It is clear that philosophers such as N. Katherine Hayles and Donna Haraway conceive of humans as ‘evolving’ – at least symbolically – toward a cyborg-state. That is, Hayles and Haraway generally understand subjective experience as advancing toward an experience in which our enhancement by technology redefines how we perceive and conceptualise our existence. But while there are many aspects of this ‘becoming-cyborg’ that deliver an ‘enhancement’ to our subjective human experience, it seems a relevant inquiry to identify what delimitations inhere in this ‘becoming-cyborg’ and, accordingly, to map out the variety of delimitations that converge upon those persons who might be seen to characteristically embody the cyborg, or the ‘transhuman’, or, quite simply, the ‘enhanced’ .
My view – in contrast to the prognostications of science fiction – is that we must now consider the possibility that machines or computers may ‘never think like people’[1] and, accordingly, and contiguously, consider not only the ways in which humans are becoming ‘enhanced’ in “evolving”, ontologically and otherwise, to computers and machines, but also the ways in which humans might be seen as “devolving” into ‘computer states’. It seems a standard discussion consists of describing just how humans are ‘evolving’ to the ‘cyborg-state’, but, more radically, it is interesting to consider how the use of drugs, such as Prozac, Ritalin, and the like (often considered as enhancement technologies, or as ‘cosmetic medicine’), are also inviting of the same questions about evolution and devolution, and similarly capable of being understood as effecting kinds of ‘disenhancement’ rather than enhancement only.
I use the term devolution not to signify a real devolution so much as to strike against the evolution-centric discourse on enhancement technologies, especially those in relation to Prozac and other enhancing drugs. If, as Hubert and Stuart Dreyfus argues, computers cannot employ human reason, then it is important to consider Dreyfus’s thesis as against the changes that occur in the human subject who does enhances itself through enhancement drugs and other forms of technology. Is it possible that, like computers, cyborgs, transhumans, posthumans, or simply, enhanced humans, lose their capacity to function and/or learn in the same way as “people”? Or, by contrast, do Prozac and other technologies enable common sense to prevail over and above the previously dominating tendencies of the subject, tendencies which are themselves defective or devolutionary, to begin with? These are some of the questions with which my research concerns itself.
To assess the effect of enhancement technologies in this broad sense, however, calls for a broader understanding of human subjectivity and also a means by which to assess its evolution and devolution. In this paper, that broader understanding and attendant means of assessment is found in a psychoanalytic-based, language-based and intelligence-based theory of subjectivity. In other words, my discussion of subjectivity will invite scholarship from the psychoanalytic, the ‘language’ and the ‘intelligence’ communities in its pursuit of understanding human nature. In this way, my research, although it is technically for degree in English (and more formally, it is expected to be a degree in English Literature), advances confidently toward other disciplines such as literary theory, philosophy, psychology and psychoanalysis, psychiatry, anthropology, cultural studies, and certain scientific understandings of evolution and the body.
My work also uses close reading of certain literary texts to adjudicate and explicate its own proclamations about the human subject. My method of reading such texts reflects my theoretical understanding of human subjectivity – if the subject is enhanced by technology, and enhancement may be assessed in and of itself by language, then, can we not read language as a kind of technology as well; perhaps even as the ‘original’ enhancement technology? Furthermore, can we not then understand or reduce the effects on language by psychopharmacological drugs and by computers and other technologies as enhancing or not enhancing? Could the question of ‘enhancement’ itself be described as as subjective as a question of literary or aesthetic quality?
The answers to these questions become complicated when language is seen as an inadequate, partial, and readily contestable reflection of the subject (or of the ‘soul’), rather than a clear and totalising representation of it. Indeed, language may be appropriated for all kinds of uses. A person may say one thing and mean another, just as he or she may say one thing and think or feel another. Most significantly, the subject may also describe itself in one way and in fact be another. Language, in this sense, is not directly reliable in assisting analysis of the subject and subjective experience. However, it is important to note that, for the purposes of the rubric of my research, language is in fact often the only means by which the subject is analysed for the purpose of characterising it in the many fields I will discuss. In this sense, my research not only depends on language as a means by which to analyse and assess the subject, but it also problematises the ways in which language has been and is already used as a means for doing the same thing. In this sense, my research is classically literary-theroetical in that it distinguishes its own practices of language-reading from those of another reader. It differs from the classic model only in that the ‘other reader’ does not always view itself, or is not always viewed, as a reader, as such, but rather, may be a medical doctor, an evolutionary scientist, a psychoanalyst, and so forth. I am interested in the intersection of these disciplines and language.
In the Dreyfus’s short article ‘Why Computers May Never Think like People’[2], the writers propose that the limitations on computers to learn to adapt to certain real-life circumstances prevents computers from ‘thinking’ in the sense that people can. For the Dreyfus’s, what defines adult humans is their ability to apply specific rules, learned in the practice and performance of one activity (‘analytic behaviour), later, in a more universal and analogical way, in the performance of other unrelated activities (skilled behaviour). Adults, then, are different from children, in that they are not only ‘analytic’, but ‘skilled’:
“their progression from the analytic behavior of consciously following abstract rules to skilled behavior based on unconsciously recognizing new situations as similar to remembered ones. Conversely, small children initially understand only concrete examples and gradually learn abstract reasoning. Perhaps it is because this pattern in children is so well known that adult intelligence is so often misunderstood.”[3]
Adults, therefore, employ a kind of analogical reasoning, which enables them to compare previous scenarios with new ones, despite certain differences in the details of the scenarios. Children, by contrast, employ an imitative, mimetic intelligence, which thinks only of mastering their skills as the owners of a body, or a voice, and not of any historical goal or outcome.
Here, the Dreyfus’s draw an interesting distinction between child and adult reasoning. For adults, the acquiring of skills is based not upon examples, as with children, but upon the successive application of certain abstract rules. In this sense, it is arguable, at its broadest, that adult intelligence depends on linguistic rules, whereas childhood intelligence relies on the imitation of examples. Furthermore, since for many children language is itself a skill yet to be fully mastered, many of the examples imitated by children might be visual, not linguistic. Where such examples are linguistic in nature, it is likely that language will be copied from examples of its use rather than from remembered rules of use, although simple rules may guide the child. This is obvious in observing the differences in intelligence operations between an adult who learns a new language as compared to a child who learns its first language.
The purpose of so distinguishing adult and children intelligence is not to set in stone a typological distinction between these forms of intelligence. Indeed, the differences between these two concepts are as various and as slippery as their similarities. Rather, this distinction serves to provide reference-points or yardsticks along the continuum of intelligence, upon which childhood intelligence consists of these analytic attributes and adult intelligence consists of skilled attributes. Whereupon the continuum an individual subject may reside will not necessarily depend on whether they are a child or an adult, but upon the activity at play.
It is interesting, in any event, to compare the Dreyfus’s analysis of the skills they associate with adult and children intelligence as to their analysis of the skills they associate with the novice, the competent performer, and the expert. For the Dreyfus’s, only the novice follows certain rules unwaveringly or strictly in the pursuance of learning a new skill, and only the novice, therefore, who also employs adult intelligence in the sense that the Dreyfus’s define it: by following the rules. Interestingly, however, competent performers, and to a greater extent than they, expert performers, employ a different kind of intelligence as they advance in their skill level. As the Dreyfus’s argue, experts do not so much follow rules as identify the many subtle exceptions thereto: “the skills of experts have become so much a part of them that that they need no more be aware of them than they are of their own bodies…When [expert chess players are] playing rapidly, they sidestep dangers as automatically as teenagers avoid missiles in a familiar video game.”[4] For the Dreyfus’s, experts understand that there can be no thought, no application of the rules, because the time it takes to think about such a rule, and whether or not to apply it, may actually jeopardise the application of the action, whether it follows the rule or not. In this sense, it is arguable that expert intelligence shares some of its characteristics with the child intelligence that the Dreyfus’s describe.
Whereas children imitate the actions of others in their advancement, experts imitate the actions that they themselves have taken in the past, and which are contained in memories. The kind of reasoning that is quickly applied by experts is both analogical in that it compares the present task with a past performance of a similar kind of task, but also imitative in that it imitates the past performance. The extent to which an expert applies an abstract rule or reduces his or her present task to a semiotic principle in the performance of that task is bound to be very short indeed.
At this point, it may be apposite to flag one aspect of childhood learning to which I will return later and describe in more detail but for the moment I shall only mention. Jaques Lacan described in his 1949 lecture in Zurich at the Sixteenth International Congress of Psychoanalysis, a concept named The Mirror Stage (le stage du mirroir), which was formative, in the subject, of the ‘I’ function.[5] In this lecture, Lacan returned to a theory that he had introduced thirteen years earlier (in 1936), which simply argued that the stage at which the infant indentifies his or her self in the mirror (which may be a real glass, reflective mirror, or the image of another person, as apprehended by the infant) is the stage at which the infant jubilantly assumes “his specular image” and whose function is “a particular case of the function of the imagos, which is to establish a relationship between an organism and its reality – or, as they say, between the Innenwelt and the Umwelt.”[6] the mirror stage enables the infant to engage with the world, intellectually. It enables the infant to consider itself independent of the rest of the world, and yet also human. In this sense, the mirror stage also triggers in the infant his or her desire to imitate the rest of the world: s/he thereafter rapidly learns to use its body and voice by imitating those around them, knowing it can be done. For the infant, there are no rules, and no thoughts – only action, only instinct.
For the Dreyfus’s, adults who reason things out, who ‘take a step back’ from certain intellectually challenging situations to deliberate upon them detachedly and rationally, often revert to the behavior of a “novice, or at best, a competent performer”, rather than an expert. Of course, there are exceptions. For instance, in situations where an expert, in all of his or her instinctual performativity, based as it is upon their lots of experience and rooted in their unconscious recognition of situations, yet cannot prevail over their opponent, it may be useful for the expert to revert to “deliberative rationality.” Nevertheless, in the usual life of an expert, such difficulties do not arise. In this sense, experts exhibit some of the characteristics that the Dreyfus’s also attribute to children, except that whereas children imitate the actions of those around them, experts imitate those acts that they have made before. I hope that I may develop these links between the mirror stage, the development of children intelligence, and the application of so-called expert intelligence in the coming months.
Moreover, it is important for me to rearticulate the Dreyfus’s argument that computers are capable only of applying ‘analytic’ reasoning and can only follow rules. It is interesting, here, to consider the well-known expression ‘computer skills’, which usually applies only to the skills of the human user of the computer and not the skills possessed by the computer itself. For the Dreyfus’, this would make perfect sense, as computers cannot acquire ‘skills’. I hope to re-examine this proposition in my research in the coming months, particularly in relation to skills often associated with computer networks, and the web.
Dreyfus, Hubert L. (1992), What computers still can’t do : a critique of artificial reason (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press) liii, 354 p.
Kaplan, David M. (2004), Readings in the philosophy of technology (Lanham, Md. ; Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers) xvi, 512 p.
Lacan, Jacques and Fink, Bruce (2002), Ecrits : a selection, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W.W. Norton & Co.) xi, 372 p.
[1]Hubert L. Dreyfus, What Computers Still Can’t Do : A Critique of Artificial Reason (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992) liii, 354 p.
[2] David M. Kaplan, Readings in the Philosophy of Technology (Lanham, Md. ; Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2004) xvi, 512 p. at 397-413.
[3] Ibid. at 401.
[4] Ibid. at 400.
[5] Jacques Lacan and Bruce Fink, Ecrits : A Selection, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2002) xi, 372 p. at 4-9.
[6] Ibid. at 6.
