That’s the title of professor Andy Clark’s 2003 book. In his own words:
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 human-technology symbionts: thinking and reasoning systems whose minds and selves are spread across biological brain and non-biological circuitry.
This may sound like futuristic mumbo-jumbo, and I happily confess that I wrote the preceding paragraph with an eye to catching your attention, even if only by the somewhat dangerous route of courting your immediate disapproval! But I do believe that it is the plain and literal truth. I believe, to be clear, that it is above all a scientific truth, a reflection of some deep and important facts about (a whiff of paradox here?) our special, and distinctively human nature. And certainly, I don’t think this tendency towards cognitive hybridization is a modern development. Rather, it is an aspect of our humanity which is as basic and ancient as the use of speech, and which has been extending its territory ever since.
The following excerpt is from the wikipedia entry on professor Andy Clark:
Clark is perhaps most famous for his defence of the hypothesis of the Extended mind. According to Clark, the dynamic loops through which mind and world interact are not merely instrumental. The cycle of activity that runs from brain through body and world and back again actually constitutes cognition. The mind, on this account, is not bounded by the biological organism but extends into the environment of that organism. Consider two subjects carry out a mathematical task. The first completes the task solely in her head, while the second completes the task with the assistance of paper and pencil. By Clark’s ‘parity principle’, as long as the cognitive results are the same there is no reason to count the means employed by the two subjects as different. The process of cognition in the second case involves paper and pencil, and the conception of ‘mind’ appropriate to this subject must include these environmental items.
In an interview, he was asked whether there are any science fiction authors he thinks are especially perceptive writers on the subjects he deals with in “Natural Born Cyborgs”.
He answers:
I am a big fan of Greg Egan, and also of Terry Bissom. Less well-known perhaps, but very good on this whole human-machine merger thing, is Maureen McHugh (I am thinking here of China Mountain Zhang).
And of course there are the usual suspects: Neil Stephenson, William Gibson, Bruce Sterling. An older (1952) and rather neglected (perhaps because so very disturbing) treatment of the issues about identity and our relation to our parts is Limbo by Bernard Wolf. Above all, though, I guess I’d single out Warren Ellis for the great Transmetropolitan comic book series.
How many professors or students of philosophy are there who know Greg Egan? Greg Egan’s Diaspora must be one of the weirdest books I’ve ever read. Good weird.
I have not read a lot of Clark’s work, but it does interest me even though I am not yet convinced of the significance or relevance of the hypothesis of the Extended mind. I do have some of his stuff on my backlog and, who knows, maybe more of it will find its way in there.