The Cyborg as an Accurate Description of the Human in the Philosophy of Technology?

(this text was part of my proposed PhD project)

What role does technology play in today’s information and network society? Are technological artefacts merely an external aid to thinking, or do they, under certain conditions, become an inseparable part of the mind? Can today’s philosophy of technology and cognitive science inform the design of the relationship between humans and technology? Although we find a fascination with the technological Other as early as the old kabbalistic legend of the Golem or the story of Frankenstein, these questions were long neglected in academic discourse.

Jacques Ellul, following Marx, drew attention to the influence of automation and to the alienation of man. Technology was at most a mere application of scientific knowledge and, according to Karl Jaspers, a neutral instrument that carries out goals set by people. The first fundamental turn came in the work of Martin Heidegger, where technology gains ontological primacy over science and becomes a mode of human being. For these and many other commentators, however, modern technology was a thoroughly negative element that humanity has to come to terms with. From the second half of the twentieth century, the view of technology began to change, away from the conception of technology as a monolithic and dehumanising abstract force.

The Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan likened technology to a medium and to an extension of human abilities that has “personal and social consequences” (McLuhan, 1991). With the proliferation of the first computers, the pioneers of the emerging field of Human-computer interaction (HCI) agreed that computers can help us cope with the growing complexity of the information and network society by augmenting the “human intellect” (Bush, 1945; Licklider, 1960; Engelbart, 1962). In these visions, the human was to become part of a symbiotic and cybernetic relationship with technology (a cyborg). These philosophically and systemically oriented views of cognition were pushed into the background in HCI in the 1980s (Card, 1983), after the field found its theoretical anchoring in cognitive science and its dominant cognitivist paradigm. Cognitivism, through the metaphor of the computer, sees human cognition as an information-processing unit that operates with internal representations made up of physical symbols. Cognitivism’s implicit acceptance of the tradition of the Cartesian dualisms of body–mind and subject–object instilled into HCI design itself, and into the relationship between humans and technology, the assumption that the physical body and perception are merely the periphery, or the interface, between the mind and the world (Van Dijk, 2018). Susan Hurley called this picture of cognition the “sandwich” paradigm of the mind, for perceptions are merely input data into the mind and action is an output from the mind into the world, while cognition is “sandwiched” in between (Hurley, 1998; Hurley, 2008). Since everything relevant to human cognition takes place in the depths of our heads, technology, seen through the lens of cognitivism, once again became a neutral instrument without influence on our cognition, for it merely passively carries out the tasks assigned to it by human users. In HCI design, cognitivism introduced a utilitarian emphasis on interaction with technology, which was structured according to plans prepared in advance that completely ignored semantic values and the influence of the contextual social and spatiotemporal factors of the situatedness of interaction.

Cognitivist axioms and the so-called strong programme of symbolic artificial intelligence were criticised, for example, by the philosopher John Searle (Searle, 1980). The well-known HCI theorist Don Norman wrote that in order to study cognition, human action has to be studied from a systemic perspective in which the situation and social and cultural influences interact with one another through feedback mechanisms (Norman, 1980). The philosopher Hubert Dreyfus, drawing on Heidegger’s phenomenology, the late work of Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty, argued that a model of the human as a symbolic process abstracted from the world will not lead to intelligent action, for the human and his cognition are fundamentally embodied in-the-world, where the world serves as an external representation of itself, and the meanings of things and tools in Heidegger’s analysis of equipment are anchored in a “network of signification” (Heidegger, 1996, §15 69/89). Only through its relations to other equipment and to the context of the practice of its use does a given tool acquire its meaning (Kiverstein, 2012, p. 4). Dreyfus’s introduction of phenomenology and of the principle of embodiment into cognitive science had a fundamental impact on research in HCI and artificial intelligence. It directly inspired Terry Winograd (Winograd, 1987) and the anthropologist Lucy Suchman (Suchman, 1985; Clark and Chalmers, 1998), who showed through empirical research that people do not act on the basis of structured a priori plans, but rather act ad hoc, in real time, in response to the concrete situation and make use of the resources they have at hand, thereby helping to launch the research programme of situated action/cognition. In a classic article (Brooks, 1991), Rodney Brooks agreed that the world is its own best model, and he was one of the first to implement in robotics the ideas of a “Heideggerian AI” that does not use internal representations. The embodiment of cognition, that is, the thesis that the body non-trivially shapes our thinking, was explored further by, for example, Lakoff and Johnson (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980). If we accept the argument that the body plays an important role in our cognition, why limit ourselves to the boundaries of our skin?

One answer to this question was the theses of distributed (Hutchins, 1995) and extended cognition (Clark, 1997; Clark and Chalmers, 1998; Clark, 2004). They argue that higher cognitive processes are produced by applying lower cognitive processes to the use of cultural materials in the form of language, sign systems or technological artefacts (Hutchins, 2010; Norman, 1993; Vygotsky, 1975; Clark, 2001). Andy Clark, the main proponent of the theory of extended cognition, holds the position of active externalism, in which the human organism, through two-way interaction with an external entity, forms together with it a coupled cognitive system that must be understood as a single whole. External processes are just as causally relevant as the internal parts of the brain. According to Clark, the mind “leaks” into the environment, and that is why we are natural-born cyborgs: cybernetic organisms in which biological, technological and environmental components give rise to emergent abilities and action.

The history and the present of the theory of extended cognition are thus complex. David Chalmers (Clark, 2004, foreword) and the Czech theorist Roman Madzia (Madzia, 2013) both point out that the germs of the thinking of the theory of extended cognition can already be found in the representatives of the philosophy of American pragmatism, George Herbert Mead and John Dewey. New media theory (e.g. Manovich, 2002; Dvořák, 2010; Wark, 2016), HCI (Kaptelinin and Nardi, 2006; Turner, 2016), anthropology (Haraway, 1987) and the sociology of science following the work of Bruno Latour all show a tradition of analysing the relationship between humans and media technology that either derives directly from the theory of extended cognition or is complementary to it. Last but not least, a historical analysis of the topic must at the same time deal with the differences and shared assumptions within cognitive science itself, for the theory of extended cognition shares the interests of researchers with the other parallel research programmes of Embodied, Embedded and Enactive cognition, which are referred to by the umbrella term 4E cognitive science (Kiverstein, 2018).

Since the theory of extended cognition is radically anti-Cartesian and connects body, mind and environment, it lends itself to being explicitly introduced into the philosophy of technology through a synthesis of new media theory and contemporary postphenomenological philosophy of technology (Ihde, 1978; Ihde, 1990; Verbeek, 2005; Verbeek and Rosenberger, 2015; Verbeek, 2015). Its representatives analyse technology as a multistable and anti-essentialist medium that amplifies and reduces our perceptions, thereby creating a specific relationship to the world.

This synthesis offers several points of inquiry. First, it presents an argument for an ontological analysis of the non-fixed, multistable nature of humans and technological objects, which is defined only in their mutual interaction. Second, it would be possible to explore how we use “cognitive technologies” to off-load demanding activities from the brain onto external artefacts (Clark, 2002; Dennett, 1996, p. 134-135). Last but not least, it would be worth focusing on how the use of technology mediates and transforms our access to the world. One of the implications of such a synthesis for the fields of HCI and technology design in a technologically mediated world could be that the design of technology is equivalent to the design of the relationship between humans, nature and the social world, but also to the design of human cognitive abilities.

 

Sources for the project proposal

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List of relevant literature

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Brooks, Rodney, 1991, Intelligence without representation

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CHEMERO, Anthony, 2011. Radical embodied cognitive science. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. ISBN 9780262516471.

Clark, A., and J. Toribio, 1994, “Doing without representing?” Synthese, 101: 401–431.

Clark, Andy, 1997, Being There: Putting Mind, Body, and World Together Again, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Clark, Andy, 2001, “Reasons, Robots, and the Extended Mind,” Mind and Language, 16: 121–145.

Clark, Andy, 2001. Natural-Born Cyborgs?. In: Cognitive Technology: Instruments of Mind. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2001-7-24, p. 17-24. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. DOI: 10.1007/3-540-44617-6_2. ISBN 978-3-540-42406-2. Also available at: http://link.springer.com/10.1007/3-540-44617-6_2

Clark, Andy, 2003, Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence, New York: Oxford University Press.

Clark, Andy, 2008, Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension, New York: Oxford University Press.

Clark, Andy; Chalmers, David, 1998, The extended mind

DEWEY, J., (1896), The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology”, Psychological Review, 3 (1), pp. 357- 370.

DVOŘÁK, Tomáš, ed., 2010. Kapitoly z dějin a teorie médií. Praha: Akademie výtvarných umění v Praze, Vědecko-výzkumné pracoviště. Edice VVP AVU. ISBN 978-80-87108-16-8.

EEDE, Yoni Van Den, 2012. Amor technologiae: Marshall McLuhan as philosopher of technology : toward a philosophy of human-media relationships. Brussels: VUBPRESS. ISBN 9789057181870.

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VEERBEK, Peter-Paul, 2015. Toward a Theory of Technological Mediation: A Program for Postphenomenological Research. BERG, Jan Kyrre, O FRIIS and Robert P. CREASE. Technoscience and postphenomenology: the Manhattan papers. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, p. 189-204. ISBN 978-0-7391-8961-0.

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VYGOTSKY, L. S., 1975. Thought and language. 12. print. Cambridge, Mass: M.I.T. Press. ISBN 9780262220033.

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