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 More importantly, manual labourers numbering in the millions have been replaced by robots, or had their positions eliminated in favour of machines that allow a single worker to do what once required many sets of hands.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.)