Up until recently, the
basic assumption was that, for a person to become a cyborg, a human-machine
hybrid, it would automatically mean that the person would be fusing with machine
parts. The whole romance behind becoming
a cyborg is that by becoming to a significant extent non-organic, a person
could escape the dangers of organic perishability, and somehow live
forever. Particularly, to the extent
that the mechanical parts of the cyborg would start to break down, the cyborg
person could then replace these parts with other new parts, something that
would be so much easier to do than trying to regrow parts organically. And anyway, there is something that seems
hard and impervious and enduring about the substance of a body part made out of
metal or plastic.
But I was recently acquainted with another notion of what
it means to be a human-machine combination by an article in the online magazine
Live Science. Live Science contributor,
Charles Q Choi has written an article about a relatively new approach to
solving problems. The article:
“Real-Life Mind Meld? Scientists Link
Animal Brains” (7/9/15) deals with experiments carried out by neurobiologist
Miguel Nicolelis at Duke University and his colleagues that link the brains of
rats together through implanted microscopic wires, little electrodes, and allow
for direct communication between these rat brains even though separated by
large distances. So the brains of the
rats aren’t literally wired together and, in experiments of Nicolelis, actually
are on different continents. The wires
allow for the exchange of data among rats leading to the solving of
problems. It is like the linked rats
become one large organic computer. In one
experiment, rats found that if they synchronized the electrical activity in
their brains, they could succeed in obtaining water. In another experiment, wired groups of rats –
or brainets as they are so cutely called – developed a heightened capacity for
basic recognition of patterns. They
learned to somehow synchronize their brain activity when one kind of stimulus
was given to them and desynchronize their brain activity when another kind of
stimulus was given to them.. This
heightened sensitivity is somehow supposed to have a useful application in
predicting the probability of rain. The
sensitivity relates to different patterns of electrical stimulation
corresponding to increased and decreased temperature and increased and
decreased air pressure. Brainets of rats
predicted rain in North Carolina with a 41% accuracy, which is a rate of
accuracy that goes way beyond a chance prediction.
Rhesus macaque monkeys –
animals much closer in evolutionary development to humans than rats – have also
been used for some of these brainet experiments. In one experiment, either two or three
monkeys were teamed up to operate different functions of an artificial monkey
arm. Each monkey in a team was actually
in a different room, so the only communication was through the brain
wires. Each monkey was in charge of
different functions in moving an arm (up and down, left and right, in and
out). The team of monkeys would get a
reward of a little juice for moving an arm together towards a target. They were able to do this after a long period
of training.
The
question is why is Miguel Nicolelis interested in creating brainets, and
ultimately in creating organic computers.
Nicolelis has discussed connecting paralyzed people with healthy people,
so that the paralyzed people could learn how to activate their bodies
again. He also feels that the notion of
brainets could help stroke victims, people with epilepsy, and people with
various other neurological problems.
This
all may be true, but it involves a person losing the personal boundaries of his
consciousness. And in most other life
situations, this loss of personal boundaries can be very threatening to a
person maintaining his personal sense of wholeness. Even a serf or a slave that is worked
terribly hard under wretched conditions maintains his personal mental boundaries,
his sense of being a coherent figure, if nothing else as a result of the
discomfort and pain that he feels. The
builders of the pyramids of Egypt may have operated as one large organic
physical entity, but not as one large organic mental entity.
When a person becomes a
cyborg as the result of fusion with machine parts, he is diminishing the
coherence and integrity of his organic sense of self, but he is not temporarily
losing himself in blending with another coherent organic self, as is the case
with brainets. And once a person’s sense
of self is temporarily blended as a part of a brainet with another person’s
sense of self, does either person’s sense of self ever fully recover its
organic coherence and its strong personal boundaries? Again, a serf or a slave is forced to give up
a lot of his personal dignity, particularly in some societies, in doing the
ongoing drudge work he frequently has to do.
But he still somehow maintains his personal mental boundaries. Perhaps a better analogy to the situation of
brainets is a person who has been brainwashed by a totalitarian society,
fundamentalist religion, or a cult. In
these cases, a person’s thoughts are to some extent retrained to be in
synchrony with those of the people in the community that surrounds him. In all of these cases, there is definitely a
deep penetration of a person’s psychological boundaries, but because these
communities still do not have the impelling force of electronic signals going
directly from one brain to another, they are not quite as invasive.
Once the boundaries of a
person’s sense of self are penetrated as a result of participating in a
brainet, that penetration will remain a part of the person’s memories and will
remain a part of a person’s projected development into the future. The temporary loss of a person’s self-
boundaries will blur into his ongoing sense of self and will prevent a total
reintegration of his self-boundaries.
The person will never be as whole again.
We must keep in mind that
the researchers developing these brainet experiments are hoping to ultimately
be able to develop “organic computers” where animal brains would be connected
by the use of wires for different purposes.
And if this can happen with animals, why not with humans. What a wonderful tool organic computers would
be for dictatorships, for totalitarian governments, even for large
multi-national companies, where people from different continents could be wired
together for the supposed purposes of inventing new products or creating new
marketing strategies. What if workers in
these companies could be coerced into participating in organic computers, if
they wanted to keep their jobs?
This represents a
different way for a person to become machine-like that is distinct from
becoming a cyborg. Instead of a person
fusing directly with functional machine parts, the machine parts being used –
namely the wires – act as conduits for a person merging with other person or
persons for functional machine purposes.
But
the brainet may be more emblematic of what has already been happening in a
symbolic way in modern technological society.
We have been moving toward the idea of large organic computers for a
long time. Again, the large symbolic organic
computers I am talking about are based on social organization and not
microscopic wires and therefore do not use the same intensity of brain
penetration as the brainets. But they
have been moving in the same direction that leads to the loss of individual
mental integrity. Communist societies
and modern capitalist societies haven’t needed brainets to accomplish many
similar goals. In communist societies,
the state has acted as one large organic computer, where people are brainwashed
into giving up their individuality and devoting themselves to promoting the
economic power of the state through large work projects that demand working in
synchrony. In some modern capitalist
societies, companies have expected absolute loyalty, as people work to promote
the collective imprint of the company.
Nowadays, a new attitude has developed where people are supposed to
temporarily give themselves up to a company, working in synchrony long hours
often without overtime pay, and then are vulnerable to dismissal when a
particular project is finished. In both
communist societies and modern capitalist societies, people are symbolically
wired together, synchronizing their tasks, partaking of larger strategies,
temporarily or permanently giving up a large part of their sense of self to
become a part of one enormous ball of mental energy, one enormous merger of
consciousness. It is just that the
metaphorical wiring together that we experience in today’s work place doesn’t
require implanted wires. It doesn’t have
to. Symbolic organic computers are
already here.
(c) 2015 Laurence Mesirow
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