Paisaje Futuro

#paraleer :Inspired by Donna Haraway's essay, "A Manifesto for Cyborgs," numerous "cyborg" studies in anthropology, sociology, history and literary criticism have looked at the relationship between humans and technology.




Draft of 8 May 1996 Please do not quote without the permission of the author.

THE EVOLUTION OF CYBORG CONSCIOUSNESS

by

Charles Laughlin*1
Carleton University

Abstract:
Inspired by Donna Haraway's essay, "A Manifesto for Cyborgs," numerous "cyborg" studies in anthropology, sociology, history and literary criticism have looked at the relationship between humans and technology.
A problem with many of these studies is that they use the term "cyborg" metaphorically and fuzzily without an appreciation of the history of cybernetics. This paper will critique both the profound insights and non-trivial distortions engendered by the cyborg polemic. A neuroanthropological model of human technics is presented that allows a scientifically useful discrimination to be made between cyborg and non-cyborg (i.e., robotic, android, AI, etc.) technologies. Technology is seen as a nonlinear, bidirectional, penetration process in which the body is physically extended outward into the world and the world is physically interjected inward into the body. Four stages of the evolution of the cyborg are defined. Grounded extrapolations are made about the future development of cyborg consciousness and its implications for culture and space travel.






THE EVOLUTION OF CYBORG CONSCIOUSNESS





Space travel challenges mankind not only technologically but also spiritually, in that it invites man to take an active part in his own biological evolution.

Manfred E. Clynes and

Nathan S. Kline (1960)

In an era filled with wondrous and frightening things, the age of space for example, and the impending take-over by the computer and other machines, another development is taking place with little or no notice by the average person, unless he or she happens to be one of the new developments. In our midst, and growing steadily in numbers, is the latest evolutionary step in man, sometimes called by the odd name of "cyborg."

D.S. Halacy (1965)



INTRODUCTION

Over a decade ago, Donna Haraway published a paper entitled "A Manifesto for Cyborgs" in the Socialist Review (Haraway 1985; reproduced in Haraway 1991). Her's was a social feminist essay that used the concept of the cyborg (short for "cybernetic organism," or integration of living organism with machine) in a metaphorical way which was theoretically insightful and which inspired a number of critical writings that have come to be known collectively as "cyborg anthropology."

Whereas the Haraway piece is brilliant and thoughtful, many of the papers written subsequent to hers are undisciplined and distorted applications of the cyborg concept in the interests of so-called postmodern criticism. For instance, in an essay presented by Gary Downey, Joseph Dumit and Sarah Williams at the 1992 meetings of the American Anthropological Association, cyborg anthropology is linked to cultural studies, eco-feminism and postmodernism, all of which are essentially anti-empirical and anti-structuralist polemics, and are driven by various political ideologies and concerns (Downey, Dumit and Williams 1995). As a consequence, and unlike the work of Haraway herself, some of these authors, as well as other writers in the fields of sociology, history, gender studies and literary criticism (see e.g., Alaimo 1994, Mason 1995, Pickering 1995, Schroeder 1994), use these various political agendas as an excuse for not "doing their homework" in terms of the logical development of cyborg theory and any accurate reflection of the history of ideas from which the notion of the cyborg originally gained its descriptive and explanatory power.

The present paper is intended as a corrective to the sloppy, overly metaphorical use of the notion of cyborg. In addition, it will develop a model of the nature of the cyborg process from a biogenetic structuralist point of view which will allow us better to understand future developments in the ongoing evolution of cyborg consciousness.

CYBORG AS METAPHOR

The current cyborg fad in anthropology and related disciplines was foreshadowed by Haraway when she combined the concept of cyborg with cultural criticism in order to produce an amalgamation of metaphor and analysis in the service of a better understanding of life in technocratic society. For example, she sees the cyborg as "a kind of disassembled and reassembled, postmodern collective and personal self" in which we are all implicated (Haraway 1985). The cyborg is our very nature, as well as being the origin and sustainer of our politics (Haraway 1985:66). Haraway's cyborg thus stands for the entire course of human technics throughout the ages, and implies its possibilities for the future. And from a certain point of view, she is right. Genus Homo has been technical for at least the last 3-plus million years, so it really is no news that it is indeed our nature to be technical and technological.

But in applying the cyborg concept in this way, Haraway alienated the concept from its more precise contextual, logical and theoretical moorings, and cast it adrift in the sea of contemporary ethnological rhetoric in which the logic of explanation is weak at best, and in which the thirst for exciting and controversial fads is apparently unquenchable. The cyborg is rapidly coming to represent virtually every technocultural phenomenon no matter how distant from the original intention of the concept: e.g., depressed people on Prozac are cyborgs, people wearing eyeglasses are cyborgs, people viewing other people on television destroying buildings with smart bombs are cyborgs. The term is now being used to characterize modern reproductive technologies (perhaps men practising safe-sex become condom cyborgs), the political implications of the internet, the entire course of techno-economic development since the Second World War, and so on.

Please do not read me wrong. Metaphors have been very important in the development of science, as well as being fundamental to all systems of human knowledge. And it is true that metaphors are indispensable in the unfolding of scientific understanding. When we speak of society having a "structure," we are borrowing a concept derived from physiology and applying it by analogy to patterns of social organization. Or when we speak of "black holes," we are projecting a visual phenomenon onto a theoretical entity that we could not possibly see with our naked eyes.

But by its very nature, metaphorical thinking depends upon fuzzifying the meaning of concepts and images so that associations may flow unfettered among patterns of similarity, and bring together in our thoughts previously unrelated phenomena. This is the up-side of the use of metaphors, for without the fuzziness of metaphor, poetical comprehension would be incapable of encoding and communicating our deepest intuitive insights.

The down-side of metaphorical thinking is that there is a concomitant loss of explanatory power. The process of explaining requires logical focus and precision of identification, and cannot work in a field of fuzzy conceptual boundaries. For example, as Bargatzky (1984) has amply demonstrated, the anthropological use of the concept of "adaptation" is usually explanatorily weak because it is used outside the appropriate context of explicit biological theory, and because the meanings associated with the term are frequently implicit, imprecise and fuzzy.

And so it is with the concept of cyborg as used by the "cyborg anthropology" cohort (e.g., Gray's confounding of the terms automaton, robot, android, waldo and the like with cyborg). The notion has been uncritically lifted from its original theoretical context and applied as a symbol for certain aspects of culture. We should note that there is nothing new in the use of machine metaphors for human nature, or of human metaphors for machines for that matter. The anthropomorphizing of machines has been with us for centuries (Rollin 1979, Warrick 1980:113), while the man-as-machine association has been with us at least since the dawn of the industrial revolution (see e.g., Halacy 1965: 57-59). In fact the tendency to apply the most cybernetically complex system of the day as a metaphor for the human brain and consciousness seems all but irresistible. When the clock was the most complex information processing system available, the human brain was thought to work like a clock. With the development of the telephone, the brain was thought to be something like a switchboard. And when computers came along... well, we are all familiar with contemporary computer and computer-related metaphors for the brain and its functions. It therefore comes as no surprise to find machine metaphors used in fiction to represent either utopian (Commander Data on Star Trek: The Next Generation) or dystopian (Terminator) visions of the jinn of technology.

Mind you, such metaphors can be quite revealing, especially when they are uncritically applied. They can expose unconscious operations in the minds and cultures of the writers.1 Most of the people writing about the cyborg are products of Euroamerican culture which is imbued with a tenacious mind-body dualism. There are things physical and other things mental, and the relations between the two categories are problematic. Our sciences reflect this ontological and epistemological distinction when they are split into the physical (or "hard") sciences and the life ("soft," or social and behavioral) sciences. Even anthropology is divided into physical anthropology and sociocultural anthropology.

And the cyborg polemic reflects this prescientific, cultural distinction as well. We find the naive notion that the mind (or consciousness) can somehow be removed from the body while leaving the mind unchanged. For example, you will find people suggesting that human consciousness can be "downloaded" (as if it were software) into a computer.2 During most of the history of cyborg imagery in science fiction, the conscious brain-in-metal-body motif predominates, as though the nervous system were limited to the brain, and the brain is distinct from the body, when in fact the nervous system permeates every part of our body except our nails, hair and tooth enamel.3

HISTORY OF THE CYBORG CONCEPT

The concept of the cyborg emerged out of the field of cybernetics. Cybernetics, a field of research and theory first defined by Norbert Wiener in 1948 (1962:11-12 [1948]), is the study of the control and regulatory properties of complex systems (see also Rose 1969, 1974). Wiener was clear from the beginning that cybernetics applied equally to both machines and living systems. Although he did address the social implications of cybernetics in his early work (Wiener 1950), he did not discuss the actual physical merger of machines and organisms. It took another decade before two NASA scientists, Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline (1960, reprinted in Gray 1995), to coin the term "cyborg," and to suggest some of the advantages for space travel of altering the human body with machines.

For the exogenously extended organizational complex functioning as an integrated homeostatic system unconsciously, we propose the term "cyborg." The cyborg deliberately incorporates exogenous components extending the self-regulatory control function of the organism in order to adapt it to new environments.

Clynes and Kline 1960:27

Clynes and Kline's major emphasis was upon the automatic, self-regulatory and unconscious activity of the mechanical components integrated as life support systems with the living organism. Clynes (1977) extended this thinking to the alteration and control of emotions during long space flights.

Cyborg in Fiction

The use of the cyborg in fiction is really our best indication of the extent to which we understand the implications of the organism-machine merger (see Porush 1985:2-3 on "cybernauts" and "soft machines;" see also Zebrowski and Warrick 1978, and the essays by Andrew Gordon, Anne Hudson Jones and Gary K. Wolfe in Dun and Erlich 1982). Although the term cyborg had yet to be coined, in his 1923 novel, The Clockwork Man, E.V. Odle depicted a person with mechanical device in his head that allowed him to flip into alternate realities. Most treatments of the cyborg idea have followed the brain-in-metal-body motif (e.g., L.A. Eshbach's "The Time Conqueror" in 1932, Curt Siodmak's Donovan's Brain in 1943 and Damon Knight's horrifying "Masks" in 1968). A newer theme began to emerge when Cordwainer Smith wrote about cyborgs designed for space travel in "Scanners Live in Vain" in 1950. Frederik Pohl's Man Plus in 1976 and Barrington J. Bayley's The Garments of Caean in 1976 continue this theme, as does Anne McCaffrey's The Ship That Sang from 1961 in which a human brain is incorporated in the structure of a space ship.

Martin Caiden's novel Cyborg, published in 1972, led to the popular "Six Million Dollar Man" TV series which brought the cyborg, or "bionic man" concept to the awareness of the general public. The novel and series followed a more modern trend in cyborgian thinking, that being the awareness that parts of the human body can be replaced and even augmented by machines. William Gibson's 1980s cyberpunk novels (Neuromancer, Burning Chrome, etc.) paint a near future era in which people have microchips implanted in their brains and can access the World Wide Web by an act of will.4

Cyborg in Comic Books

The cyborg motif has received a lot of play in comic book art ever since the first cyborg villain named Metallo appeared in issue 252 of Action Comics in 1959. Perhaps the best developed cyborg character is Cliff Steele, the Robotman of the Doom Patrol (first appearing in My Greatest Adventure comics, issue 80 in 1963), who was saved from almost certain death in a racing car accident by The Chief who surgically removed his central nervous system from his damaged body and placed in a metal "robotic" body.

Deathlok (first appearing in Astonishing Tales, issue 25 in 1974) is a more advanced cyborg who unwillingly gave up his organic body to inhabit a machine body, and spends much of his time trying to locate where the bad guys hid his real body. His machine body includes an onboard computer with which (with whom?) he carries on a continuous dialogue. The 1990s have seen the publication of even more complex cyborgs, including Valiant Comics' Bloodshot and Rai who are human beings whose natural blood has been replaced by the "Blood of Heros" which contains nanites instead of haemoglobin. The nanites are microscopic computers that instantly repair tissue damage and allow the heros to communicate with and control machines.5

Cyborg in the Cinema

And the movies have done their fair part in depicting the cyborg. The Frankenstein movies presented certain cyborgian features, complete with bolts sticking out of the creature's neck, not included by Mary Shelly in her classic novel. Perhaps the most famous cinema cyborg to date is Darth Vader, the archetypal villain of the Star Wars series. But the most interesting cyborg character to me is Alex Murphy, the police officer who is shot down in the line of duty and wakes up to find himself installed in a high-tech robot body and known as Robocop.6

The point to emphasize in the fictional development of the cyborg is that at first the notion was simply one of replacing of the organic body with a mechanical body which somehow magically supports and allows interaction with a living, conscious brain. Attention is rarely paid to the technological problem presented by the interface between brain and machine. Later on, the idea surfaces that parts of the natural body may be replaced, and their functions even augmented or perfected by new technologies (real blood replaced by the "Blood of Heros," the Robocop cyborg depicted as "the future of law enforcement," and virtual sex portrayed as even better than natural sex). We will return to this shift in emphasis in the discussion below.

NATURE OF THE CYBORG

An essential failing in cyborg anthropology, and indeed in much of anthropological theory, is that consciousness and culture are disembodied. They are disembodied precisely because the Euroamerican culture from which anthropology derives its core values is comprised of an intransigent mind-body dualism. A modern, embodied anthropology would be thoroughly grounded in modern biology and neuroscience. Regrettably, current anthropology is not.

My analysis of the cyborg, however, is grounded in the findings of modern neuroscience. I make the presumption, fundamental to biogenetic structural theory,7 that human consciousness and culture are functions of the nervous system. That is, the organization of consciousness is a property of the organization and function of the nervous system. If there is no nervous system, then there is no consciousness in any human sense of the term. And, if by "culture" we mean the social conditioning of consciousness and behavior, there is also no culture without a nervous system. If the reader holds an alternative view -- say that consciousness is somehow separable from, or independent of the organ of consciousness, the nervous system -- then he will likely reach quite different conclusions than I have done in this essay. One good reason to accept my perspective is that virtually the entire weight of neuroscience supports it.

This perspective requires us to pay close attention to the physiology and engineering of the cyborg, and to watch carefully the impact of technology upon the structure and function of the mind and the body. For instance, there cannot be a cyborg without solving the body-machine interface problem, which is difficult enough when dealing with replacement of limbs with prosthetic devices (see Halacy 1965, Chapter 8), but which becomes exceedingly complicated when it involves direct brain to computer interfacing. Cyborg consciousness is not now, nor will it ever be, a simple matter of "downloading" human consciousness out of a brain and into a machine.

Consciousness is Nonlinear

Haraway is quite right. Technoculture is our nature, and has been for hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years. We are a conscious animal that has developed a technological mode of adaptation, and that transforms his/her very nature in the process. And the reason why we are transformed by our technologies, as we move about transforming the world around us, is that consciousness is a nonlinear phenomenon (see Nicolis 1995). We are raised to think that if we want to change the world, we need only develop the appropriate machines, do the job and that's the end of it. This is a linear way of thinking: A causes B causes C. Linear thinking leads us to the mistaken notion that all we need in order to predict what consciousness will do is to stipulate all the external conditions correctly.

But actually consciousness is a complex system engaged in (and evolved to engage in) innumerable feedback relations with the environment. Thus when we act to change the world, we change ourselves into the bargain. Nonlinear understanding requires that we treat the entire system, including consciousness itself and its myriad activities, as a system of superpositions. That is, adding or subtracting initial conditions does not merely have an additive or subtractive effect upon the system, but rather may cause radical, unpredictable, even chaotic transformations of the entire system -- in the present case, transformations incorporating consciousness, its actions and its proximal environment.

Because we must acknowledge consciousness as a nonlinear process, we may not arbitrarily separate technology from consciousness if we are ever to understand the emergence of the cyborg. Rather, we may speak of the technics of consciousness, or alternatively technoconsciousness, in emphasizing the inextricable intercausation between the organization of consciousness and the organization of its technical adaptations. I will use the term "technics" to imply this quality of essential nonlinearity, and the unity of a process that involves consciousness, its technical acts and its environmental transformations.

Law of Bidirectional Penetration

This essential nonlinearity of consciousness is emphasized by the foremost contemporary philosopher of technology, Don Ihde, in his book Existential Technics (1983:32-33) when he notes that it is not possible to reorganize the world around us without consequently transforming our system of knowledge and indeed our very being. The reason he gives for this is that we simultaneously interpret ourselves in our interaction with the world.

I suspect that Donna Haraway would agree with this fundamental point. If we accept this view as real, then it is quite appropriate to appeal to a phenomenology of technics (see Laughlin 1989, Ihde 1990), but one modified by biogenetic structural tenets. I would argue that the process of technical extension of the body into the world is lawfully complemented by an endogenous process of technical penetration of the body by the world. I will call this process the law of bidirectional penetration.8

I use "law" here because my claim is that the reciprocal causation involved is "wired-into" our natures and is thus inescapable. We in the West may think of ourselves as "alloplastic" (Douglas 1978:116) -- that we change our environment to suit ourselves. But actually, to the extent that we develop cybernetic technologies to control the world (e.g., computer systems to control power plants, life support systems to fly us to the moon, or to explore the bottom of the oceans, etc.), we also produce technologies to control our physical and mental beings (e.g., electronic sensors, pacemakers, prostheses, etc.). Whereas it is easy for us to see that the industrial revolution replaced human labor with technologies (i.e., muscle and bone replaced by machines) and the cybernetic revolution replaced human controllers with technologies (i.e., brains replaced by computers; a "smarthouse" replaces a traditional "housewife" or "housekeeper"), it is not so easy for us to see that the same processes reciprocally penetrate into the body and consciousness (servomotors, biochemical taps, artificial limbs, voice boxes and senses, and perhaps future microchips in the brain) -- that indeed the cyborg is an inevitable consequence of human technics.

Activity and Experience in Nonlinear Context

The concept of the cyborg was to allow man to optimize his internal regulation to suit the environment he may seek.

Manfred Clynes (1970)

The law of bidirectional penetration is so pivotal to my argument that I want to spend time fleshing it out. The law operates because of the nonlinear role of behavior in producing experience (also see Powers 1973). We act -- that is, we move our bodies with intention, but often unconsciously -- in order to produce, maintain or modify our experience. If we desire the experience we are having, then we act to continue that experience. If we desire another experience than the one we are having, we act to transform our experience to the one desired. These may be simple acts, as when I close my eyes to shut out something I do not want to see, or turn my head to see something I want to see. These are non-technical acts.

Our acts become technical when the process of producing the desired experience requires in intermediary and enduring transformation of the material world. If I want to see an episode of The X-Files, I have to turn on the TV, and that is a simple technical act. The point being that I cannot have the X-Files experience without the intervention of a technical phase in my activity. Technics opens up new experiences, and broadens my range of experiences by essentially replicating first skeletal, then muscular, and finally neural processes in the world. This replication changes the world which in turn impresses itself upon our senses in the form of experiences. This understanding of the nonlinear relations among consciousness, activity and external world is fundamental to the phenomenology of technology. As Ihde put it:

The essence of technology allows us to see, to order, to relate to the world in a particular way. Nature becomes [a] standing-reserve, a source of energy for human use, and this mode of relating to the world becomes, in a technological era, the dominant and primary way in which we understand [the] world.

Ihde (1983:33)

But a biogenetic structural account of the cyborg goes further than this view. I suggest that the cyborg process results in a transformation of the human body itself, and hence the internal organization of the body's consciousness. Eventually, in order for me to have access to a broader range of experiences than the limits provided by my natural body, I may have to technically alter my nervous system. In a sense, the endogenous systems come to replicate the exogenous, technologically altered patterns in the world.

We continue to be aware of the body-machine distinction because we still interact with machines via our limbs and our senses. Yet the phenomenology of tool-use shows us that the better the tool, the more we lose track of the tool as we focus on the task at hand (Martin Heidegger noted that technology tends to "withdraw" from our awareness when it works well; see Ihde 1990:33).

Meanwhile, the law of bidirectional penetration is inexorably leading humanity to the development of a direct brain-machine interface technology that will both eliminate the necessity of behavioral-sensory interaction with machines in many cases, and dissolve the phenomenological distinction between body and machine even more than normal "withdrawal" experienced with machines today.9 The machine will be experienced as part of me, just as my arm is now part of me. People are quite aware these days of the human chess master vs. chess software competitions, and that computer software will one day best even the brightest chess masters. But few of us are aware of the inevitable development of the cyborg chess master -- human and machine directly interfaced to produce a being capable of beating any pre-cyborg chess master. The cyborg process means that eventually if I wish to be the best possible chess player, I must technically transform my own internal neural processes in order to optimize certain computational abilities.

THE EVOLUTION OF THE CYBORG

I have suggested that the evolution of exogenous technics reciprocally penetrates the body, and eventually will penetrate the very organization of consciousness. This process of technical penetration is inseparable from the development of the cyborg, and involves the replacement, augmentation and integration of parts of the human body with machines. And this process has obvious evolutionary significance (see e.g., Clarke 1973, and Haas and Voigt 1977), and may be schematized in a model of four stages, as follows (see Table 1):10

Table 1

THE FOUR STAGES IN THE EVOLUTION OF THE CYBORG



Stage I: Replacement or augmentation of the human skeleton. Examples: wooden leg, hook for lost hand, armor, false teeth, etc.

Stage II: Replacement or augmentation of muscle. Examples: mechanical hand for lost hand, other prosthetic devices, mechanical heart valve, replacement of lens in eye, etc.

Stage III: Replacement or augmentation of parts of the peripheral nervous system, autonomic nervous system and the neuroendocrine system. Examples: bionic arms and legs, pacemakers, automatic biochemical pumps, etc.

Stage IV: Replacement or augmentation of parts of the central nervous system. Examples: video "eyes" for blind, Air Force cyborg fighter plane control, etc.



Of course, this model is an over-simplification of the unfolding of the cyborg process, but it has the advantage of letting us see the progressive complexity involved. Stage I cyborg is equivalent to the external extension of the hands with a hammer, knife or other primitive tool. It essentially replaces or augments the skeletal physiology of the limbs (see Halacy 1965:63-71). Thus the wooden leg and hook as prosthetic devices represent the more primitive innovations leading to the process of cyborg transformation. Portions of the nervous system have been eliminated with the loss of the amputated apendage.

Stage II cyborg sees the technical replacement or augmentation of both skeletal and muscle systems in the body. This stage is equivalent to the external replacement of muscles with engines. The hand is replaced with a movable machine, perhaps manipulated by servomechanisms that are triggered by movements of particular muscle groups. The diseased heart valve is replaced by a mechanical valve. The lens of the eye is replaced by a synthetic lens, and so on. Such mechanisms depend upon intact neuro-muscular systems for their control.

At Stage III cyborg, technical penetration reaches the nervous system and replaces or augments neural structures in the peripheral, autonomic or endocrinal systems involved in the regulation of internal states. This stage is equivalent to simple regulatory systems in the external world, such as the thermostat controlling the temporature of a heater. Clynes and Kline addressed their original cyborg paper to problems in space exploration that might be solved by Stage III cyborg measures. The "bionic" arms and legs of the Six Million Dollar Man are fictional examples of Stage III developments, as is the more realistic contemporary heart pacemaker.

Finally, Stage IV cyborg produces the replacement or augmentation of structures in the central nervous system. This stage is equivalent to the supplementation or replacement of human brain power with computers in industry. This stage may involve modification of structures mediating the cognitive aspects of emotion (Clynes' "sentics" ideas are cyborgian at this level; see Clynes 1977), as well as imagination, intuition, perception, rational thought, intentionality, language, etc. -- all of which require higher cortical processing. Examples of developments at this stage are technologies such as the miniature video camera "eyes" wired to an electrode array implanted in the visual cortex of certain blind people. And rumor has it that the United States Air Force underwrites research on technologies that would allow direct brain to aircraft interfacing for fighter pilots. Also, over 17 years of research generated at the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Laboratories (PEAR Labs) have shown a low but consistent telekenetic effect of conscious intention on the behavior of random event generating machines (Jahn and Dunne 1987), an effect that may prove to have a bearing on the brain-machine interface problem.

The point to emphasize in all of this is that the emergence of the cyborg is a process of progressive technological penetration into the body, eventually replacing or augmenting the structures that mediate the various physical and mental attributes that we normally consider natural to human beings, including emotion, natural sensory modes, properties of imagination and rational thought, the organization of intentional acts, etc. Clearly then, progressive penetration into the cortex of the brain will inevitably result in the technical alteration of human consciousness.

DISCUSSION

If the reader has followed my line of reasoning so far, then there are a number of implications and applications of this model for cyborg evolution.

Recognition of Cyborg Possibilities

It is interesting that it has taken many years for the picture of the cyborg to become articulated to the extent that it has been to date. Cyborg possibilities began with, and for years was limited to, the brain-in-metal-body motif. The idea that the body could be functionally augmented for new purposes emerged only gradually in the post-World War II era in scientific theory and in science fiction. Likewise, it has taken a long time for cyborg-related medical attitudes ("we can fix it with this widget") to evolve into a perfectibility attitude ("we can make it even better with this widget"). And the impact of Clynes and Kline's original thinking in transforming these possibilities cannot be over-emphasized. At the very least they planted a seed that has yet to reach its fruition.

Cyborg Consciousness and the "Guru Program"

If one accepts the tenets of biogenetic structuralism in regard to the nature and evolution of the cyborg, one is forced to acknowledge the likelihood of certain consequent developments. For one thing, when cyborg technologies eventually result in the internal reorganization of the central nervous system, this will necessarily produce a reorganization of human consciousness. Of course, cyborg developments at every stage affect consciousness to some extent. If my leg should be replaced by a prosthesis, it will change my experience of my body and its activities. But developments at cyborg Stages III and IV do so by direct alteration of neural structures and may eventually so radically change human mental processes that we will be forced to recognize new species of life and consciousness; i.e., cyborg consciousness.

For another thing, the complexity of neurocognitive processing will likely be augmented. In a Piagetian sense, the complexity of each individual's cognitive processing is limited by the extent of that individual's neurobiological development (see Piaget 1977, 1980). Obviously, cyborg augmentation may well increase the limits of maximal complexity of cognition of which the amalgamated brain-machine system may be capable. This complexity may increase the number of parallel processes integrated within any intentional act (see McClelland and Rumelhart 1986) and may result in an increase in the information being processed. Enhanced complexity may well be beyond what even the most developed natural human brain is now capable.

In any case, the organization of the self-concept or "ego" of the cyborg may be substantially different than the natural human's self-concept. Indeed, the Stage IV cyborg may be routinely capable of the kind of ego-transcendence that seems to be characteristic only of those with the most advanced consciousness today (Laughlin and Richardson 1986).11 Moreover, the merger of brain and machine opens the possibility of what may be called a "guru program," a software that brings the neurobiological portions of the cyborg system to optimal cognitive development through a series of alternating experiences and interpretive exercises.

Cyborgs and Culture

Few people have thought through the cultural implications of the cyborg (see Gray 1993 for a refreshing exception). Yet the development of cyborg consciousness has important implications for our understanding of the nature and evolution of culture. In the first place, and I think in keeping with Donna Haraway's position, I do not wish to leave the impression that I am advocating either a utopian (Six Million Dollar Man as culture hero) or a dystopian (William Gibson's cyberpunk vision) cyborg scenario. We must be clear on this issue, for, as Leo Marx has shown in his seminal work, The Machine in the Garden (1990), there exists an inherent tension between humans and their machines. In fact, cyborg characters in science fiction usually have been objects of fear (e.g., the Borg in Star Trek: The Next Generation, or Damon Knight's Jim in "Masks"), and are often the bad guys in the tale (Gordon 1982). This tension continues to be revealed in much of the current cyborg anthropology (as well as cyborg history, cyborg sociology, cyborg gender studies, cyborg literary criticism, etc.) polemic, for, unlike Haraway, some of these folk use the cyborg to represent all that is wrong, evil and inhumane about modern technological development.

As I have taken some pains to argue, whatever the quality of the outcome, the development of the cyborg is as inevitable as our other technologies have been; the cyborg is lawfully entailed in our technical natures. And the cyborg is just as "multistable" in its value as any other technological development (see Ihde 1990:144-151). All technologies are ambiguous with respect to cultural value. Just as a Palaeolithic handax could be used either to feed the family or clobber an obnoxious relative, the value of the cyborg will depend upon the intentions and perceptions of the culture in which it emerges.

For another thing, it is typical of our Euroamerican culture that most of the attention paid to cyborgs has to do with military applications (see e.g., Levidow and Robins 1989). But the cultural implications are far greater than the production of cyborg soldiers, sailors, airmen and astronauts. Culture is a word we use to label the system of meaning, communication and habitual activity shared by members of a society. Now, we have already seen that the range and complexity of meaning for Stage IV cyborgs may transcend that of which humans are now capable. Moreover, communication may well render traditional language obsolete because cyborgs will certainly be capable of direct data links via cyberspace with other cyborgs, independent of natural language or physical proximity. Imagine if you will that by a mere act of will, a cyborg's brain may become linked through telemetry with an Internet-like cyberspace in which his thoughts, imaginations, intuitions, wishes, etc., can be electronically shared with other cyborgs.

Cyborgs in Space

Let me return to the context in which the notion of cyborg originally arose in the thinking of Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline -- that being life in space. As commonplace as it may seem, we must stress the fact that the human body, and many of its neurological structures, are the products of millions of years of evolution in adaptation to the forces of gravity on this planet. Migration into space radically changes the environmental forces that people will face. As everybody knows, spacefarers already experience serious health problems due to the zero-g environment. So far, research has been directed at the more gross physical problems encountered by astronauts (e.g., space sickness and skeletal decalcification). But as Clynes and Kline note, there are mental health issues as well that must eventually be addressed.

I would suggest that at least some of the psychological and sociocultural adaptational problems that permanent spacefarers will face may be due to inherent brain structures12 that have evolved in adaptation to planetary survival. These structures emerge during early pre- and perinatal neurogenesis and are the "seeds" upon which later neuropsychological development are patterned (see Laughlin 1991). Some of these nascent structures determine the universal properties of human consciousness, a consciousness that is primarily oriented toward Earth bound intentional activities.

Both genetic engineering and future cyborg technologies may well be utilized to replace, alter or augment these inherent neural structures in favor of new structures that may prove to be more adaptive to the spacefaring life. Which approach -- whether it be genetic engineering or cyborg technics -- will contribute most to the solution of these adaptational problems is still uncertain. My hunch is that cyborg technologies will develop before those of genetic engineering, but this is an empirical question that only time can answer. In any event, these technologies will certainly alter human consciousness at its most fundamental, structural level, presumably in directions leading to a kind of consciousness more auspicious for a spacefaring species.

CONCLUSION

In conclusion, I have argued that the fuzzy, metaphorical application of the cyborg concept by some contemporary anthropologists has obscured the explanatory power of the concept, as well as the very real implications of the cyborg process for an evolutionary account of human consciousness. I have tightened the concept so that a biogenetic structural model may be constructed that allows us to focus on an essential process of human technics leading eventually to cyborg consciousness. Cyborg consciousness will lawfully emerge, possibly (as envisioned by Clynes and Kline) in the context of the exploration and colonization of interplanetary space. Considering the inevitability and cultural multistability of the cyborg, it would behoove anthropologists to think deeply about such a vital process that is evolving in our very midst as we speak.



NOTES






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