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Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence
From Robocop to the Terminator to Eve 8, no image better captures our deepest fears about technology than the cyborg, the person who is both flesh and metal, brain and electronics. But philosopher and cognitive scientist Andy Clark sees it differently. Cyborgs, he writes, are not something to be feared--we already are cyborgs.
In Natural-Born Cyborgs , Clark argues that what makes humans so different from other species is our capacity to fully incorporate tools and supporting cultural practices into our existence. Technology as simple as writing on a sketchpad, as familiar as Google or a cellular phone, and as potentially revolutionary as mind-extending neural implants--all exploit our brains' astonishingly plastic nature. Our minds are primed to seek out and incorporate non-biological resources, so that we actually think and feel through our best technologies. Drawing on his expertise in cognitive science, Clark demonstrates that our sense of self and of physical presence can be expanded to a remarkable extent, placing the long-existing telephone and the emerging technology of telepresence on the same continuum. He explores ways in which we have adapted our lives to make use of technology (the measurement of time, for example, has wrought enormous changes in human existence), as well as ways in
which increasingly fluid technologies can adapt to individual users during normal use. Bio-technological unions, Clark argues, are evolving with a speed never seen before in history. As we enter an age of wearable computers, sensory augmentation, wireless devices, intelligent environments, thought-controlled prosthetics, and rapid-fire information search and retrieval, the line between the user and her tools grows thinner day by day. "This double whammy of plastic brains and increasingly responsive and well-fitted tools creates an unprecedented opportunity for ever-closer kinds of human-machine merger," he writes, arguing that such a merger is entirely natural.
A stunning new look at the human brain and the human self, Natural Born Cyborgs reveals how our technology is indeed inseparable from who we are and how we think.
In Natural-Born Cyborgs , Clark argues that what makes humans so different from other species is our capacity to fully incorporate tools and supporting cultural practices into our existence. Technology as simple as writing on a sketchpad, as familiar as Google or a cellular phone, and as potentially revolutionary as mind-extending neural implants--all exploit our brains' astonishingly plastic nature. Our minds are primed to seek out and incorporate non-biological resources, so that we actually think and feel through our best technologies. Drawing on his expertise in cognitive science, Clark demonstrates that our sense of self and of physical presence can be expanded to a remarkable extent, placing the long-existing telephone and the emerging technology of telepresence on the same continuum. He explores ways in which we have adapted our lives to make use of technology (the measurement of time, for example, has wrought enormous changes in human existence), as well as ways in
which increasingly fluid technologies can adapt to individual users during normal use. Bio-technological unions, Clark argues, are evolving with a speed never seen before in history. As we enter an age of wearable computers, sensory augmentation, wireless devices, intelligent environments, thought-controlled prosthetics, and rapid-fire information search and retrieval, the line between the user and her tools grows thinner day by day. "This double whammy of plastic brains and increasingly responsive and well-fitted tools creates an unprecedented opportunity for ever-closer kinds of human-machine merger," he writes, arguing that such a merger is entirely natural.
A stunning new look at the human brain and the human self, Natural Born Cyborgs reveals how our technology is indeed inseparable from who we are and how we think.
229 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2003
About the author
Andy Clark
21 books168 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 36 reviews
December 9, 2021
Since many people are too stupid to realize the implications of Transhumanism, I'll explain them profoundly.
First, transhumanism focuses on the modification of the human species via any kind of emerging science, including genetic engineering, digital technology, and bioengineering.
And... what is "wrong" with this? Oh, I don't know, maybe that, in transhumanist thought, humans attempt to substitute themselves for God.
Changing the genetic identity of man as a human person through the production of an infrahuman being is radically immoral.
The creation of a superhuman (hello, Nietzsche) superior being is unthinkable since true improvement can come only through religious experience and realizing more fully the image of God.
Christian theologians have expressed similar objections to transhumanism and claimed that Christians attain in the afterlife what radical transhumanism promises, such as indefinite life extension or the abolition of suffering. In this view, transhumanism is just another representative of the long line of utopian movements which seek to create "heaven on earth".
It would be extremely morally wrong for humans to tamper with fundamental aspects of themselves (or their children) in an attempt to overcome universal human limitations, such as vulnerability to aging, maximum life span, and biological constraints on physical and cognitive abilities.
Attempts to "improve" ourselves through such manipulation would remove limitations that provide a necessary context for the experience of meaningful human choice. In a nutshell, it destroys Free Will, it goes against the existence of the Soul, and it destroys the intrinsic value, purpose, and significance of Humanity. Say goodbye to Morality, God, and anything that states you are not a brute animal.
Finally, I'll just point out how disgusting is that Clark cynically supports this. As if we don't know that he is supporting the creation of subhuman creatures with human-like abilities (and that is now called "Science"). This is just an extreme version of Neo-Darwinism (oh, hello, Eugenics) and Behaviorism.
Somebody, please, slap Clark in the face, really hard, and force him to go to any Holocaust museum. May he see the results of his deluted philosophy.
January 31, 2014
Most people who know me are probably aware that I am very pro-cyborgs. (I even wrote a four-page comic featuring my terrible art and a woman made into a cyborg for my Comics & Graphic Novels class.) The idea fascinates me and given half a chance I'd probably volunteer myself to get wired up. So this book caught my interest immediately, though how exactly Amazon knew to promote it at me, I'm not sure I want to know.
It was published in 2004, so in terms of the technology, it's a little behind. It talks, for example, about the clunkiness of then-current e-reading technology. I read it on my little Kobo with its e-ink screen -- you know, the little device that I actually bought for £24. But in terms of concerns about technology, we haven't moved much past it. Some of them I was less convinced by (alienation, disembodiment), while others remain a concern, like the "digital divide".
The main thrust of the book, however, is the theory that we're already cyborgs, in a sense. Human beings are tool users; we're not the only ones, but we're the most sophisticated ones we know of. We've had a form of external memory for thousands of years -- writing. Though most of us can't hold numbers in our heads for complicated equations, given a piece of paper, we can work through it and produce the answer. (Given a piece of paper and appropriate time, even I can calculate the heritability of a certain gene in the population, for example, and yet I struggle with remembering how to calculate percentages.) And now, there's the internet, information at our fingertips. When you grow up with these things, you learn to use them as semi-consciously as you do your own hands: I don't consciously calculate where the keys are as I'm typing this any more than I consciously calculate how far to lift my hand to turn a door handle.
This aspect of the book hasn't dated badly. I found it interesting and convincing, and while I don't share all the author's ideas about where the links between biology and technology are going, I do agree that the lines are blurring. Perhaps one day we'll be indistinguishable -- after all, our mitochondria began as separate to the cells that were our ancestors.
It was published in 2004, so in terms of the technology, it's a little behind. It talks, for example, about the clunkiness of then-current e-reading technology. I read it on my little Kobo with its e-ink screen -- you know, the little device that I actually bought for £24. But in terms of concerns about technology, we haven't moved much past it. Some of them I was less convinced by (alienation, disembodiment), while others remain a concern, like the "digital divide".
The main thrust of the book, however, is the theory that we're already cyborgs, in a sense. Human beings are tool users; we're not the only ones, but we're the most sophisticated ones we know of. We've had a form of external memory for thousands of years -- writing. Though most of us can't hold numbers in our heads for complicated equations, given a piece of paper, we can work through it and produce the answer. (Given a piece of paper and appropriate time, even I can calculate the heritability of a certain gene in the population, for example, and yet I struggle with remembering how to calculate percentages.) And now, there's the internet, information at our fingertips. When you grow up with these things, you learn to use them as semi-consciously as you do your own hands: I don't consciously calculate where the keys are as I'm typing this any more than I consciously calculate how far to lift my hand to turn a door handle.
This aspect of the book hasn't dated badly. I found it interesting and convincing, and while I don't share all the author's ideas about where the links between biology and technology are going, I do agree that the lines are blurring. Perhaps one day we'll be indistinguishable -- after all, our mitochondria began as separate to the cells that were our ancestors.
Read
July 23, 2022The technology cited in this is inevitably outdated, but the main arguments are as sound as it gets.
January 18, 2023
Sadly, although this book provides tremendous insights into the relationships between our minds and the technological tools that we use to extend our cognitive capabilities, it has been published more than 20 years ago and the field of cognitive science has evolved quite substantially since its publication.
However, Clark quite accurately describes the human mind as a functional system that has the remarkable ability to perceive the environment consciously and subconsciously as a salience landscape scattered with tool-like affordances. This ‘agent-arena-relationship’ is in fact incredibly intimate to such an extent that your shoes are implicitly perceived as part of the body, the smartphone – part of your mind, your home – part of your physical barriers etc. This is to some extent why you might even experience physical and emotional pain when your computer crashes, or when your car breaks down next to the freeway.
Clark dedicates a substantial part of this publication to the interfacing mechanisms between the mind and its ‘tools’, with a special emphasis on the technological advances in mind-tool-relationships. The key hypothesis is that the technological adaptations to the habits and cognitive preferences of the human mind will ultimately start to blur the borders between being and its cybernetic environments. Although it is correct to assume that the agent-arena-relationship is indeed a quite integrated and dynamic structural-functional relationship, the extrapolation of this heuristic within the context of rapidly evolving technological advances incorrectly adopts a ‘computational theory of mind’ where the brain can be compartmentalised into task-specific areas that will ultimately afford physical synaptic integration to unlock the bandwidth required for the rapid extension of our cognitive abilities through the use of advanced technological interfacing.
Taken to its conclusion, me might very well either end up with cognitive disembodiment or become bio-mechanical cyborgs. This form of neuro-cybernetic integration fails to consider several epistemological constraints:
1. The human brain in general and the mind more specifically is far more complex than previously understood. The language processing system, for example, is far more distributed than expected with no clear and distinctive areas that might afford ‘cognitive language processing inputs or outputs.’ The brain architecture is not only functionally diverse, but also functionally differentiated and integrated through multiple levels of organization between cognitive systems and subsystems. It’s for this reason why it’s virtually impossible for us to write a physical book in our imagination, or to write a book on a PC without using our speech or fingers since we don’t have an isolated language system that can seamlessly interface with the world without a body.
2. However, even if we could isolate functional areas of the brain into computational modules, it’s not obvious how one can tap into the synaptic biophysical structures of these areas while simultaneously unlocking the full bandwidth of the nervous system. This poses an incredible complex engineering problem that struggles to take into account the technical barriers of brain-machine interfacing such as the physical opponent processing requirements, energy requirements, environmental constraints and not even to speak of the cognitive processing requirements because the brain does not necessarily have spare capacity for managing additional bio-physical capabilities that do not even have contextual relevance or salience towards our other cognitive systems and sub-systems. For example, how is a physically integrated cybernetic system different to transplanting two additional arms to the body without compromising the functional capacity or structural integrity of the brain?
Clark therefore correctly concludes that the paradigm of cyborg interfacing and cognitive disembodiment is untenable and undesirable. The cybernetic framework for technological interfacing should therefore rather be construed within the context of ‘soft-interfacing’ where there is a distinct physical separation between our ‘tools’ and our ‘bodies’ and that the tools should rather enable the expansion of the cognitive reach of human beings as opposed to integrating such extensions by physical means.
Such a paradigm however still has tremendous philosophical implications into what exactly it means to be human and if the border between the self and the environment even exists? The evidence against the Cartesian mind-body dualism will therefore only become stronger with time as we realise that the technological tools at our disposal will continue to blur the agent-arena-relationship that existed a-priori even without these technologies.
The notion of embodiment is therefore self-evident and will become an increasingly powerful construct which will force us to contend with the philosophical implications of our extended agency as the salience, valence and reach of our cognitive technologies become increasingly powerful. However, it’s important to understand that embodiment is not a mere ‘tool-like’ construct and can be further segmented into functional areas and differentiated into levels of cognitive integration. Embodiment can therefore be differentiated into the following categories:
• Tool embodiment
• Peer-tot-peer embodiment
• Group embodiment
• Network embodiment
• Abstract embodiment
Clark almost exclusively dedicates the focus of his work on ‘tool-embodiment’ where he explores the levels of possible ‘cognitive-integrations’ with human made tools from shoes to implanted hearing-aids. Our tools can surely extend our cognitive reach and although smartphones did not exist when this book was published, we can surely agree that the information age in the past 20 years has indeed transformed our cognitive reach in unmeasurable ways. The extent of this reach however is determined by the level of embodiment of these tools, as for example, driving a motor vehicle often exudes a sense that the car becomes an extension of our bodies and that every small little change in the road surface directly transfers to our embodied experience. Although the synaptic integration of a man-machine symbiosis ignores many extremely difficult technical and cognitive constraints, the hypothesis that the advance in technological tools will greatly expand our cognitive reach in the future is certain and somewhat underappreciated.
Furthermore, embodiment can also be analysed at a peer-to-peer level of analysis. The extent of peer-to-peer embodiment can anecdotally be construed as ‘intimacy’, where high levels of peer-to-peer embodiment can be described as ‘love-making’ that involves the maximum level of cognitive and sensory integration. On the opposite end, a simple peer-to-peer WhatsApp message has very low levels of cognitive and sensory integration.
This paradigm can easily be expanded to the context of groups where high levels of cognitive integration, or ‘intimacy’, at a group level can be stimulated by a small group that collectively and enthusiastically sings, dances and worships together. On the other side of the spectrum, a simple ‘group chat’ on a social media platform may very well be the lowest form of group embodiment. Similarly, a network of individuals might demonstrate very similar manifestations of embodiment. A Family network can therefore be described as probably the most integrated and intimate forms of network embodiment. However, network embodiments are from a cognitive perspective very fragile and can easily degenerate, pathologize, or ossify as we move up into levels of abstraction from the families to friends, to acquaintances, colleagues, clubs, communities, towns, cities and countries. Cities in the modern world for example have larger populations than most countries had only a few centuries ago. It’s therefore no surprise that most societies, especially in the developed world, struggle to find meaningful network embodiment because of entropy.
Finally, abstract embodiment in essence utilises ‘higher-order’ cognitive functions such as symbolism, mathematics, and language systems that enables the mind to map transtemporal narrative structures onto agent-arena relationships. Our action-orientations are therefore very real representations of our conscious and subconscious propositional structures. These ‘abstract tools’ therefore enables the mind to simulate and navigate transtemporal agent-arena-relationships and can have different levels of sophistication. The most integrated and intimate abstract embodiment is most probably your moral and religious value structures where an intimate embodiment of a religious ideal will often translate into the transformation of action-orientations. At the lower levels of abstraction, these embodiments become less sophisticated propositions such as the rules we use to play chess, or the cognitive habits we embody when confronted with anger or frustration. It seems like abstract embodiments can even be described as personality traits because it can be construed as the rules, propositions, norms, and values that regulate our agent-arena-relationships.
Clark illustrates this fact by explaining that the brain is more often occupied with ignoring facts as opposed to observing facts. The human visual system is therefore optimised to process extremely high-resolution visual representations within a very small area of the potential visual field and has adapted the visual processing capabilities of the eye to reflect this truth. The fovea of the eye therefore processes a very small high-resolution image and constructs a frame of representational reference by moving around the visual field. The eye ignores most of the low-resolution field of vision because the brain simply does not have sufficient processing capacity to represent such a vast landscape at a high resolution. The eye is therefore an action-orientation which is nested within a higher order ‘agent-arena-relationship’ synthesis with top-down, bottom-up, feedback and feed-forward adaptive processing.
We can therefore conclude that the distinct mind-body dualism should be rejected in the face of the overwhelming evidence of our mind-body-tool-environment embodiment. Although Clark foresees a future where technological advancements might radically transform and dilute the level of separation between the mind and its tools, he rightfully highlights several serious ethical dilemmas:
1. Because technological advancements might dramatically extend our cognitive reach, it’s not obvious that society will gain equal access to cybernetic resources. Although the cost of cybernetic intelligence might tend towards zero in the long run, it could very well incentivise dominant players to double down on their information technology investments which could exasperate the levels of socio-economic inequality in the world.
2. Moreover, because such technological advancements are pioneered by large tech companies, the incentive to encroach on the individual liberties of consumers to capture and entrench competitive advantages might render such initiatives highly intrusive and restrictive. Although the argument will be that the benefits of these technologies will offset the costs of your freedom, this scenario could very well become dystopian and should be adopted with great care and ethical oversight.
3. The restrictions of freedoms within this context could also severely limit our control over such technologies. Just imagine a self-driving car that prohibits you to act irresponsibly or forces you to drive within speed limit even in the face of an emergency, or automatically drives you to the nearest police station when a warrant of arrest has been issued. When we delegate moral and ethical responsibilities or negotiations to machines, we run a substantial risk of becoming entrapped slaves in a superordinate cybernetic system.
4. The extension of our cognitive reach might also seem like an obvious and valuable benefit, but it does not consider our innate desires for relevance realization and meaning seeking, especially within the context of our limited cognitive capacity. For example, we often feel overwhelmed with the number of text messages, phone calls and emails that are neither urgent nor meaningful or relevant. By opening the cybernetic floodgates, we could easily create an overwhelming and psychotic environment. User interface design thinking just might become a trojan horse.
5. Furthermore, by narrowing our preferential focus and attention explicitly towards the ‘tool embodiment’ of these ‘psycho-technologies’ we might run the risk of alienating and isolating ourselves from the other essential forms of embodiment such as peer-to-peer-, group-, network- and abstract-embodiment. We already have substantial evidence that the generation born after 1994 who grew up as teens in the era of social-media have above baseline trait-neuroticism and are more prone to inflict self-harm and suicide.
6. Finally, apart from the alienating aspects of our preoccupation with cybernetic embodiment, the anonymity of such networks often enables deceitful actors to exploit weak links or exposed nodes within the network for unethical and malevolent objectives. As these networks become more powerful, so will the danger grow in proportion to the networks inability to contain anti-social behaviour. This is especially important given the fact that such cybernetic technologies will blur the agent-arena-relationship and that such anti-social activities could become much more potent in its physical and psychological destruction.
In conclusion, the sci-fi vision of a ‘post-human’ future where we either become cyborgs or disembodied cybernetic entities has several serious technical and ethical constraints and should therefore be rejected in principle. However, the notion, that the mind has a deep and embedded relationship not only with its body in a physical sense, but also with the external environment and its tools in an embodied sense, is emerging as an indisputable fact. The unintended consequence of this paradigm is that future technological advancements that facilitates the interfacing between the mind, body, tools, and the environment, can render the symbiosis increasingly diffuse and integrated. The philosophical ripple-effects of such a cognitive landscape are immense and should be approached with great caution, especially given the fact that since this book has been published 20 years ago, that the ethical and psychological contingencies of such technologies have been ignored and could point to a future in which we sleepwalk into a cybernetic prison.
However, Clark quite accurately describes the human mind as a functional system that has the remarkable ability to perceive the environment consciously and subconsciously as a salience landscape scattered with tool-like affordances. This ‘agent-arena-relationship’ is in fact incredibly intimate to such an extent that your shoes are implicitly perceived as part of the body, the smartphone – part of your mind, your home – part of your physical barriers etc. This is to some extent why you might even experience physical and emotional pain when your computer crashes, or when your car breaks down next to the freeway.
Clark dedicates a substantial part of this publication to the interfacing mechanisms between the mind and its ‘tools’, with a special emphasis on the technological advances in mind-tool-relationships. The key hypothesis is that the technological adaptations to the habits and cognitive preferences of the human mind will ultimately start to blur the borders between being and its cybernetic environments. Although it is correct to assume that the agent-arena-relationship is indeed a quite integrated and dynamic structural-functional relationship, the extrapolation of this heuristic within the context of rapidly evolving technological advances incorrectly adopts a ‘computational theory of mind’ where the brain can be compartmentalised into task-specific areas that will ultimately afford physical synaptic integration to unlock the bandwidth required for the rapid extension of our cognitive abilities through the use of advanced technological interfacing.
Taken to its conclusion, me might very well either end up with cognitive disembodiment or become bio-mechanical cyborgs. This form of neuro-cybernetic integration fails to consider several epistemological constraints:
1. The human brain in general and the mind more specifically is far more complex than previously understood. The language processing system, for example, is far more distributed than expected with no clear and distinctive areas that might afford ‘cognitive language processing inputs or outputs.’ The brain architecture is not only functionally diverse, but also functionally differentiated and integrated through multiple levels of organization between cognitive systems and subsystems. It’s for this reason why it’s virtually impossible for us to write a physical book in our imagination, or to write a book on a PC without using our speech or fingers since we don’t have an isolated language system that can seamlessly interface with the world without a body.
2. However, even if we could isolate functional areas of the brain into computational modules, it’s not obvious how one can tap into the synaptic biophysical structures of these areas while simultaneously unlocking the full bandwidth of the nervous system. This poses an incredible complex engineering problem that struggles to take into account the technical barriers of brain-machine interfacing such as the physical opponent processing requirements, energy requirements, environmental constraints and not even to speak of the cognitive processing requirements because the brain does not necessarily have spare capacity for managing additional bio-physical capabilities that do not even have contextual relevance or salience towards our other cognitive systems and sub-systems. For example, how is a physically integrated cybernetic system different to transplanting two additional arms to the body without compromising the functional capacity or structural integrity of the brain?
Clark therefore correctly concludes that the paradigm of cyborg interfacing and cognitive disembodiment is untenable and undesirable. The cybernetic framework for technological interfacing should therefore rather be construed within the context of ‘soft-interfacing’ where there is a distinct physical separation between our ‘tools’ and our ‘bodies’ and that the tools should rather enable the expansion of the cognitive reach of human beings as opposed to integrating such extensions by physical means.
Such a paradigm however still has tremendous philosophical implications into what exactly it means to be human and if the border between the self and the environment even exists? The evidence against the Cartesian mind-body dualism will therefore only become stronger with time as we realise that the technological tools at our disposal will continue to blur the agent-arena-relationship that existed a-priori even without these technologies.
The notion of embodiment is therefore self-evident and will become an increasingly powerful construct which will force us to contend with the philosophical implications of our extended agency as the salience, valence and reach of our cognitive technologies become increasingly powerful. However, it’s important to understand that embodiment is not a mere ‘tool-like’ construct and can be further segmented into functional areas and differentiated into levels of cognitive integration. Embodiment can therefore be differentiated into the following categories:
• Tool embodiment
• Peer-tot-peer embodiment
• Group embodiment
• Network embodiment
• Abstract embodiment
Clark almost exclusively dedicates the focus of his work on ‘tool-embodiment’ where he explores the levels of possible ‘cognitive-integrations’ with human made tools from shoes to implanted hearing-aids. Our tools can surely extend our cognitive reach and although smartphones did not exist when this book was published, we can surely agree that the information age in the past 20 years has indeed transformed our cognitive reach in unmeasurable ways. The extent of this reach however is determined by the level of embodiment of these tools, as for example, driving a motor vehicle often exudes a sense that the car becomes an extension of our bodies and that every small little change in the road surface directly transfers to our embodied experience. Although the synaptic integration of a man-machine symbiosis ignores many extremely difficult technical and cognitive constraints, the hypothesis that the advance in technological tools will greatly expand our cognitive reach in the future is certain and somewhat underappreciated.
Furthermore, embodiment can also be analysed at a peer-to-peer level of analysis. The extent of peer-to-peer embodiment can anecdotally be construed as ‘intimacy’, where high levels of peer-to-peer embodiment can be described as ‘love-making’ that involves the maximum level of cognitive and sensory integration. On the opposite end, a simple peer-to-peer WhatsApp message has very low levels of cognitive and sensory integration.
This paradigm can easily be expanded to the context of groups where high levels of cognitive integration, or ‘intimacy’, at a group level can be stimulated by a small group that collectively and enthusiastically sings, dances and worships together. On the other side of the spectrum, a simple ‘group chat’ on a social media platform may very well be the lowest form of group embodiment. Similarly, a network of individuals might demonstrate very similar manifestations of embodiment. A Family network can therefore be described as probably the most integrated and intimate forms of network embodiment. However, network embodiments are from a cognitive perspective very fragile and can easily degenerate, pathologize, or ossify as we move up into levels of abstraction from the families to friends, to acquaintances, colleagues, clubs, communities, towns, cities and countries. Cities in the modern world for example have larger populations than most countries had only a few centuries ago. It’s therefore no surprise that most societies, especially in the developed world, struggle to find meaningful network embodiment because of entropy.
Finally, abstract embodiment in essence utilises ‘higher-order’ cognitive functions such as symbolism, mathematics, and language systems that enables the mind to map transtemporal narrative structures onto agent-arena relationships. Our action-orientations are therefore very real representations of our conscious and subconscious propositional structures. These ‘abstract tools’ therefore enables the mind to simulate and navigate transtemporal agent-arena-relationships and can have different levels of sophistication. The most integrated and intimate abstract embodiment is most probably your moral and religious value structures where an intimate embodiment of a religious ideal will often translate into the transformation of action-orientations. At the lower levels of abstraction, these embodiments become less sophisticated propositions such as the rules we use to play chess, or the cognitive habits we embody when confronted with anger or frustration. It seems like abstract embodiments can even be described as personality traits because it can be construed as the rules, propositions, norms, and values that regulate our agent-arena-relationships.
Clark illustrates this fact by explaining that the brain is more often occupied with ignoring facts as opposed to observing facts. The human visual system is therefore optimised to process extremely high-resolution visual representations within a very small area of the potential visual field and has adapted the visual processing capabilities of the eye to reflect this truth. The fovea of the eye therefore processes a very small high-resolution image and constructs a frame of representational reference by moving around the visual field. The eye ignores most of the low-resolution field of vision because the brain simply does not have sufficient processing capacity to represent such a vast landscape at a high resolution. The eye is therefore an action-orientation which is nested within a higher order ‘agent-arena-relationship’ synthesis with top-down, bottom-up, feedback and feed-forward adaptive processing.
We can therefore conclude that the distinct mind-body dualism should be rejected in the face of the overwhelming evidence of our mind-body-tool-environment embodiment. Although Clark foresees a future where technological advancements might radically transform and dilute the level of separation between the mind and its tools, he rightfully highlights several serious ethical dilemmas:
1. Because technological advancements might dramatically extend our cognitive reach, it’s not obvious that society will gain equal access to cybernetic resources. Although the cost of cybernetic intelligence might tend towards zero in the long run, it could very well incentivise dominant players to double down on their information technology investments which could exasperate the levels of socio-economic inequality in the world.
2. Moreover, because such technological advancements are pioneered by large tech companies, the incentive to encroach on the individual liberties of consumers to capture and entrench competitive advantages might render such initiatives highly intrusive and restrictive. Although the argument will be that the benefits of these technologies will offset the costs of your freedom, this scenario could very well become dystopian and should be adopted with great care and ethical oversight.
3. The restrictions of freedoms within this context could also severely limit our control over such technologies. Just imagine a self-driving car that prohibits you to act irresponsibly or forces you to drive within speed limit even in the face of an emergency, or automatically drives you to the nearest police station when a warrant of arrest has been issued. When we delegate moral and ethical responsibilities or negotiations to machines, we run a substantial risk of becoming entrapped slaves in a superordinate cybernetic system.
4. The extension of our cognitive reach might also seem like an obvious and valuable benefit, but it does not consider our innate desires for relevance realization and meaning seeking, especially within the context of our limited cognitive capacity. For example, we often feel overwhelmed with the number of text messages, phone calls and emails that are neither urgent nor meaningful or relevant. By opening the cybernetic floodgates, we could easily create an overwhelming and psychotic environment. User interface design thinking just might become a trojan horse.
5. Furthermore, by narrowing our preferential focus and attention explicitly towards the ‘tool embodiment’ of these ‘psycho-technologies’ we might run the risk of alienating and isolating ourselves from the other essential forms of embodiment such as peer-to-peer-, group-, network- and abstract-embodiment. We already have substantial evidence that the generation born after 1994 who grew up as teens in the era of social-media have above baseline trait-neuroticism and are more prone to inflict self-harm and suicide.
6. Finally, apart from the alienating aspects of our preoccupation with cybernetic embodiment, the anonymity of such networks often enables deceitful actors to exploit weak links or exposed nodes within the network for unethical and malevolent objectives. As these networks become more powerful, so will the danger grow in proportion to the networks inability to contain anti-social behaviour. This is especially important given the fact that such cybernetic technologies will blur the agent-arena-relationship and that such anti-social activities could become much more potent in its physical and psychological destruction.
In conclusion, the sci-fi vision of a ‘post-human’ future where we either become cyborgs or disembodied cybernetic entities has several serious technical and ethical constraints and should therefore be rejected in principle. However, the notion, that the mind has a deep and embedded relationship not only with its body in a physical sense, but also with the external environment and its tools in an embodied sense, is emerging as an indisputable fact. The unintended consequence of this paradigm is that future technological advancements that facilitates the interfacing between the mind, body, tools, and the environment, can render the symbiosis increasingly diffuse and integrated. The philosophical ripple-effects of such a cognitive landscape are immense and should be approached with great caution, especially given the fact that since this book has been published 20 years ago, that the ethical and psychological contingencies of such technologies have been ignored and could point to a future in which we sleepwalk into a cybernetic prison.
February 8, 2016
Over the past year I found it quite challenging to peel off time to read. It's been exciting to get back to my one book a month pace (even though I missed it this go-round) with Andy Clark's Natural Born Cyborg.
Natural-Born Cyborgs takes me back to prior reading such as "Collaborative Media" and my personal favorite Paul Dourish's "Where the Action Is". Clark's core thesis is that we - human's - are already Natural-Born Cyborgs and have been since the invention of written language.
To get there Clark resets expectations about what is a "Cyborg". First coined by Manfred Clynes, the term Cyborg was primarily focused on self-regulating systems such as pace makers to suit the future where human's explore new environments. Clark extends that to suggest that the core value of Cyborg technologies is not the degree to which they are embedded in our physical selves (thought experiment: does Google Glass make us any less cyborgs than if the technology were implanted directly in our eyes?); but instead the focus is on the degree of complexity and the transformative nature possible through the human-machine interface.
Next Clark focuses on where the human-machine interfaces are being stretched and bridged such as a man who has found a way to control a third-hand. Such research highlights the neural plasticity of our species - and finally explored this further by investigating the concept of telepresence and along with it the difference between chronos (actual time) and kairos (the perception of time). Similar ideas exist in the difference between physical place and the perception of place -- or our proprioception.
This journey begins to highlights to the modern day reader that the cell-phone has enabled us to realize the most advanced cybernetic capabilities of prior eras: real time access to information, a sense of information connectedness — breaking news alerts on our phone, the sensation of being multiple places at once and our ability to remote control — buzzing someone into our apartment from work.
All of this highlights and shifts the view of what it means to be Cyborg and most interestingly highlights a now that we’re here — what next?
As a technologist this eyeopening view provides a new lense to critique the role that technology could and should play in our lives. It’s already changed my views about the value of wearables — hint not the screen or Dick Tracy scenarios: https://medium.com/\@MikalFM/apple-wa...
The book also helps me understand and form a richer point of view about the role of devices in my life as a human being. Ultimately this helps me understand how my needs, might differ from a person with disabilities or further a person who is homeless. For example for all the power a cell phone has in extending my human capability of having readily accessible information it fails in the richness of data input — so while I started this post on my phone, I quickly felt stifled as if my thinking was blocked by technology that was present-at-hand as opposed to the feeling of ready-to-hand when seeking new information. This highlights, for me the importance of larger devices to students and professionals where thinking is involved. Not primarily for it's larger screen but instead for it's richer input.
I recommend this book for technology and philosophy enthusiasts and ultimately believe it’s a trans-formative work that can change perspective about the role of technology in our lives. Similar to the way Creation (Steve Grand) inspired Jeff Bezos to rethink the role of services at Amazon:
> Bezos directed groups of engineers in brainstorming possible primitives. Storage, bandwidth, messaging, payments, and processing all made the list. In an informal way— as if the company didn’t quite know the insight around primitives was an extraordinary one— Amazon then started building teams to develop the services described on that list.
> Stone, Brad (2013-10-15). The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon (p. 213). Little, Brown and Company. Kindle Edition.
Natural-Born Cyborgs takes me back to prior reading such as "Collaborative Media" and my personal favorite Paul Dourish's "Where the Action Is". Clark's core thesis is that we - human's - are already Natural-Born Cyborgs and have been since the invention of written language.
To get there Clark resets expectations about what is a "Cyborg". First coined by Manfred Clynes, the term Cyborg was primarily focused on self-regulating systems such as pace makers to suit the future where human's explore new environments. Clark extends that to suggest that the core value of Cyborg technologies is not the degree to which they are embedded in our physical selves (thought experiment: does Google Glass make us any less cyborgs than if the technology were implanted directly in our eyes?); but instead the focus is on the degree of complexity and the transformative nature possible through the human-machine interface.
Next Clark focuses on where the human-machine interfaces are being stretched and bridged such as a man who has found a way to control a third-hand. Such research highlights the neural plasticity of our species - and finally explored this further by investigating the concept of telepresence and along with it the difference between chronos (actual time) and kairos (the perception of time). Similar ideas exist in the difference between physical place and the perception of place -- or our proprioception.
This journey begins to highlights to the modern day reader that the cell-phone has enabled us to realize the most advanced cybernetic capabilities of prior eras: real time access to information, a sense of information connectedness — breaking news alerts on our phone, the sensation of being multiple places at once and our ability to remote control — buzzing someone into our apartment from work.
All of this highlights and shifts the view of what it means to be Cyborg and most interestingly highlights a now that we’re here — what next?
As a technologist this eyeopening view provides a new lense to critique the role that technology could and should play in our lives. It’s already changed my views about the value of wearables — hint not the screen or Dick Tracy scenarios: https://medium.com/\@MikalFM/apple-wa...
The book also helps me understand and form a richer point of view about the role of devices in my life as a human being. Ultimately this helps me understand how my needs, might differ from a person with disabilities or further a person who is homeless. For example for all the power a cell phone has in extending my human capability of having readily accessible information it fails in the richness of data input — so while I started this post on my phone, I quickly felt stifled as if my thinking was blocked by technology that was present-at-hand as opposed to the feeling of ready-to-hand when seeking new information. This highlights, for me the importance of larger devices to students and professionals where thinking is involved. Not primarily for it's larger screen but instead for it's richer input.
I recommend this book for technology and philosophy enthusiasts and ultimately believe it’s a trans-formative work that can change perspective about the role of technology in our lives. Similar to the way Creation (Steve Grand) inspired Jeff Bezos to rethink the role of services at Amazon:
> Bezos directed groups of engineers in brainstorming possible primitives. Storage, bandwidth, messaging, payments, and processing all made the list. In an informal way— as if the company didn’t quite know the insight around primitives was an extraordinary one— Amazon then started building teams to develop the services described on that list.
> Stone, Brad (2013-10-15). The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon (p. 213). Little, Brown and Company. Kindle Edition.
Read
July 20, 2013A strong rebuttal of the idea that modern technology is taking humans away from their true nature. Clark argues humans and technology have ALWAYS been merging. Dystopian science fiction has created too many stereotypes of cyborgs. Clark deconstructs this dark image of man-machine hybrid and illuminates that we are by nature cyborgs, just ones merged with our natural human "mindware" and supporting cultural practices rather than gory, scary flesh/machine physical connections imagined in dystopias.
He does devote a chapter, "Bad Borgs?", to the aniticipated dangers of too much technology in our lives. His responses are not "The solutions are all there" and he does expose challenging questions unanswered. But he also notes how dealing with those dilemmas isn't done by falling back on our fearful images of "humans plugged in".
Everyone, take note of his term "nonpenetrative" technology. That is how Clark charts the currently-occuring (r)evolution of our technology to fit our needs. Nonpenetrative means essentially tech that is hooked to us non-physically.
Read and see. And since this book came out in 2003, I recommend we all look up what Dr. Clark has been up to with this overall theme: extended cognition = our thought process is not confined to our head, but goes in, out, through our tech, and back into our heads in a feedback loop of cognition.
He does devote a chapter, "Bad Borgs?", to the aniticipated dangers of too much technology in our lives. His responses are not "The solutions are all there" and he does expose challenging questions unanswered. But he also notes how dealing with those dilemmas isn't done by falling back on our fearful images of "humans plugged in".
Everyone, take note of his term "nonpenetrative" technology. That is how Clark charts the currently-occuring (r)evolution of our technology to fit our needs. Nonpenetrative means essentially tech that is hooked to us non-physically.
Read and see. And since this book came out in 2003, I recommend we all look up what Dr. Clark has been up to with this overall theme: extended cognition = our thought process is not confined to our head, but goes in, out, through our tech, and back into our heads in a feedback loop of cognition.
December 25, 2013
After reading Lewis Mumford, Clark's Natural Born Cyborg is a shell of a book. Mumford gives a lucid perspective of human technics that allows you to reach the point with which Clark finishes his Natural Born Cyborg. And Mumford wrote before the technological advancements Clark drools about. Clark's favorite point; that our perception of our bodies can extend outside of our flesh IS exciting. However if you're already there conceptually and read some work on phenomenology then there's nothing new in this book for you. His lists of technological crazy shit going on in the world is boring. This book frankly doesn't go that deep. I think I would have liked it if I was a teenager though.
O, he writes shit like, "the mental buck stops here." Annoyingly cute. If you think "extended consciousness" is the latest and greatest then read The Tibetan Book of the Dead, The Poetics of Space or even Blake, Whitman or Shakespeare.
O, he writes shit like, "the mental buck stops here." Annoyingly cute. If you think "extended consciousness" is the latest and greatest then read The Tibetan Book of the Dead, The Poetics of Space or even Blake, Whitman or Shakespeare.
January 30, 2021
Andy Clark is one of the most important philosophers of the modern age. He is also someone I never recommend to anyone who is not working in cognitive science. He is often incredibly careful, specific, and technical, which makes him essential for anyone interested in cognitive science, both theoretical and practical, but not great for those in other fields or just general readers. This book is the exception. Natural Born Cyborg is by far the most readable book by Clark, and I would imagine it is fairly approachable by a general educated audience.
The main thesis is that the close relationship humans have to their technology is a product of human nature; humans have evolved to have the brains and bodies that mesh with technology. This meshing is as natural as wearing clothes or cooking food, and instead of fighting the intrusion of technology into our lives, we should embrace it as a purely natural phenomenon. If you have read anything by Clark before, this isn’t surprising, but it is still worth the read for the sci-fi examples and the philosophical treatments.
One can’t help but feel like a second edition is warranted. This was published in 2003, and the world has changed dramatically since then. One of the points Clark makes is about feedback modulating how the brain represents the body, and I couldn’t help but think of the new PlayStation 5 controllers, which makes use of adaptive triggers that adjust the resistance given based on the action taken in the game. Also, several wonderful examples of sci-fi media has came out that provide wonderful thought experiments. One example is the anime “Psycho-Pass”, which takes place in a futuristic utopia where all decisions are made by smart technology. What happens to responsibility in this context? What happens when we are no longer able to make our own decisions because we never learned? Is this even possible?
This is a book that I would easily recommend to anyone who questions whether we should delete our social media pages, unplug our laptops, and just go live in the woods. It is an optimistic take by one of the smartest people in the world, and incredibly readable given some patience.
The main thesis is that the close relationship humans have to their technology is a product of human nature; humans have evolved to have the brains and bodies that mesh with technology. This meshing is as natural as wearing clothes or cooking food, and instead of fighting the intrusion of technology into our lives, we should embrace it as a purely natural phenomenon. If you have read anything by Clark before, this isn’t surprising, but it is still worth the read for the sci-fi examples and the philosophical treatments.
One can’t help but feel like a second edition is warranted. This was published in 2003, and the world has changed dramatically since then. One of the points Clark makes is about feedback modulating how the brain represents the body, and I couldn’t help but think of the new PlayStation 5 controllers, which makes use of adaptive triggers that adjust the resistance given based on the action taken in the game. Also, several wonderful examples of sci-fi media has came out that provide wonderful thought experiments. One example is the anime “Psycho-Pass”, which takes place in a futuristic utopia where all decisions are made by smart technology. What happens to responsibility in this context? What happens when we are no longer able to make our own decisions because we never learned? Is this even possible?
This is a book that I would easily recommend to anyone who questions whether we should delete our social media pages, unplug our laptops, and just go live in the woods. It is an optimistic take by one of the smartest people in the world, and incredibly readable given some patience.
July 12, 2024
The central thesis presented in this book is that we evolved as minds ready to be augmented by our bodies and our environments. This shapes not only our cognitive processes but the very core of what we are: embodied, situated beings. The history of culture and technology is about us using this capacity to design our environments and ourselves further.
The book is 20 years old, and I was expecting it to feel more dated than it does. Whilst many of the specific technologies cited are long gone now, it’s surprising how relevant the technological discussion seems in the era of the smartphone, the Oculus, and the large language model.
Clark draws from a large variety of sources to make his arguments, ranging from Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty to Don Norman, Rodney Brooks, and various people in the MIT Media Lab. What I was left missing the most was an explicit connection made between these ideas and Predictive Processing and Active Inference - something Clark has written about extensively elsewhere and connects to the cybernetic notions on the philosophy of mind discussed here. Alas, this book predates all of that.
The book is 20 years old, and I was expecting it to feel more dated than it does. Whilst many of the specific technologies cited are long gone now, it’s surprising how relevant the technological discussion seems in the era of the smartphone, the Oculus, and the large language model.
Clark draws from a large variety of sources to make his arguments, ranging from Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty to Don Norman, Rodney Brooks, and various people in the MIT Media Lab. What I was left missing the most was an explicit connection made between these ideas and Predictive Processing and Active Inference - something Clark has written about extensively elsewhere and connects to the cybernetic notions on the philosophy of mind discussed here. Alas, this book predates all of that.
June 1, 2018
Given Clark's ground-breaking neuroscience work, I found this book underwhelming. There's a lot of interesting insights here, but nothing that isn't found in basic media studies texts like those of Lewis Mumford, Marshal McLuhan, etc. I do think had he incorporated more neuroscience work (like in his amazing recent book SURFING UNCERTAINTY), this book could have been more interesting. Also, reading this in 2018, and seeing his excitement about the Nokia phone that can connect to the internet, is a bit underwhelming. That isn't his fault, but just points to how dated this book reads today.
March 30, 2024
I pretty much flipped thru the last 50 pages bc he was going on about search engines and what the future (today) would be like. Honestly i was kind of mad bc i had anticipated and hoped for more of this “monkey uses a hammer as though it is an extension of his arm” kind of thing, but maybe there is only so much to say about that.
Some Cool ideas, but i might have gotten the gist of it from this one tweet about this work 5 years ago. Of course he’s a brit lol. I wonder what he thinks about all of his optimistic predictions about today.
Some Cool ideas, but i might have gotten the gist of it from this one tweet about this work 5 years ago. Of course he’s a brit lol. I wonder what he thinks about all of his optimistic predictions about today.
January 17, 2024
Great read just a little outdated the book is from 2004 and most of the things that Clark said would happen has happened on how people will act with their phones and something of chatbots that we basically have chatgpt he called this out way ahead of his time pretty amazing, and some stuff that we still don’t have the technology for , but in due time.
You Probably don’t need to read this book but he does have a few newer ones then this but I’ll leave that to you.
You Probably don’t need to read this book but he does have a few newer ones then this but I’ll leave that to you.
August 22, 2021
Really enjoyed this book - offered a very original perspective on the future of society and technology with some decent grounding in cognitive science. I'll be carrying some perspectives from this book into my work in tech and think it's a worthy read for anyone interested in human computer interaction.
September 27, 2020
Very interesting read, though I wish some of the hypothetical scenarios were either pared down or replaced with real world applications. Definitely gave me a new perspective on the idea of cyborgs and humans' relationship with technology.
April 1, 2021
I read this book for my UB grad class, so while it is certainly not a light read, it was interesting and enlightening. Clark brings up many great notions regarding humans and how we interact with the world.
February 18, 2020
A wonderful, compelling picture of how our technology has always been a part of thinking and how human beings might deepen their relationship to technology in the near future.
June 20, 2020
გამარკვიეთ ახლა, ამ კაცს ჩავაკითხო ინგლისში თუ ბრაიან ლარკინს ამერიკაში?
March 24, 2017
Boy oh boy was this ever uncomfortable. This book certainly has given me a lot to think about in terms of what the self is. Is my laptop a part of my 'self' because it is so integral to my life and stores so much information? The idea that it might be is upsetting, but that's probably why my professor had our class read this book.
January 1, 2016
Clark's basic argument is that our technologies extend our minds. But he takes that much further than a metaphor. For Clark, the externalisation of cognition achieved through technology is literally and "scientifically" an extension of our own thoughts into external reality. Rather than limit the constituent parts of the self to the "biological skinbag" that's our brain and bodies, we can and should see cognitive operations performed through external tools as part of our own thought processes. Clark claims that this has been the case for as long as humans have been humans. This process started with writing, and is culminating in various technological innovations that aim to integrate computer technology into everyday practice.
Clark presents a great deal of research into perception and cognition to demonstrate that, counter to intuitive feeling that our internal thoughts and senses are the fullest and most complete experience of reality possible, our senses and our brains actually perform innumerable shortcuts and make an awful lot of assumptions about the incomplete information that is actually parsed and processed. He uses this to argue that the human apparatus has no superior claim over external tools to be able to apprehend and make sense of reality.
What Clark sees as the way of the future is technology that integrates into the human bodily experience. The possibilities of various future technologies are presented in terms of how they might help achieve this. Ubiquitous computing, invisible technologies, wearable computing: all represent various facets of how to computers might be more fully integrated into our overall cognitive apparatus: both the internal and external parts of it. Some of them are quite interesting, and Clark spends a great deal of time speculating about what new technologies might mean for our sense of who we are and where we feel ourselves to be when our available perceptions and possible activities have been extended through "human-centred" technologies.
I suppose this also illustrates the problems with Clark's work. Amongst those technologists who branch out into the philosophical implications of their work, they seem to consistently full into the same attitude of naive humanism and uncritical attitude towards technological development which makes their philosophy rather problematic. Clark is no exception. The trend towards technologies of the self is seen by Clark as inevitable, due to what he claims is the "basic human nature to annex, exploit, and incorporate nonbiological stuff deep into our mental profiles". Perhaps. But that's a far cry from describing all of what human nature entails, and it's likewise only one of any number of potential human motivations for developing and seeking to diffuse technology. Clark gives very little thought to how the development of all these wonderful toys might relate to the real world, with all its problematic politics and its economic dictates. This is especially an issue once external cognition stops being an individual process, and various thoughts and ideas expressed in our tools come into contact - or conflict.
The standpoint of seeing humans as "natural-born cyborgs", or as entities whose mental processes inherently exist as much outside our heads in tools as they do in our biological processes, is a highly useful one, and Clark supplies fairly good evidence to support the idea. But I disagree with his rosy assessment of the future based on this thesis, which seems to me based on the assumption that this thesis is the only incentive there is for technological development, and that technology is always developed and used for the benefit of all individuals equally. Neither are true.
Clark presents a great deal of research into perception and cognition to demonstrate that, counter to intuitive feeling that our internal thoughts and senses are the fullest and most complete experience of reality possible, our senses and our brains actually perform innumerable shortcuts and make an awful lot of assumptions about the incomplete information that is actually parsed and processed. He uses this to argue that the human apparatus has no superior claim over external tools to be able to apprehend and make sense of reality.
What Clark sees as the way of the future is technology that integrates into the human bodily experience. The possibilities of various future technologies are presented in terms of how they might help achieve this. Ubiquitous computing, invisible technologies, wearable computing: all represent various facets of how to computers might be more fully integrated into our overall cognitive apparatus: both the internal and external parts of it. Some of them are quite interesting, and Clark spends a great deal of time speculating about what new technologies might mean for our sense of who we are and where we feel ourselves to be when our available perceptions and possible activities have been extended through "human-centred" technologies.
I suppose this also illustrates the problems with Clark's work. Amongst those technologists who branch out into the philosophical implications of their work, they seem to consistently full into the same attitude of naive humanism and uncritical attitude towards technological development which makes their philosophy rather problematic. Clark is no exception. The trend towards technologies of the self is seen by Clark as inevitable, due to what he claims is the "basic human nature to annex, exploit, and incorporate nonbiological stuff deep into our mental profiles". Perhaps. But that's a far cry from describing all of what human nature entails, and it's likewise only one of any number of potential human motivations for developing and seeking to diffuse technology. Clark gives very little thought to how the development of all these wonderful toys might relate to the real world, with all its problematic politics and its economic dictates. This is especially an issue once external cognition stops being an individual process, and various thoughts and ideas expressed in our tools come into contact - or conflict.
The standpoint of seeing humans as "natural-born cyborgs", or as entities whose mental processes inherently exist as much outside our heads in tools as they do in our biological processes, is a highly useful one, and Clark supplies fairly good evidence to support the idea. But I disagree with his rosy assessment of the future based on this thesis, which seems to me based on the assumption that this thesis is the only incentive there is for technological development, and that technology is always developed and used for the benefit of all individuals equally. Neither are true.
August 2, 2009
I think this work really adds some needed ammunition to Clark's overall campaign for the controversial thesis of extended cognition. From what I've seen, much of the resistance to this thesis has been the result of his, and Chalmers, choice of examples (including the Alzheimer patient's notebook and strings tied around fingers).
While these simple examples may have helped them in terms of clarity and precision, its seems that many have been led to believe that the theory does not encompass enough practical applications to be worthy of much attention. On the other end of the spectrum, there are those that worry that the EC thesis encompasses too much; can't I claim to know everything written in the books at my local library?
Both these worries are put to rest through
1) Clark's expansion on past arguments: ex. undermining the idea that the 'skin-bag' is a principle boundary to cognition, the view of language as technology, the essential role of unconscious processing in cognition.
2) his development of new distinctions regarding various kinds of technologies: ex. transparent vs opaque techs, virtual reality vs augmented reality, some Heideggerian present-to-hand vs ready-to-hand.
3) and lastly his fascinating examples: ex. some goofball artist has managed to take transparent control of a prosthetic third arm via a small patch of arm muscles, a study on the role of pattern-recognizing and externalized representations in the creation of certain forms of abstract art.
One issue I took with Clark had to do with his optimism about the future of our ever-extending modes of cognition. He pretty much has two bad arguments for it: A) extending and transforming cognition is nothing new and essentially human, thus, more of the same couldn't hurt and B) future technologies will be mostly optional and what's optional can't pose that much of a threat. This simplifies no doubt, but this more or less sums up how he sees the matter.
It's strange to me that Clark's willing to take such a radical position on the nature of the self early in the book, only to appeal to a kind of Enlightenment position with B). I think his main failing here comes from not taking into account the nature of cultural change in modern times and the messy effects of capitalism (ideology) on all that he's so neatly laid out in this book. All the same, I found his strangely positive outlook refreshing; perhaps it can help to bring some balance to the freak outs induced by so many anxious continental theorists regarding technoculture.
While these simple examples may have helped them in terms of clarity and precision, its seems that many have been led to believe that the theory does not encompass enough practical applications to be worthy of much attention. On the other end of the spectrum, there are those that worry that the EC thesis encompasses too much; can't I claim to know everything written in the books at my local library?
Both these worries are put to rest through
1) Clark's expansion on past arguments: ex. undermining the idea that the 'skin-bag' is a principle boundary to cognition, the view of language as technology, the essential role of unconscious processing in cognition.
2) his development of new distinctions regarding various kinds of technologies: ex. transparent vs opaque techs, virtual reality vs augmented reality, some Heideggerian present-to-hand vs ready-to-hand.
3) and lastly his fascinating examples: ex. some goofball artist has managed to take transparent control of a prosthetic third arm via a small patch of arm muscles, a study on the role of pattern-recognizing and externalized representations in the creation of certain forms of abstract art.
One issue I took with Clark had to do with his optimism about the future of our ever-extending modes of cognition. He pretty much has two bad arguments for it: A) extending and transforming cognition is nothing new and essentially human, thus, more of the same couldn't hurt and B) future technologies will be mostly optional and what's optional can't pose that much of a threat. This simplifies no doubt, but this more or less sums up how he sees the matter.
It's strange to me that Clark's willing to take such a radical position on the nature of the self early in the book, only to appeal to a kind of Enlightenment position with B). I think his main failing here comes from not taking into account the nature of cultural change in modern times and the messy effects of capitalism (ideology) on all that he's so neatly laid out in this book. All the same, I found his strangely positive outlook refreshing; perhaps it can help to bring some balance to the freak outs induced by so many anxious continental theorists regarding technoculture.
June 6, 2010
Natural-Born Cyborgs offers an interesting perspective on the debate surrounding the integration of technology into everyday life. While Clark acknowledges some of the concerns surround posthumanism, he maintains a generally optimistic view of humanity's ability to successfully integrate technology into our lives, and of the benefits of doing so.
His argument revolves around his belief that humans have always incorporated non-biological tools into their lives in order to counteract their limitations - essentially that we are natural cyborgs.
It's certainly an interesting discussion, and many of his arguments are very convincing. While I don't share his unadultered optimism (yes the plasticity of our brains allow us to change and adapt, but not all change is good) I do think he's right in talking down the dooms-day stance taken by so many people. Worth a read, even if you disagree, since it will give you plenty to contemplate.
His argument revolves around his belief that humans have always incorporated non-biological tools into their lives in order to counteract their limitations - essentially that we are natural cyborgs.
It's certainly an interesting discussion, and many of his arguments are very convincing. While I don't share his unadultered optimism (yes the plasticity of our brains allow us to change and adapt, but not all change is good) I do think he's right in talking down the dooms-day stance taken by so many people. Worth a read, even if you disagree, since it will give you plenty to contemplate.
April 26, 2016
Yes I really am a doctor, however truth be told I got my Doctorate in Divinity online for 19.99 USD. But I still consider myself average intelligence even after I melted my mind in the 80's dancing with Jerry Garcia. I agree with the concept set forth in this book that we are cyborgs already with reliance on everything from pacemakers to Google. However Andy Clark was way too intellectual even for this old Doctor and like many professors, journalists and lawyers he tended to over plot as it were. We get it, you know a lot of stuff. Besides this book is so antiquated that the ubiquitous iPhone did not yet exist and thus Andy Clark could not even envision the day when everyone walking, driving or waiting on the bus would be completely mesmerized while frantically one-thumb flipping through the feed of an Orwellian nocturnal emission also known as Facebook.
December 13, 2016
I definitely enjoyed Andy Clark's reiteration of his views on embodiment and the extended mind, his cleverly devised categorization of kinds of technologies, and his extensive use of examples and references.
What bothered me, however, was his over-optimistic treatment of humanity's technological future. By focusing mainly on the potential benefits of mind-altering technologies (such as telepresence and transparent, yet tangible, brain-machine interfacing), he paid only cursory attention to some of the dangers, and almost no attention at all to the socio-economic causes and effects of technological development.
Nevertheless, I would recommend this book to anyone interested in Cognitive Science and the extended mind. That being said, I also think some of Clark's other writings might be a better place to start.
What bothered me, however, was his over-optimistic treatment of humanity's technological future. By focusing mainly on the potential benefits of mind-altering technologies (such as telepresence and transparent, yet tangible, brain-machine interfacing), he paid only cursory attention to some of the dangers, and almost no attention at all to the socio-economic causes and effects of technological development.
Nevertheless, I would recommend this book to anyone interested in Cognitive Science and the extended mind. That being said, I also think some of Clark's other writings might be a better place to start.
December 15, 2014
A fascinating analysis of our own potential. This was written a decade ago, so some of the examples are ancient history now, but Clark was increadibly accurate with his conclusions about where society was heading (and still is heading). Of personal importance, Clark's vision inspired me to think of new neural interfaces that I can develop to automate and enhance parts of my life (using the Muse brain sensor). I'm now excited to read his next book (even though it's also history, having been published in 2008).
November 9, 2007
It is just amazing how close we are to achieving SciFi level technologies... where will the next 10 years take us. He talks about a researcher that e-mails his wife orgasms, and eye implants linked to "your" network where simply talking to someone will activate you internal computer and pull up all related information, including the topics of your last conversation with said person, and display it directly to your vision, really neat stuff. If you are a tech junky you will love this book.
Read
January 4, 2011I sincerely recommend this book. It's a fascinating account of how the human brain is built to "dovetail" with technology, culture, and other brains, and with elements of itself -- and how this has ever been the case. Clark provides an imaginative and elegant framework with which to think about current and emergent tech.
April 5, 2011
I read this book for my "Technology and Cognition" course my final college semester. It is a quick read. Andy Clark writes about new "cyborg" technologies in layman language. I found his links useful though I didn't go to all the websites listed. While I may disagree with some of his points it opened my eyes to a lot of new things.
Also, he loves his sound bites.
Also, he loves his sound bites.
May 5, 2011
This books is a pretty interesting and engaging defense of the extended mind hypothesis, which states that human cognition extends beyond the "skin bag". Most of this book discusses various technologies and how it either aids or actually instantiates human thought. The philosophy is a bit light, though.
March 31, 2012
I'd love to see an updated version of those book with the ever more integrated mobile lifestyle, and many countries bypassing the land line entirely for mobile phones. There is a lot to think about in terms of the argument he presents, though many people will have issues with it. Still, glad I read it as a technologist.
December 29, 2015
A valuable perspective on the post-human idea, in stating that our cognition and identity has always been plastic enough to make us essentially biotechnology hybrids, from the beginning of tools and language - the only difference is that now our technology can respond to us too. A technology/humanism perspective shift up there with the likes of Dennett's work on consciousness and free will.
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