element of her actual voice remaining in the highly produced
final releases, but mostly what the listener hears is a product not of her
craft, but of the sound engineer’s skill and equipment. Vocally, the human
element is almost incidental, but for the time being at least, a human body is
still required to make videos and dance around on stage while lip-syncing into
a headset.
So—not quite finally—the second-last question I want to
address in this extended meditation is our production of visual images. What
does our culture’s current fascination with the cyborg say about us? In
depicting flesh layered over machinery, or machinery peeking through fissures
in the flesh, we reveal rather a lot about what moves us—about what we
simultaneously desire and fear. And I have to admit to a large dose of both of
these emotions, myself. Do I want to be more ‘borged up than I already am?
Hell, yes. If, for example, I were to learn tomorrow of a brain implant that
would give me instant comprehension and command of every language ever devised
by any human species, I would have myself placed on a waiting list within
minutes. Questions of safety would enter my mind, if at all, as an
afterthought. On the other hand, I still cling, in my more naïve moments, to
the illusion of myself as an organic and integral whole, and though I know that
this image is demonstrably an illusion (See Andy Clark’s Natural Born
Cyborgs and Supersizing the Mind), in my weaker moments I am
hesitant to stare the actual mechanisms of selfhood in the eye.
Okay, that last bit was a lie: I’m good with it.
Though not necessarily the majority, cyborg images with
an erotic undertone (or overtone) are common, and a casual search through
Google Images suggests that most of these depict some version of the human
female form. So what do these images suggest, not only about the artists but
also about the viewers who enjoy this particular type of depiction? Though
other possibilities may exist, two related ones spring to mind: either we want
our objects of desire to become machines, or we desire union with our machines
themselves in a nakedly erotic way. In either case, there is a clear and
possibly troubling tension. On the one hand is the commodification of sex, to
which the figure of the erotic cyborg (male or female) is an effective and
understandable response. Read this way, the image suggests a dehumanization of
human relations—a mechanization of our most intimate moments. On the other hand
is our urge to merge with our machines—the sense that, Pygmalion-like, we have
fallen in love with what we intended to be an extension of our own will. But
through no intention of our own, it awoke to its own unanswerable agency.
Kinda like an actual person.
And yet, as a culture, there is no denying that we are
afraid—maybe eagerly afraid, like a fundamentalist simultaneously trembling and
salivating over the prospect of the End Times, or maybe just gut-deep
horrified. When we look into the mirror, or when we look into the eyes of a
loved one, we can never be quite sure about what is looking back at us. Has the
machine within staged a coup when we weren’t paying attention? How many of the
thoughts and words that we take to be our own are in fact the articulations of
an increasingly mechanized system of mass education, mass economics, and mass
advertising whose grammar may have become the scaffolding of our social
identities and inner beings? We speak in catch phrases and hum jingles in the
shower. Sing together in the millions about our individuality. But our fears
are not just metaphoric. We have already started implanting technology in our
bodies: pacemakers, cochlear implants, artificial heart valves. And these are
undeniably good things. What we fear, though, is that these implants will begin
to modify not just our bodies, but our minds as well—our selves in the most
fundamental sense.
This fear, though understandable in a knee-jerk sort of
way, is simpleminded.
Consider the following thought experiment. Imagine that
you are a fully functioning person: you possess, in accordance with Locke’s
definition of the term, reason, self-awareness, and memory. Your life is
proceeding in the experiment just as it has proceeded up until now, but
tomorrow, you are involved in an accident in which you sustain a serious brain
injury. The result of the injury is that your capacity to reason is severely
impaired. Fortunately for you, medical science has just made a number of
breakthroughs, one of which is a device that can replace the damaged section of
your brain, thus allowing it to function precisely as it had functioned before.
Your family, lawyer, or whoever holds power of attorney, consents to the
operation on your behalf. You undergo the operation, and it is successful. With
the new machine safely implanted in your skull, you both think and feel
precisely as you thought and felt before, and once you have recovered from the
operation, you resume your life. Unfortunately, you are soon involved in
another accident in which your capacity for self-awareness is wiped out: you
can think, but are no longer aware of yourself as the being doing the thinking.
But once again, medical science comes to the rescue, and once again, the
damaged portions of your brain are replaced with artificial devices that
re-establish your self-awareness. Recognizing you as the accident-prone person
that you are, your physician suggests taking a scan of your brain and backing
up all of the data it contains on a state-of-the-art supercomputer. You accept
the suggestion, and accordingly, a complete image of your brain is recorded and
preserved, with several back-up copies stored in facilities across the country.
On the way home, you suffer yet another accident, in which your memory is
completely and permanently destroyed. So once again, you are taken to the
hospital where yet more of your brain is replaced, and your backed-up memories
loaded into the new components. By this point, all of your brain functions that
are commonly understood to be “human” are carried out by machines while the
remnants of your biological brain continue to look after the lower-order
details of heart-rate, respiration, and other automatic behaviours. Are you, at
this point, still a person? And are you still the person that you were? If you
are not a person, then when did you stop being one, and what are you now? If
you are a person but not the same one you were, when exactly did the break
occur?
OK, I admit it: the experiment was rigged. By Locke’s definition, you are still a person, and at least arguably still the same person—taking into account the fact that all experience changes us in some way or another. But the actual point of the endeavour was to uncover potential lurking biases, traces of what James Hughes refers to as “human racism” (Hughes 2004). Another way in which the experiment was rigged, or at least a little mischievous, was in positing no change in function. Should this scenario ever become technologically possible, it is difficult to imagine that there would be no change, and certainly easy to imagine that, with sufficient refinement, there might be considerable augmentation. We are not, despite what we like to believe, the best that the universe can do.
While we both desire and fear, we also quite obviously
aspire. We know—those of us who are persuaded by reason and evidence—that
without our technology we are nothing more than deficient apes with 25-year
expiry dates. We also know, then, that the systems of which we are a part can
only remain self-sustaining if their machine components remain intact and
connected. But it is not enough for them to be merely intact. And it is
certainly not enough to be intact for merely 25 years—the average human
lifespan for much of our species’ history. Accordingly, we are always seeking
to improve ourselves, to the extent that in modern Western society, one can
live in the reasonable expectation of 80 or more years of life, with the
ambient possibility that the first person to reach 150 years has already been
born (Garreau 2006) and may in fact already be an adult.
The fact is, we have always been augmenting ourselves. From the moment the first homo habilis shaped the first stone hand axe, thus altering the course of evolution toward something that would lead to us some 2,000,000 years later, we have been shaping our bodies and thus our brains and minds into machine-human hybrids. The main difference that has arisen in recent years, and it is an important one, is that now we have reached a point where the process is coming within our control. We have, as many authors on the subject have pointed out (Gray 2002, Hughes 2004, Garreau 2006, Clark 2011, Harris 2010, to name a few), acquired or come near to acquiring the capacity to decide what future versions of our species may look like, and what abilities they may have.
Meet Belle, the telekinetic monkey. In the early 2000s, Belle was implanted with a transmitter linked to her motor cortex via a grid of electrodes. The transmitter was linked to a robotic arm at MIT (check Garreau). When Belle moved her arm, the electrodes detected action in the relevant neurons and transmitted this information to the robotic arm, which Belle, in return for a tasty reward, learned to manipulate. Once she had mastered the basic motion of the robotic arm, her biological arm was immobilized, and yet she could still move the mechanical device using nothing but her brain and employing precisely the same neural pathways that were used in moving her own now-immobilized limb. As far as her brain was concerned, her body schema now included not just her biological apparatus but also a piece of sophisticated lab equipment. Not satisfied with this extension of Belle’s agency, the experimenters then set up another robotic arm, this one in Washington, D.C. What they found, was that as long as Belle received real-time feed-back, she was still able to operate the arm. At this point, the question, “Where exactly was Belle” becomes problematic as her body schema now spanned rather a large geographic area. If we are, as Dennett suggests, the sum of all the parts that we control directly, then a part of Belle was in the U.S. capitol. In theory, she, or any animal equipped with comparable technology, could have an identity encompassing any span of space—the distal limit referred to above—across which a return signal travelling at the speed of light would not produce any perceptible delays.
The next step was obvious, and in 2008 was successfully undertaken when the Braingate cranial implant was attached to the motor cortex of a human brain. After sufficient practice—a process in all ways identical to that by which the brain learns to manipulate the body’s limbs during infancy or acquire precise motor skills during athletic or musical training—the subject, a quadriplegic, was able to move a cursor on a computer screen and control a robotic arm telekinetically. After 1,000 days, the device was still operational.
Another cyborg milestone was reached in 2011: the first successful transplant of an artificial organ grown using stem cells. If you think the image looks yucky, get over it: the trachea was transplanted into a man suffering from throat cancer, who, as a result of the operation, is no longer dying. The project was undertaken by Harvard Bioscience and involved cultivating pluripotent stem cells on a scaffolding formed by a polymer web. Since then, other artificial organs have been developed or are under development, including a retina grown in a petri dish (Harvard, 2012). Our capacity to fix ourselves is expanding on a more or less monthly basis. And, I need to emphasize, the most basic goals of medicine are the postponement of death and the maintenance of bodily health.
Remember the military exoskeleton mentioned above? It is
probably worth mentioning that there are other applications for this
technology. For instance, Ekso's lower body exoskeleton, shown here in its 2012
prototype, enables paraplegics to walk again. This in itself is pretty
exciting. Even more exciting is the potential, with further refinements in
technologies that already exist, of linking a full-body exoskeleton to a brain
implant such as those developed last decade, at which point a quadriplegic will
be able to regain something approaching full mobility.
This application, incidentally, is not mere speculation. Rather, it was the intention from the outset with the DARPA team that worked with Belle the telekinetic monkey (Garreau 2006), and clearly has potential applications ranging from military through medical to industrial. An obvious application, both medical and military, is with an advanced model of the full-body exoskeleton mentioned above, but others come readily to mind, especially when we recall Stelarc’s third arm or the Apache pilot and his close relationship with both vehicle and weaponry. The placticity of the brain is such that its capacity for control is not limited to the biological body’s conventional complement of limbs. The same processes by which it learns to control a hand with breathtaking dexterity can also be applied to other modules, either biological or technological, for instance a helicopter, fighter jet, or space vehicle; a suit of precision surgical tools operated at a distance; or any number of remotely operated vehicles used in locations hazardous to direct human engagement, for instance the deepest mines or ocean trenches, or the sites of chemical or nuclear accidents (given sufficient shielding in the latter case).
And remember that scary and ubiquitous image of the
cyborg eye?
Last year, companies in both Australia and Britain
successfully fitted blind patients with bionic eyes consisting of
photoreceptors mounted on goggles and connected to retinal implants that
transmitted signals to the optic nerves, allowing the patients to see for the
first time in years. And earlier this year in the U.S., according to MIT’s Technology
Review (Feb 15), the FDA approved Second Sight’s Argus II bionic eye, shown
above in the image on the left, for marketing. This version of the technology
is designed specifically for patients suffering from late stage retinitis
pigmentosa, a degenerative eye disease that leads to complete blindness and for
which there is currently no medical remedy. At present, only black-and-white
vision is possible, but according to the article cited above, colour vision is
in the works.
And again, it does not take much imagination to envision other uses for this technology once it becomes sufficiently advanced. While the human eye is restricted to the visible spectrum (hence the name “visible spectrum”), this thin sliver of all available electro-magnetic radiation is no limit for a photoreceptor. Even the now-obsolete technology of film photography could function in the infrared and ultraviolet and beyond, and images familiar from the field of astronomy, for instance, have offered us glimpses of the universe ranging from radio through to gamma wavelengths. To equip a set of goggles with photoreceptors that bracket the visible spectrum with infrared at one end and ultraviolet at the other would be a small matter. In fact, what we refer to as the visible spectrum is a function of our own perceptive mechanisms: many insects can see well into the ultraviolet wavelengths, and it is interesting to speculate that soon, perhaps we will, as well. A question that arises from this possibility, given that the colours we perceive are simply the brain’s interpretations of the data it receives rather than an integral property of the things seen, is whether, given new ranges of stimulation, the brain will produce new and as-yet unimagined shades.
Ultimately, though, what we stand in greatest need of seeing is ourselves—not as we want to be, not as our various ideologies tell us that we ought to be, but clearly and simply as we are. And what we are—what we have been since at least two million years before the emergence of our species—is hybrid beings. Since the emergence of such basic cognitive technologies as spoken language and math, to say nothing of such communications technologies as writing, the printing press, and the internet, the speed of our hybridization has been accelerating exponentially. So it was with a sense of amused frustration that, prior to giving a recent public presentation on this very subject, I spoke briefly with an audience member who confided that the prospect of cyborgs already being among us filled him with a profound anxiety. In a spirit of admittedly mischievous intellectual aggression, I then proceeded to direct the presentation not only to him, but at him, the more insistently over the ensuing hour as his disagreement with my position manifested itself in his stubborn bespectacled eyes.
The source of his anxiety was the usual one: the desire
to protect an assumed human purity that has never existed. And it is with this
notion of purity that I would like to conclude. A cyborg understanding of human
nature, or rather an understanding of our own mixed nature, allows no room for
any notion of purity, or any such related nonsense as an original or unfallen
state, unless we are willing to concede that in such a state we are speechless
and covered in fur, with considerably more robust molars and jaw bones than we currently
possess. In fact, it is impossible to say in any absolute sense where the
border between us and not-us might be found. Our identities extend well beyond
the arbitrary boundaries of skin and skull. We affect each other intimately at
a distance, and flow through identity after identity depending on the hardware
with which we bond and the social mechanisms that produce and maintain it. At
the same time, others’ identities reach deep into our own beings: their effects
resonate in our bodies and psyches, with reciprocal bonds constituting both us
and them through the shared medium of experience. We are permeable. Flexible.
Fleeting.
Tat tvam asi.
Sources for Images
(in order of appearance)
Terminator
face: http://hmslade5.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/terminator_movies_cyborg_movie_desktop_2000x2829_wallpaper-2281151.jpg
Cyborg runner: http://www.ecouterre.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/nike-ossur-prosthetic-running-sole-1-537x402.jpg
Infinity cyborg: http://images.clipartof.com/small/20410-Cyborg-Robotic-Face-With-Bold-Eyes-And-Cables-Springing-From-The-Head-Poster-Art-Print.jpg
Man drinking water: http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/wp-content/gallery/pentagon039s-cyborg-army/67357.jpg
Woman plugged in: http://digital-art-gallery.com/oid/2/r169_457x256_1335_Nimhoa_3d_sci_fi_steampunk_girl_female_woman_cyborg_illustration_picture_image_digital_art.jpg
Toronto police state: http://inapcache.boston.com/universal/site_graphics/blogs/bigpicture/g20_06_28/g19_24092349.jpg
Armour and barding: http://www.talismancoins.com/catalog/Knight_and_Horse_Charger_Suits_of_Plate_Armor.jpg
Captain America: http://www.potgut.com/captainamerica/content/uploads/2008/10/captainamericawall.jpg
Jimi Hendrix: http://classicrockreview.files.wordpress.com/2010/07/jimi-hendrix-woodstock-seale-431165.jpg
Microchip implant: http://interaxon.ca/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/BrainGate_Collaboration_424x318.jpg
Artificial trachea: http://www.pcworld.com/article/235271/synthetic_organ_transplanted_for_the_first_time.html
Second Sight image and article: http://www.technologyreview.com/news/511356/bionic-eye-implant-approved-for-us-patients/
Australian bionic eye: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2195683/Bionic-eye-breakthrough-Australian-woman-receives-radical-world-implant.html
Works
Cited
Chandogya Upanishad.
Clark, Andy. Natural Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human
Intelligence. New York: Oxford U.P., 2003.
---. Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension.
New York: Oxford U.P., 2011.
Clynes, Manfred E. and Nathan S.
Kline. “Cyborgs and Space.” The Cyborg
Handbook. Ed. Chris Hables Gray. New York and London: Routledge, 1995.
29-34. Rpt. from Astronautics (Sept.
1960): 26-27, 74-75.
Dennett, Daniel. Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth
Wanting. Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1984.
Diamond Sutra.
Garreau, Joel. Radical Evolution: The Promise and Peril
ofenhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies—and What It Means to Be Human. New York:
Random House, 2006
Gray, Chris Hables. Cyborg Citizen: Politics in the Posthuman
Age. New York and London: Routledge, 2002.
Hess, David J. “On
Low-Tech Cyborgs.” The Cyborg Handbook.
Ed. Chris Hables Gray. New York and London: Routledge, 1995. 371-77.
Harris, John. Enhancing Evolution: The Ethical Case for
Making Better People. Princeton: Princeton U.P., 2010.
Hughes, James. Citizen Cyborg: Why Democratic Societies
Must Respond to the Redesigned Human of the Future. New York: Basic Books, 2004.
Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding.
1689. In Works of John Locke.
MobileReference. (ebook)
Pepperell, Robert. The Posthuman Condition: Consciousness
Beyond the Brain. Portland OR: Intellect Books, 2003. (ebook)
