Download Walt Whitman “I Sing the Body Electric” (1900)

Introduction
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Introduce our selves – are you a cyborg?
Assignment #1
Steve Mann – “At a airport gate, a Cyborg unplugged”
NBC – Introduction & Chapter 1
SM – Chapter 1
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Walt Whitman “I Sing the Body
Electric” (1900)
I SING the Body electric;
The armies of those I love engirth me, and I
engirth them;
They will not let me off till I go with them,
respond to them,
And discorrupt them, and charge them full with
the charge of the Soul.
Was it doubted that those who corrupt their
own bodies conceal themselves;
And if those who defile the living are as bad as
they who defile the dead?
And if the body does not do as much as the
Soul?
And if the body were not the Soul, what is the
Soul?
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Brain
• Brain: an apparatus with which we
think we think.
– Ambrose Bierce (1842 1914), The Devil's Dictionary
• If the brain were so simple we could
understand it, we would be so simple
we couldn't.
– Lyall Watson
• People who don't Think probably
don't have Brains; rather, they have
grey fluff that's blown into their
heads by mistake.
– Pooh's Little Instruction Book,
inspired by A. A. Milne
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Neural Networks
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Human-computer interaction
• From interacting with ATMs to playing video games to
neural implants…
• What makes humans differ than computers?
– Human (1533): a bipedal primate mammal (Homo
sapiens)
– Computer (1646) - one that computes;
specifically : a programmable usually electronic
device that can store, retrieve, and process data
• How do we interact with computers?
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Human Brains
Advantages :
• Enormous size.
• Uses parallel processing &
biological preprocessing.
• Uses memory instead of
processing power.
• Efficient when performing
small # of useful operations.
• Good at : pattern
recognition, motor control,
perception, flexible
inference, intuition &
guessing.
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Disadvantages :
• Slow.
• Imprecise, make erroneous
generalizations,
• Prejudiced.
• Often incapable of
explaining their actions.
Neural Networks
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Computer-aided = ?
• When does computer-aided
cross the line into no
longer human?
• Andy Clark – Natural Born
Cyborg
• Howard Rheingold – Smart
Mobs
• Cory Doctorow – Down &
Out in the Magic Kingdom
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Artificial Intelligence (AI)
• Artificial intelligence (1956): a branch of computer
science dealing with the simulation of intelligent
behavior in computers; the capability of a machine to
imitate intelligent human behavior (onelook.com)
• Cyborg (cybernetic organism) -- “A cyborg is a
cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and
organism, a creature of social reality as well as a
creature of fiction.” Donna Haraway (1991).
– E.g., Kevin Warwick & Steve Mann vs. Terminator,
Borg
Andy Clark
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Andy Clark: Natural Born Cyborgs :
Introduction
My body is an electronic virgin. I incorporate no silicon chips, no
retinal or cochlear implants, no pacemaker. I don't even wear
glasses (though I do wear clothes). But I am slowly becoming
more and more a Cyborg. So are you. Pretty soon, and still
without the need for wires, surgery or bodily alterations, we
shall be kin to the Terminator, to Eve 8, to Cable...just fill in
your favorite fictional Cyborg. Perhaps we already are. For we
shall be Cyborgs not in the merely superficial sense of combining
flesh and wires, but in the more profound sense of being humantechnology symbionts: thinking and reasoning systems whose
minds and selves are spread across biological brain and
nonbiological circuitry. This book is the story of that transition
and of its roots in some of the most basic and characteristics
facts about human nature. For human beings, I want to convince
you, are natural-born cyborgs.
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Terminator, Eve VIII, Cable, Santa
Claus Meets the Martians?
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Clark’s Argument – Cognitive hybridization,
mindware upgrades, man the toolmaker, cyborg
• Humans have always done cognitive
hybridization.
– Speech & counting  written text
& numerals  printing  printing
press  digital encodings
– Cascade of “mindware upgrades”
• Our cyborg nature can explain
– Why humans differ from other
animals while having similar neural
& bodily resources
– Why it’s hard to build a decent
thinking robot
– Why losing his laptop was tough
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• Human mind can’t be seen as
bound & restricted by biological
skin-bag
– Prejudice that “whatever
matters about my mind must
depend solely on what goes
on inside my own biological
skin-bag, inside the ancient
fortress of skin & skull.”
• Role of biological brain
– Good at pattern recognition,
perception, controlling
physical actions
– Bad at complex planning &
long derivations of
“bad at logic & good at Frisbee”
consequences
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Cyborg
• “an organism that is a self-regulating
integration of artificial and natural systems”
(Wikipedia)
• Cultural icon of human-machine hybrids
• Clark – “hijack that image & to reshape it,
revealing it as a disguised vision of (oddly) our
own biological nature.”
• Humans – unique in ability to enter into deep &
complex relationships with nonbiological
constructs, props & aids.
– Doesn’t depend on physical wire-and-implants
– Does depend on our openness to informationprocessing mergers
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Post-humanism
www.robertpepperell.com/Posthum/gener.htm
1.1. It is now clear that Humans are no longer the most important
things in the Universe. This is something the Humanists have yet
to accept.
1.2. All technological progress of Human society is geared towards
the redundancy of the Human species as we currently know it.
1.3. In the Posthuman era many beliefs become redundant - not
least the belief in Human Being.
1.4. Human Beings, like Gods, only exist in as much as we believe
them to exist.
1.5. The Future never arrives.
1.6. All Humans are not born equal, but it is too dangerous not to
pretend that they are.
1.7. In the Posthuman era machines will be Gods.
1.8. Intelligent Agents will be the religious authorities of the
Information Age. We will ask them to interpret the Chaos of the
God machines for us.
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Clark is not post-humanist
• As NBC, humans ready to merge our
mental abilities with technology
• E.g., Lolo & his silicon chip
– No signs of “cat-machine”
symbiosis
• New waves of user-sensitive
technology that adapt to us will help
us merge with technology -> harder to
say “where world stops &the person
begins”
• We are “creatures whose minds are
special precisely because they are
tailor-made for multiple mergers &
coalitions”
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Clark’s argument continues
• Barrier between biological self & technological world
was never very firm.
– Plasticity & multiplicity are true constants
– Technology has always been present
• Example – home town of Brighton
– Cell phones, Nokia, text messaging
– Finnish use of “kanny” – extension of the hand –
for cell phone.
• Something you use + something that is part of you.
• Upgrades have pros & cons
– Every new technology brings new limits & demans.
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Mind-Body Problem is Really Mind-Body
Scaffolding Problem
• Understand how human thought & reason
is born out of looping interactions
between material brains, material bodies
& complex cultural & technological
environments.
• Create environments, but they create us
too.
• “Baffling dance of brains, bodies, and
cultural & technological scaffolding.”
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