Are You a Cyborg?
I wager that your intuitive response to this question is “no”. Most people that we come into contact with do not have third arms, third eyes (besides those of us who have our chakras aligned, of course), or cranially implanted phase guns. However, as I will hope to show below, once we come to a proper understanding of what a “cyborg” really is, we’ll soon realise that we’re all cyborgs, and have been for quite some time.
At its birth in the 1960s, a cyborg (shorthand for “cybernetic organism”) was defined as an entity that “deliberately incorporates exogenous components extending the self-regulating control function of the organism in order to adapt it to new environments” (Clark, 2003: 14). In English, what this means is that for a member of Homo sapiens to be considered a cyborg, they would have to have both biological and technological components. These technological (“exogenous”) components must be “self-regulating” in the sense that they are subject to various feedback loops, allowing for the organism to effectively control them as extensions of itself. Imagine yourself with a third arm: in order for such an appendage to work effectively it should be linked to you in such a way that enabled you to have fine-grained control of its motion. Moreover, you would want to receive feedback from the arm so that you could adjust it accordingly. This third arm could then be considered a very useful tool that you deploy in your everyday life: brushing your teeth, trading a stock, and signing a document, all at the same time (as an Italian, the sheer amount of extra information I could convey with an added arm for gesticulating is almost inconceivable).
With our definitions (somewhat) in order, we can go back to our original question: are you a cyborg? On a common sense understanding of the word it seems obvious that most of us are nowhere near to being classified as cyborgs. As noted earlier, not many of us have third eyes. But I want to challenge that assumption. To do this, I want you to think about a “tool” that you use every day, but perhaps don’t really consider a tool at all: your brain. Now you might object: your brain is not a tool that you use, it is a part of you, or, perhaps more strongly, you are your brain. Well, I think we are all more than our brains, and not in some speculative and abstract metaphysical sense, but in a very ordinary and practical sense.
I’ll use an example borrowed in form but not content from Andy Clark and David Chalmers in their mind-bending paper “The Extended Mind” (1998: 12). But first, imagine a neurotypical adult. We’ll call him X Æ A-Xii.[1] X Æ A-Xii hears from a friend that there is a flash sale of Altra Lone Peak 4.5s at the Cape Town Convention Centre. Luckily, X Æ A-Xii knows Cape Town quite well and, after thinking for a moment, recalls from memory how to get from his current location to the Centre, which is located at 1 Lower Long Street. In this case it seems clear X Æ A-Xii believes that the Centre is located at 1 Lower Long Street, and that he believed this even before being prompted to consult his memory in search of the information.
Next, consider the case of Frank, who suffers from Alzheimer’s disease (Ibid: 12). Like many who suffer from Alzheimer’s, Frank relies on various kinds of environmental information to help him structure his life and live as independently as possible.[2] Imagine that Frank has a notebook where he places any new information that he has learnt so that he can consult it later. For Frank, the notebook performs the role usually played by biological memory. Now imagine that Frank also hears about the flash sale of Altra shoes and immediately proceeds to the convention centre. To do so, however, Frank first consults his notebook, in which it states that the centre is located on 1 Lower Long Street, and then proceeds to walk there.
Frank walked to 1 Lower Long Street because he wanted to go to the sale, and he believed that this was the location of the sale. Analogously, if we agree that X Æ A-Xii believed the centre was located at 1 Lower Long Street, then it seems we should say the same about Frank before he consulted his notebook. The notebook, in this case, plays the same role as biological memory — it just so happens that the notebook is not contained in the skin-bag within which we usually expect our beliefs to be found (Ibid: 13). If we are to resist this interpretation, then we are forced to say that Frank has no belief about the matter before consulting his notebook, and that his belief is rather that the address is in his notebook. This way of viewing things, however, does not seem to do justice to the way that Frank makes use of his cognitive gadget. Frank constantly makes use of his notebook to get around, recording new information in it, and consulting it in ways which significantly impact his actions. In this sense it is similar to the role of biological memory: it is readily there when needed and can be used to guide action (Ibid: 13). To say that Frank’s beliefs about certain things vanish as soon as the notebook is put away would then force us to concede that X Æ A-Xii’s beliefs also vanish as soon as he is not conscious of them — an absurd conclusion.
Let us take stock. What the above example was meant to show is that our brains, much like the notebook, are also readily accessible tools that we make use of in order to guide our actions and structure our world. If we accept this, we can then concede that, much like the notebook and our brains, there may be other objects “out there” in the world that have significant roles to play in the kind of beliefs we have, and that the boundary between self and world is not as clear-cut as we intuitively think it is.
What does this have to do with us being cyborgs? Well, everything. What the discussion up until this point reveals, paradoxically perhaps, is that making use of various “exogenous components” is akin to us “making use” of our brains. But our brains are not the only things we make use of. The operations of our mind make us what we are, and “mind” can be understood as a complex interplay of our brains and our world. As Andy Clark puts it, “the line between tool and user becomes flimsy indeed” (2003: 7). Technological artefacts (of which the notebook above is but a primitive example), therefore, reveal themselves to be less like tools and more like proper parts of a person’s normal mental functioning. The visually impaired person’s cane is in a very meaningful sense part of how they view the world — taking it away would be akin to removing a non-impaired person’s eyes. In this sense, our minds become extended, and the world in which we are embedded and the technologies that are available to us importantly shape the kinds of persons we are and can become. For the moment, at least, these technological extensions have not threatened our humanity: current technologies, while emphasizing the blurry nature of the boundary between self and world, do not fundamentally change the nature of the self. The self might be “soft” in the sense that it is malleable and subject to change, but it is nonetheless recognisably human. A death-dealing machine from the future, which bears no resemblance to any human being, is another story altogether.
If you accept this, then it seems we human beings have been cyborgs for a very long time: from at least the first use of symbolic representation (in the form of art in caves, or even storytelling, to the use of pens and paper, and now word processors) we have found ways to offload information from our biological brains into external media. This performs the function of freeing up our biological information processing systems, and also delegating to artificial systems that which is very difficult for biological brains (your calculator can instantly calculate that 4377 multiplied by 5435 is 23,788,995, but I doubt you can. Thankfully, computers routinely fail to recognize what a bus looks like, so it’s not all doom and gloom[3]). It is this uncanny ability of ours to extend ourselves into the world “that explains how we humans can be so very special while at the same time [be] not so very different, biologically speaking, from the other animals with whom we share both the planet and most of our genes” (Clarke, 2003: 10).
References
Clark, A. (2003) Natural-Born Cyborgs. Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi: 10.2307/3654679.
Clark, A. and Chalmers, D. (1998) ‘The Extended Mind Thesis’, Analysis, 58(1), pp. 7–19.
[1] Elon Musk and Grimes apparently changed their son’s name from “X Æ A-12” to “X Æ A-Xii” due to California state law. As a law-abiding citizen myself I follow their lead. See https://indianexpress.com/article/trending/trending-globally/elon-musk-grimes-son-name-x-ae-a-12-x-ae-a-xii-6427851/
[2] Examples include photos of family and friends with indications of names and relationships, memory books to store events and meetings, and “open-storage”- strategies which place crucial items in plain view.
[3] I’m sure you’re all familiar with CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart). Well, computers fail these tests, for now (but they’re getting better).
