Notes: Clark, A. (2003) Natural-Born Cyborg

p.25

You may consciously decide, for example, to reach for the wine glass. But all the delicate
work of generating a sequence of muscle commands enabling precise and
appropriate finger motions and gripping is then turned over to a dedicated,
unconscious subsystem—a kind of on-board servomechanism not unlike
those ABS brakes.

p.26

Satisfied with your work you address the meeting, presenting the final plan of action for which (you believe, card-carrying materialist that you are) your biological brain must
be responsible. But in fact, and in the most natural way imaginable, your
naked biological brain was no more responsible for that final plan of action
than it was for avoiding the earlier skid. In each case, the real problem-solving engine was the larger, biotechnological matrix comprising (in thecase at hand) the brain, the stacked papers, the previous marginalia, the electronic files, the operations of search provided by the Mac software, and so on, and so on.

What the human brain is best at is learning to be a team player in a problem-solving field populated by an incredible variety of nonbiological props, scaffoldings, instruments, and resources. In this way ours are essentially the brains of natural-born cyborgs, ever-eager to dovetail their activity to the increasingly complex technological envelopes in
which they develop, mature, and operate.

p.27

What blinds us to our own increasingly cyborg nature is an ancient western prejudice—the tendency to think of the mind as so deeply special as to be distinct from the rest of the natural order. [This prejudice…] emerges instead as the belief that there is something absolutely special about the cognitive machinery that happens to be housed within
the primitive bioinsulation (nature’s own duct-tape!) of skin and skull.
However, there is nothing quite that special inside. The brain is, to be
sure, an especially dense, complex, and important piece of cognitive machinery. We are, in short, in the grip of a seductive but quite untenable illusion: the illusion that the mechanisms of mind and self can ultimately unfold only on some privileged stage marked out by the good old-fashioned skin-bag.

My goal is to dispel this illusion, and to show how a complex matrix of brain, body, and technology can actually constitute the problem-solving machine that we should properly identify as ourselves.

p.28 Dovetailing

Transparent technologies are those tools that become so well fitted to, and integrated with, our own lives and projects that they are (as Don Norman,28 Weiser, and others insist) pretty much invisible-in-use.

p. 32-33

Let’s return, finally, to the place we started: the cyborg control of aspects of the autonomic nervous system. The functions of this system (the
homeostatic control of heart rate, blood pressure, respiration, etc.) were
the targets of Clynes and Kline in the original 1960 proposal. The cyborg,
remember, was to be a human agent with some additional, machine-controlled, layers of automatic (homeostatic) functioning, allowing her to survive in alien or inhospitable environments. Such cyborgs, in the words of
Clynes and Kline, would provide “an organizational system in which such
robot-like problems were taken care of automatically, leaving man free to
explore, to create, to think and to feel.” Clynes and Kline were adamant
that such off-loading of certain control functions to artificial devices would
in no way change our nature as human beings. They would simply free the
conscious mind to do other work.

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

p. 47-48

There is, however, another problem lurking in the general move toward
ever-more-integrated, invisible, automatic, pseudo-neural technologies. The
danger is one of loss of control.

But truly invisible, seamless, constantly running technologies resist control in a subtler,
perhaps even more dangerous, manner. How then can we alter and control
that of which we are barely aware?