Cooking acts as a supplemental external stomach. Once humans acquired this artificial organ it permitted them to evolve smaller teeth and smaller jaw muscles and provided more kinds of stuff to eat. Our invention altered us.
I like the idea behind 50 posts about cyborgs. Not only are cyborgs awesome, but on a meta-level I appreciate the way the project is formulated: here are fifty posts about cyborgs. No more, no less. Then it’s done. So many websites go on for far too long simply out of inertia.
Anyway, I’m fascinated by this idea, formulated by Kevin Kelly above but certainly not unique to him, that we humans today are already, in a sense, cyborgs, or more precisely, that we are one with our tools and technologies in some non-trivial sense, that one can legitimately say that some of our tools have become part of us and thus that we are more than our biological bodies, that, say, my computer or my fork could be said to be part of me. Tools are trivially part of our psychological body-image, in the sense that tools we use every day become as natural to use as our own limbs. When you walk, you don’t think about where to put your feet or which muscles to tense, you think about where you want to go. And in the same manner, some tools have become so natural to use that you don’t think about how to operate them, you think about higher-level goals. When you learn to drive, for instance, you think consciously of the various movements required to operate a modern car, but once you’ve learned it, you think rather of where you want to go, instead of where to put your hands and feet.
But perhaps there are less trivial senses in which our tools are integrated with our identities. Human identity is very tricky to define while preserving all our intuitions about it — in fact, I suspect that no possible definition exists which can coherently deal with all our intuitions regarding identity — but I wouldn’t be surprised if there are plausible theories of identity under which some of our tools by definition become part of us, making us all cyborgs, even if we look nothing like the covers of 1960s SF pulp novels or 1980s cyberpunk movies.
Sep 7, 2010