webliography

3. ‘The machine/organism relationships are obsolete, unnecessary’ writes Haraway. In what ways have our relations to machines been theorised?

Exploring the positions defining what is mechanical and what is organic is a good way to start answering this question. Haraway is proposing that something that once was described as a “machine/organism relationship” has changed or ceased to exist, such that the phrase is no longer useful, and the first task is to report on the ways that this may have happened. Max More, responding to the statement “man and machine are diametric opposites”, provides a useful account of this process.

The thesis of his article “Beyond the Machine” is that humans can and should extend their control of consciousness and of self (what More designates as 'humanity'), and that this process is contingent on recognising our mechanical origins and contrivance. He begins be describing the more obvious flaws in the opposing position, in which humans are endowed of some property, substance or force that fundamentally differentiates the human from the mechanical: that everything of the physical world is comprised of the same stuff, that there is no evidence for the existence of some vital force, that humans have created machines that appear to behave increasingly like humans, and that humans are demonstrably the incredibly complex sum of their mechanical parts.

The point here is not to devalue human complexity and creativity, but to force our acknowledgement that “whether a creature or an organ is made of carbon-based organic material, or of silicon or other inorganic materials does not matter. What is important is the complexity of the result: is the structure able to learn, to self-modify, to respond dynamically to changing input?”. More does not propose that humans are machines. However, he does maintain that discrete biological systems are. So, because humans are made from mechanical (biological) components, and yet “we think of ourselves as free, responsible, moral, rational beings”, More proposes that other systems may cease to be 'machine' at some point of complexity.

With these arguments in mind, and thinking of the way 'organic' and 'machine' can be defined and explored, we can take a closer look at some of the ways the relationship between these two categories is theorised.

One approach looks at the psychological and neurological implications of human relationships with machines. Professor Susan Greenfield, a neuroscientist at Oxford University has written about this with a particular emphasis on the way identity is generated, and some of her findings are summarised in an approachable article written for the online edition of the UK's Daily Mail newspaper.

Although Greenfield adopts an alarmist tone in this article, the dramatised conclusions (in which human identity is erased, “neuro-chip technology” dictates our every thought, and crying for loved ones is somehow lost to the past) don't decrease the validity of her evidence. Which is, briefly, that “electronic devices and pharmaceutical drugs all have an impact on the micro-cellular structure and complex biochemistry of our brains.” She describes the ways that neuroplasticity responds to machine interaction, and explores the changing boundaries of individuality as personal information and meaningful experience moves online. Although her arguments don't hold water, theorising psychology and identity as a machine/human relationship does.

The Nobel Laureate Herbert Simon provides an account of literary theory that reads almost as the inverse of Greenfield's article. Published online in five parts, “Literary Criticism: A Cognitive Approach” proposes a structuralist approach to meaning whereby rather than human psychology being reshaped by interactions with machines, 'human' is a paradigm applied to machine psychology to produce a particular textual syntagm (from part five):

Neurons or symbols, they are simply patterns. And the patterns have meanings because they can refer (point) to each other and especially because some of them can denote (through perceptual tests of the kind I described earlier) things, relations, and events outside the head.

Building on this interpretation of meaning and of texts, Herbert theorises that our relationships with machines can help us explore our own mechanical consciousness and that this is fertile ground for a new field of literary criticism. Simon's article was the focus piece for an entire issue of the Stanford Humanities Review, so there is extensive response to and exploration of this idea on the website, for example N. Katherine Hayles' response “the embodiment of meaning”.

Another way of theorising the organic/human relationship is to look at the spaces in which we move and the ways that we negotiate them. In his summary and review of Mark Nunes' book Cyberspaces of Everyday Life, Paul Youngman comments that “we have come to accept the foregrounded nature of the network in everyday life” and that “a great many of us in the Western world, not just students, are cyborg in nature.” This is a consequence, in Youngman's reading of Nunes, of the inception of “relational space”, where material and conceptual processes (infrastructure and superstructure) “produce the virtual topographies we navigate in our everyday (lived) existence.” This is a vision of true obsolescence, where the machine/organism interface cedes all relevance to the cyborgs that traverse it.

The last resource that I have chosen deals with the way that ethics might be able to account for machine/human relations by applying what is called the 'capabilities approach'. Extending a theory that was first usually applied to comparative studies of international development, Mark Coeckelbergh proposes that ethical judgements about freedom or equality should be based on the things that persons can actually do, not on supposedly natural or intrinsic human characteristics. He says that assessing capabilities “allows us to talk at a sufficiently high level of abstraction and organisation, thus avoiding atomistic and reductionist views of humans” and, earlier, that “technology is not a mere ‘condition’ for human being in the sense of a means that can be used to achieve human ends; rather, human existence is already a human-technological existence.” By avoiding an “instrumentalist” view of technology in this way, Coeckelbergh says we can make more consistent and helpful ethical decisions.