We, human beings, are natural-born cyborgs; we are thinking systems whose minds and selves are spread across biological brain and non-biological circuitry.
This hybridization is not a modern development, it is an aspect of our nature as human beings.
We need to spell the old prejudice that what counts as “mind” is solely what goes on inside our own biological skin-bag. Perpetrating this separation between the inside (mental) and the outside (world) doesn’t allow us to understand a distinctive feature of human intelligence: the ability to enter into deep and complex relationship with non-biological props and aids.
The line between biological self and technological world, user and tools, is very flimsy.
We exist, as thinking things, only thanks to the supportive environment that we create and it creates us.
Maybe the small biological difference between human beings and animals becomes an enormous gap cause this plasticity of our mind.
Chapter 1 - Cyborgs Unplugged
The term “cyborg” was first used in 1960 by Clynes and Kline in their article “Cyborgs and Space”.
What is important in making a cyborg is
* Not the merger of flesh and wire
* Not the depth of the implant
* But the potential of transformation
* And for cognitive systems the fluidity of the flaws of information.
In our daily activity our biological brain is already cooperating with a lot of technologies (spoken or written words, drawings, pen, paper, notes, watches, etc.) which are not implanted in our body but nonetheless play a crucial role in our cognitive activities.
What blinds us about our cyborg nature is the ancient western prejudice that the mind is completely separate and different from the rest of the world. If we dispel this illusion we can understand that our mind and our self are problem solving systems constituted by brain, body and technologies.
The idea of human cognition as an hybrid is not new (Vygotsky, Bruner, Merleau-Ponty, Dennett, Norman, Hutchins) but underestimated.
Chapter 2 – Technologies to Bond With
Difference between transparent and opaque technologies
Transparent technologies:
* well fitted to, integrated with, the biological capacities
* almost invisible in use.
Opaque technologies:
* Not naturally integrated with the organism,
* Requiring constant attention, remaining in focus during operation
* It’s easy to distinguish user from tool
The distinction is not fixed. It depends on the tool and on the user.
Transparent technologies
* should be easily and constantly available
* are not knew (pen, paper, book, watches, etc.)
* often need a long process (the tool must change, but also the user and his culture) to became such .
Donald Norman, The invisible computer, MIT Press, 1999
“Technology centered” – “Human centered” products
A technology, at the same time, adapts to and shapes the cognitive processes of the user.
Differences between
* “Do you know the time?”
* “Do you know the meaning of the word ‘clepsydra’?”
Our sense of self is changeable, its not tight to fixed biological borders, but to our mutable experience in thinking, reasoning and doing, inside a system of strong mental scaffolding.
Danger of technologies “too transparent”
Heidegger
“ready-to-hand” – “present-to-hand”
focus on task – focus on tool
The importance of the opportunity to change, when necessary, from 'ready to hand' to 'present-to-hand' .
[notes :]
- The general problem and importance of interfaces
- Plato's avversion to the technique of writing
- Our better ability on outer then on inner world
Chapter 3 – Plastic Brains, Hybrid Minds
The image of our physical body, despite all its appearance of durability, is highly negotiable. It is a mental construct, open to continual renewal and reconfiguration. Just a few simple tricks can modify it
The brain make a very intelligent use of the small high-resolution fovea. Subjects presented with the same image, but different task, show different patterns of saccade. Tendency to overestimate what we see. Dennett (Consciousness Explained).
Change Blindness.
- J. K. O’Regan, “Solving the ‘Real’ Mysteries of Visual Perception: The World as an Outside Memory”, Canadian Journal of Psychology 46 (1992): 461-88
- Dan Simons & Dan Levin, ‘Change Blindness’ Trends in Cognitive Science 1 (1997) p. 261-67. They bring the research into the real world.
The visual brain is opportunistic; instead of attempting to create, maintain and update a rich inner representation, it deploys a strategy that roboticist Rodney Brooks describes as “letting the world serve as its own best model”.
Compression algorithms in Computer Science
It just doesn’t matter whether the data are stored inside the biological body or in the external world.
When a the infant brain encounters the language a variety of cognitive shortcuts become available.(e.i., second-order relations).
The act of labeling allow the brain to reduce a complex, abstract problem, to a simpler, concrete one.
Our brains are good at patters matching, simple associations, perceptual processing. For long reasoning we need external scaffoldings.
Dennett “mind-tools”(Gregory)
One large jump or discontinuity in human cognitive evolution seems to involve the distinctive way human brains repeatedly create and exploit various species of cognitive technology so as to expand and reshape the space of human reason. We – more then any other creature on the planet – deploy non-biological elements to complement our basic modes of processing, creating extended cognitive systems whose computational and problem-solving profiles are quite different from those of naked brain.
When we freeze a thought or idea in words, we create a new object upon which to direct our critical attention.
- Dennett, Kinds of Minds.
- Merlin Donald, Origins of the Modern Mind (February 1993) and A Mind So Rare: The Evolution of Human Consciousness (2001).
With speech, text, and the tradition to use them as a critical tools, humankind entered the first phase of its cyborg existence.
Instead of seeing our words and texts as simply the outward manifestations of our biological reason, we may find whole edifices of thought and reason accreting only courtesy of stable structures provided by words and texts.
It’s a mistake to think of a fixed human nature, tools and culture are as much as determiners of our human nature as products of it.
The sense of our location and our body.
Dennett’s “Where Am I”.
The sense of real telepresence can be generated by quite basic technologies, but only if they are interactive. Passive experiences don’t work.
The notion of our perceptual experience as a passive receipt of information is misleading. Our brains are not like TV, which simply take incoming signals a display them for… who? The whole business of seeing and perceiving our world is bound up with the business of acting upon, and intervening in, our worlds.
Aglioti's follow-up experiment on “Titchener Circles”. Subjects are prone to the illusory scaling effect but they act accordingly the real sizes. Differences between conscious perception and action. Like the human vision system was an hybrid of two different cooperating systems.
The adaptation (for instance) to new limbs or to relocation can be a very long process but after a while the new limb or the new position became second-nature, the prosthesis became transparent.
The relevant differences between natural or artificial connections are only those affecting timing, flow and density of informational exchange.
Our brains are amazingly adept at learning to exploit new type and channels of input. Our brains, especially those of newborn babies, are extremely plastic.
The relation between a neural signal and a movement is always arbitrary. The infant discover which signal command which limb by try and error.
[note:
Hume: expectation, gentle force, habit.]
Our sense of ‘where we are’ and of ‘what we are’ are always constructed on the basis of the brain’s ongoing registration of correlations.
It is possible to drive a prosthesis by attaching its input directly to the brain or to some place in the nervous system.
It is possible to drive muscles by attaching its output directly to the muscles or to some place in the nervous system.
Dennett: “I am the sum total of the parts I control directly” (Elbow Room)
What we need to reject is the idea that all our various neural, or non-neural, tools need a kind of Privileged User. Instead, we are just tools all the way down. We are just shifting coalitions of tools.
Chapter 6 – Global Swarming
Like slugs or ants we leave trails of our activities in a global networked environment. This trails can be exploited to better suite (but there are dangers) our relations with our technological extensions.
Interesting:
The collaborative filtering. The categorization by cumulative trail laying which is unplanned, emergent and flexible.
The strategy of new search engines like Google that focus attention not (ultimately) on the content of the pages so much as on the structure of links between pages.
Jon Kleinberg, Authoritative Sources in a Hyperlinked Environment at http://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/kleinber/auth.pdf
Better search engines make the extensive use of personal bookmarks redundant.
Chapter 7 – Bad Borg?
Same danger (more or less real):
* Inequality
* Intrusion
* Uncontrollability
* Overload
* Alienation
* Narrowing
* Deceit
* Degradati0on
* Disembodiment
2 comments:
Go to watch Cyborg vs. Humans, Contamination" an amazing dramatization of Identity and Role -theatre improvvisation- www.dramaticamenteteatro.blogspot.com. Many wishes to your research. Director
Thanks for this wonderful synopsis! :) I think you may want to check up on the spelling, though.
Post a Comment