Alexandru Budac, PhD

West University in Timişoara, Romania

alexandru.budac@litere.uvt.ro

 

 

Soft-Selves and Soft-Readers

 

 

Abstract: This paper tries to outline some consequences of the cognitive perspectives that describe humans in technological terms. Andy Clark’s provocative explanation as to why we are “natural-born cyborgs” is discussed in detail. An artificially redesigned self definitely needs a special kind of education, but can a technologically-oriented culture provide the proper means to acquire valuable knowledge? Some possible answers to this question are suggested at the end.

Keywords: Ludwig Wittgenstein; Language; Philosophy; Cognitive sciences; The Copycat Project; Andy Clark; Cyborg; “Self redesigned”.

 

 

The issues raised by the accelerated progress of technology are rarely tackled in a moderate way. Especially when it comes to the fate of education and the future of books in the present information era, one can find discourses either at the somber extreme – culture and civilization as we know them will be swallowed by the black hole of technological apocalypse – or on the crest of a purely enthusiastic wave – we are heading to a better world, a Wonderland where we shall live forever, plugged into the information infinity, our personalities extended through the Paradise of Virtual Reality. Between the dystopian fears and the unreflected acceptance of technology’s promises, alternatives seem to be quite few. We will vegetate euphorically, surrounded by screens and deprived of books, like the characters in Fahrenheit 451 or, on the contrary, we will fulfill the evolutionary chain by completing our biologic equipment with ideal, metal and silicon organs and connecting with one another through more and more sophisticated communication networks. The books will die, the machines will do our entire work.

Too soon have we have forgotten Ludwig Wittgenstein’s lesson, namely that the majority of the dilemmas we try to solve by our more or less philosophical assertions are caused by the use of language itself, by our lack of expressivity, and by our habit of feeding the mind “with only one kind of example.”[1] Moreover, our ways of approaching and understanding new technologies depend enormously on how we relate to our own body and what was formerly called “soul”. A good part of the recent descriptions of human beings and their activities concentrates almost exclusively on what is really external, a byproduct of their life, not at all indispensable conditions for their existence: the artificial environment is more important than the mind which perceives and transforms it, social energies have priority over individuals, literary theories have become more important than the texts to which they apply, the generally valid abstraction takes the place of the specific situation, semantic interactions at a mental level do not depend on neural activities, memes are as responsible for our ancestral inheritance as genes, and so on. In short, we find ourselves before a plethora of more or less clear and justified categories. Though it should be a truism, the truth that any educational system involves the endorsement of some cognitive patterns to the detriment of others is quite often ignored.

It is surprising that, although the soul has become an obsolete term, used rather ironically or at best metaphorically nowadays, cognitive theories grounded in Artificial Intelligence research perpetuate, despite their high-tech terminology, the same old thought patterns and, particularly, dualisms similar to the one they ardently refute – the Cartesian dualism. Years ago, I was myself seduced by the descriptions of the mind in computational terms and by the uncanny consequences of the “Universe as Computer” theory. Today, much as I admire the efforts of philosopher Douglas Hofstadter and his team of eminent researchers (The Fluid Analogies Research Group), their attempts to build an artificial connectionist model meant to explain and perhaps even compete with the human one fuel my skepticism. I am referring to the famous Copycat Project – a computer program designed to reproduce the human mind’s aptitude to juggle with concepts’ extensionality and intensionality.

According to the authors’ description, the program has “an emergent architecture, in the sense that the program’s top-level behaviour emerges as a statistical consequence of myriad small computational actions, and the concepts that it uses in creating analogies can be considered to be a realization of ‘statistically emergent active symbols’.”[2] Extremely ambitious and admirable as it is – designed in the ’80s and the ’90s, The Copycat Project served as a base for the development of similar programs –, the software’s capacity to create simple analogies and simulate the infinitesimal processes (not yet fully understood) of human creativity are unsatisfactory if we compare them to the inner cosmos of each of us. Every single rule precisely defined by programmers to stimulate the emergent architecture’s fluidity is an obstacle to explaining the true conceptual fluidity at the same time – the human one. Besides, Douglas Hofstadter and the other researchers’ project grounds itself on ideal premises and does not take into account the fact that every mind is the result of an organic body. I believe that more interesting answers concerning brain mysteries should be sought in the field of neurology and the books of some remarkable scholars, among whom Antonio Damasio, Eric Kandel, Vilayanur S. Ramachandran, and Oliver Sacks.

I shall now turn to a challenging study published in 2003 by Andy Clark, Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at The University of Edinburgh, because I consider it symptomatic if one needs to understand a particular kind of attitude towards technological progress and our posthuman future. I am talking about Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence. After assessing Andy Clark’s vision of our nature, I shall conclude with some personal considerations concerning the fate of books and teaching human sciences in the Twenty-First Century.

Andy Clark is one of the scholars who consider that the human mind is not special, as an entire Western philosophical tradition tries to persuade us[3]. It is only more adaptable to environment and, thanks to brain plasticity, more inclined towards improvement than other minds. To put it differently, its strength is, simultaneously, a weakness, but one that humans have always known how to use to their advantage. To Clark, „the mind is just less and less in the head”[4]. It transcends skull boundaries and projects itself onto weapons, tools, pens, texts, books, flying and sailing machines, PCs, remote-controls, artificial hearts, and many others. The scientist from the University of Edinburgh extends Manfred Clyne’s definition of the cyborg[5] and replaces, in an undoubtedly ambitious manner, the classical conception of homo faber with the upgraded description of man as “natural-born cyborg”.

The anthropological premises are correct, but when the author illustrates the imperative which upholds the entire book (We must improve our brain!) some distinctions become fuzzy. In Clark’s opinion, the development of our cognitive endowments necessarily involves more and more advanced technologies: eyes helped by video cameras, digital props for our tactile sense, cortical implants, devices turned on vocally or by retina recognition, auxiliary limbs, easy to pierce interfaces between mental states and Virtual Reality. We are “soft-selves”[6] – another euphemistic concept supposed to enforce our time’s pervasive belief that the self does not exist – scattered over an organic surface (our body) longing for inorganic prosthetic extensions. Indeed, our brain can only develop in constant interaction with the environment; yet, I wonder if a world perceived through such devices actually is a step forward.

The verifiable truth that our mind constructs an elusive image of the body and that this image is easy to change or distort encourages Clark to demonstrate how the self could be enlarged through “Augmented Reality”, that is a reality with its signifiers mathematically multiplied by the machines to which we would be plugged or, more correctly, the machines which would be plugged into our flesh. He distinguished between “opaque technologies”, whose manipulation needs special skills and sustained reflection during use, and “transparent technologies”, the latter being so present in everyday life that we are not even aware of our symbiosis. All technologies are opaque at the beginning, but most of them become transparent as they more or less change our lives. Though he accepts that we always have to pay a price for technological progress and that there are many kinds of risks – which he analyses in detail to refute by making them a little more benign –, Andy Clark still claims that, eventually, everything depends on our ability to discern the proper ways of handling the machines to accomplish our goals without becoming their slaves. His paradoxical belief, that only by extending our natural body into the inanimate world we become better beings, is unshakable:

“My claim […] is that various kinds of deep-human machine symbiosis really do expand and alter the shape of the psychological processes that make us who we are. The old technologies of pen and paper have deeply impacted the shape and form of biological reason in mature, literate brains. The presence of such technologies, and their modern and more responsive counterparts, does not merely act as a convenient wrap around for a fixed biological engine of reason. Nor does it merely free up neural resources. It provides instead an array of resources to which biological brains, as they learn and grow, will dovetail their own activities. The moral, for now, is simply that this process of fitting, tailoring, and factoring in leads to the creation of extended computational and mental organizations: reasoning and thinking systems distributed across brain, body, and world. And it is in the operation in these extended systems that much of our distinctive human intelligence inheres.”[7]

However, there are huge differences between the antique pen and paper and the brand new “non-penetrative modes of augmentation” of the self described in detail throughout Andy Clark’s book. Nothing assures us that the cognitive mutations will be benign and literate as they used to be. When he writes about the future education, the scientist particularly sees a semantic explosion due to the jocular interchangeability of the real and the virtual, and the artificial circumstances created to stimulate better brains from an early age. Yet, he does not too seriously question to what degree a reality which reaches the brain through a medium of digital processes can guarantee the ontological grounds for a coherent way of living. The possibility that the simpler solution could be the better one does not seem to interest Andy Clark. For example, he agrees that the printed book has major advantages over the digital format – his comparison between the amount of energy needed to light a virtual page and the comfort of reading offered by the paper page is more than enlightening[8] –, but the author still hopes that the old books will become museum pieces, accusing them of not being interactive. The idea that the MIT Media Lab technicians could replace the classical book format with papers covered in microencapsulated particles and powered by solar cells should amuse us, if only we did not know that it was deadly serious.

I myself do not believe that the human mind is a fixed entity, a Cartesian spectre (or a ghost) locked up in a machine[9], but I become very skeptical when Andy Clark tries to persuade us that our cultural future depends entirely on our ability to technologically redesign consciousness. The benefits of prostehetic devices described in the book for medical purposes are beyond doubt, though the morality of resorting to some of them should be discussed separately for each particular case. Nevertheless, to believe that, as the healthy human body becomes more robotized, we will find more and more priceless information about ourselves is beyond my comprehension.

What Andy Clark ignores in his otherwise brilliant study is that history of the self and reading cannot be separated. Nobody doubts that books truly improve our brain, but, at least for the moment, I like to believe that, if the human mind were to be “redesigned” in a better way, neither computers nor eugenic techniques would do it. In Natural-Born Cyborgs there is no clear distinction between being read and being informed, being imaginative and having the senses digitally excited. A world made richer by cyborglike perceptions, where people would be able to assimilate any kind of knowledge rapidly, – let’s say at a simple keybord touch, as Trinity learns to pilot a helicopter in The Matrix movie – , could hardly be called a cultural world. The recent overtechnologized wars have already shown us enough as to how the soldier’s moral sense is altered by simulator training. Combat field reality and the PC game interactivity become one and the same. The borders between life and death, natural and artificial, authentic experience and its simulation tend to be seen, alas, more and more like an interface aspect. In such circumstances, teaching literature or philosophy seems a real issue, because no matter how up to date you might be, no matter how sophisticated and efficient the means which help you to study, nothing can replace deep reading. Yet, reading is a solitary activity and, however out of fashion this might sound, it is only when you read that you are truly with yourself. The literary critic Harold Bloom put it superbly in the preface of his book How to Read and Why:

“There is no single way to read well, though there is a prime reason why we should read. Information is endlessly available to us; where shall wisdom be found ? If you are fortunate, you encounter a particular teacher who can help, yet finally you are alone, going on without further mediation. Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you, because it is, at least in my experience, the most healing of pleasures. It returns you to otherness, whether in yourself or in friends, or in those who may become friends. Imaginative literature is otherness, and as such alleviates loneliness. We read not only because we cannot know enough people, but because friendship is so vulnerable, so likely to diminish or disappear, overcome by space, time, imperfect simpathies, and all the sorrows of familial and pasional life .”[10]

Every sentence in this fragment is an urge for authentic life, a life lived among peers and enhanced by reading. Computer mediated experiences are life surrogates. To use science and its tools to understand and accurately describe the universe and to create better living conditions proves the greatness and audacity of human race once more, though lessons from the past teach us that any scientific progress has its dark side (see, for example, how the future cyborgs will be the best fighter pilots and warriors, perfectly plugged into their weapons[11]). To become one with the technology you are using, to sharpen your feelings until you change into a machine is to take the means as primary goals.

Our education systems will be highly digitized – a feature more than positive if we know how to rationally benefit from the unquestionable technical and economical advantages of the IT field. But it is not enough if we want them to be better than the systems of the past. A student whose memory and imagination were never spurred by deep reading in his/her early years, but whose dexterities at stitching pseudoscientific papers from the colorless ocean of information he or she takes for granted, will perpetuate the same learning pattern. More than ever, we must tell the real issues from the redundant ones – the wheels that can be turned though nothing else moves with them[12], as Wittgenstein used to say in the first half of the past century. The extreme attitudes described at the beginning of this essay – apocalyptic fears, and enthusiast technophilia – are mostly logical consequences of the translation from the scientific language into our everyday language. In a world homogenized by the Internet and mass-media – but not necessarily more open to actual communication, as nowadays mantra tries to convince us –, human sciences are the most vulnerable. For now, book selling is a sufficient argument to console those who worry. Despite the prophecies of Amazon Kindle and Google, the death of books is still far, but we will most certainly become soft-readers.

 

 

Bibliography

Bloom, Harold, How to Read and Why, A Touchstone Book, Published by Simon&Shuster, New York, 2000.

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

Hofstadter, Douglas, and Melanie Mitchell, The Copycat Project: A Model of Mental Fluidity and Analogy-making, in Douglas Hofstadter and The Fluid Analogies Research Group, Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies. Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought, Basic Books, New York, 1995.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Philosophical Investigations, Revised 4^th edition by P.M.S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte, English translation by G.E.M. Anscombe, Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.

 

 

Notes