Tag: Cyborgs

Dysembodiment

When I first encountered mind-body dualism as a philosophy, I pictured monks frustrated with their bodies wishing their minds could be dissociated from them so that they could avoid the ‘temptations’ associated with ‘the flesh’. Supposedly ‘pure’ minds are not troubled by the need for food and water, thermal comfort, sexual fantasies, or urgent needs to defacate while trying to concentrate on something. No wonder religions tend to idealize a disembodied afterlife where our souls persist after our flesh decays. Remembering that, in evolutionary terms at least, the various parts of our bodies are the emergent products of networks of interdependent collaborations among cells that have specialized their functions, it is not difficult to imagine that one part of the body might become irritated with the behaviour of another. But mind and body seem to be a particularly vulnerable fault line.

When I become ill, or my tinnitus worsens, or whatever internal pipework in my face it is that means I hear my breathing rather like the space-walk scenes in 2001: A Space Odyssey, I feel that irritation intensely. Sometimes, there is even no bodily provocation for such irritation at all. I have wished I didn’t have to breathe, that my heart would stop beating, that I didn’t need sleep, or that my body would cease causing me the discomforts associated with the symptoms of illness. If I had a robot body, for example, then a malfunctioning part could simply be replaced using a few spanners and a bit of solder. It would be a routine occurrence, perhaps as part of an annual service one could do oneself, rather than some major, potentially life-threatening undertaking requiring specialist skills.

The experience of some form of dysembodiment, as we might term a persistent desire to inhabit a different body, is prevalent in contemporary society, and causes significant psychological discomfort, and in the worst cases, severe mental illness. The concept of dysembodiment cannot distinguish among the sources of the problem: be they in the mind, the body, the environment, or some combination of these. For example, a long-term medical problem that might make one wish one had a different body could be caused by an inherited condition, stress, social norms about what people’s bodies should look like, and/or pollution. Whatever the cause, the issue would be addressed by living in a different body. Though I could hardly say I suffer much from dysembodiment, when I do find myself whimsically wishing I had a different body because of some inconvenience or another, I tend to imagine it being a machine rather than flesh. Why replace my body parts with some other randomly emergent meat, as opposed to carefully designed, precision engineered, and, critically, replacable and perhaps even upgradable machined parts?

Another alternative could be to do away with embodiment altogether. However, if we imagine brains as information processing machines, ‘pure mind’ is computation with no physical engine making it happen — I cannot conceive of a means by which such a thing would be possible. If this isn’t just my limited imagination, but a fundamental law of the universe, then one way or another, embodiment is something minds must accept in order to be minds at all. Then, if nothing else, increasing entropy means that the body will decay. Bodies allow minds to exist, but they also malfunction and need maintenance, which irritates minds and makes them wish they didn’t have bodies.

Three Cyborg Manifestos

A significant step towards articulating the discomfort I referred to in my previous post was a random encounter on the web with a ‘hoax’ perpetrated by Richard DeGrandpre, author and associate editor of Adbusters magazine. The hoax, perpetrated at the time through a Flash app at cyborgmanifesto.org, is old enough that I had to go to web.archive.org to get a link. The app, essentially, just presented some text for you to read, and I’d love to type it all out here to make it more accessible, but that would be an abuse of copyright.

The text opens with an imagined conversation in an internet chat-room, in which the participants discuss the formation of the Cyborg Manifesto, which is built around the seemingly noble goals of advancing and disseminating human knowledge, eliminating human suffering and increasing life expectancy; and the more questionable goals of making human biological systems obsolete and engineering artificial consciousness. The subsequent text is presented as a series of scrollable pages within the app, each accessed by pressing a button at the bottom of the previous page. It covers themes familiar to any sci-fi and cyberpunk fan: what it means to be human in an increasingly artificial reality, and the blurring of the boundaries between human and machine. It was clear that the ultimate destiny the manifesto had in mind was the complete subsumption of human existence in computers.

The app then invited people to submit comments for or against the manifesto. What seems to have shocked Richard DeGrandpre was that — whether comments were in favour or opposed, whether they thought it was really possible to bring about or not — people took the manifesto seriously. Fifteen to twenty years later, there are people working to bring about the kinds of phenomenon discussed in the Cyborg Manifesto: body–hackers, biohackers, and life-extenders — somewhere in the world there’s an underground movement working away right now to make all this happen. Almost incredibly, there’s even the 2045 initiative with its own manifesto (one that is absolutely not satirical) that mirrors, if not word-for-word, then intention-for-intention, the one at cyborgmanifesto.org.

The cyborgmanifesto.org hints at what might have been the inspiration for its content with a rather disturbing reference to Donna Haraway. Her 1991 book Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, contains a chapter more modestly entitled “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” This is a highly-influential piece of work that has been cited thousands of times, but a little bit like the way Richard DeGrandpre embedded his text in Flash, Donna Haraway’s text is couched in the turbid language of critical feminist theory. I have what might be called a mental ‘Foucault-horizon’: a little bit like the boundary of a black hole, any article mentioning Foucault is going to be one I will struggle to comprehend. But in the Cyborg Manifesto chapter, he’s right there at the bottom of the third paragraph: “Foucault’s biopolitics is a flaccid premonition of cyborg politics.”

Whether satire, vision or blasphemy the three manifestos for cyborgs mentioned here focus on the human; as though humans are distinct ‘things’ that can have an independent existence, as opposed to deeply interconnected networks of collaborating cells engaged in a constant exchange of materials and information with an ecosystem in which they are embedded. Cyborgs, if they are to exist, need an ecocyborg to exist in. If we are already engaged in projects to bring about the cyborg manifesto, what is the manifesto that underwrites what we are doing to our environment?