Betwixt and Between Animal and Machine: Human Nature at the Close of the Twentieth Century and the Start of the Twenty-first

DR. DENNIS M. WEISS YORK COLLEGE ENGLISH AND HUMANITIES DEPARTMENT YORK, PA 17405-7199� 1DWEISS@YCP.EDU

Our Fascination with Animals and Machines and Our Relationship with Them

Let me begin today with some interesting anecdotes culled from recent newspaper and magazine articles.

The first comes from close to home: Garry Kasparov’s battle with Deep Blue for world chess supremacy in the Philadelphia Convention Center. Kasparov was playing against an IBM computer nicknamed Deep Blue who is capable of searching more than 100 million chess positions a second and became the first computer to defeat a reigning world champion in a game. Not having much interest in chess myself, what struck me about the match was the almost apocalyptic fan fare that greeted this battle between man and machine. In Newsweek, for instance, in an article apocalyptically titled “Man vs. Machine,” Steven Levy wrote that Kasparov was fighting for all of us: “all of us, that is, with spit in our mouths and DNA in our cells. To chess enthusiasts the first-game loss was more than a shock: it was the apocalypse. The feeling was that supremacy in chess represented an important foothold in the battle against the computer’s relentless incursion in the human domain.” USA Today ran a cover story on the chess match the headline of which read: “Can this Man Save the Human Race?” It was, according to the newspaper, the ultimate man versus machine showdown, brain cells versus microchips. The New York Times weighed in with the suggestion that the historic match was a “symbolically, if not actually, profound event in the history of brains, human and otherwise.”

At the same time that the Times was giving attention to this apocalyptic showdown, buried a little further in the newspaper was the story of Steven Mann who has literally become a walking window on the world wide web. Wearing a visor, head-mounted cameras, beanie-mounted antenna and wraparound computer on his waist, Mann’s travels are fed instantaneously to the Internet’s World Wide Web, where anyone can dial in and look at the world through his eyes. The computer Mann wears around his waist allows him to view

pictures simultaneously through tiny computer screens on his visor. He can also read his e-

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mail, scan the Web and do his computer work as he waits in the line at the bank. While Kasparov battles Deep Blue for world supremacy, or at least world chess supremacy, Mann has become the ultimate cyborg, part human, part machine, his experiences fed into the World Wide Web to be downloaded potentially by millions. There is something of a paradox to be found in these two stories which I’ll return to in a moment.

But let’s move on to another set of stories. Returning to USA Today, in the same issue that pits man against machine, we also find the less conspicuous story: “Chimps Learn Morality, too”, reporting on the work of Frans de Waal of the Yerkes Primate Center. de Waal’s work was also featured in the same Newsweek issue in which Levy contrasted the spit in our mouth with the processing power of Deep Blue. On the very next page is an article featuring a prominent photo of two chimpanzees and the headline “The Roots of Good and Evil”. It seems that de Waal’s research suggests that human conceptions of morality and justice can be found in the behavior of chimpanzees. The author of the article sums up de Waal’s work by suggesting that our “notions of right and wrong are part of our animal heritage.”

While de Waal is purportedly discovering the origins of human morality in our cousins the chimpanzees, baboons are making a bit of a sacrifice themselves donating their bone marrow to Jeff Getty, a 38 year old man with AIDS who received a transfusion of baboon bone marrow in hopes of restoring his immune function. This procedure calls to mind Dr. Christian Barnard’s attempt to transplant a chimpanzee heart into a human being in 1977 and the later baboon heart of Baby Fae. Scientists tell us that this type of procedure is sure to become commonplace in the future when pigs may be routinely raised for hearts and livers, human DNA may be introduced into goats, and tissue engineering may be used to harvest replacement organs from animals. A recent Time article explored the issue of tissue engineering and featured a picture of a mouse with a human ear seemingly growing out of its back. As the article explains, “It is the latest and most dramatic demonstration of progress in tissue engineering, a new line of research aimed at replacing body parts lost to disease, accident or, as is sometimes the case with a missing ear, a schoolyard fight.” In a subsequent issue, however, we discover the future may not be as close as we might like to think. Time reports that readers were startled and disgusted by their report on the mouse with the human ear. Wrote one reader, “I was horrified at the grotesque sight of that poor little mouse with a human ear growing out of its back.”

What do these dispatches allow us to conclude? I think in part they point to the complexity and ambiguity in our relationship to both animals and machines. We are fascinated by computers and animals both, attracted to them, repelled by them, in awe of them, fearful of them. Just a glance around underscores the continuing fascination we have with both animals and machines. Consider for instance the recent movies that focus on either animals and machines and the manner in which they seemingly disrupt the boundaries between humanity and non-humanity.

Babe, Wolf, Virtuousity, Johnny Mnemonic in one way or the other raise questions about what it means to be human by comparing human beings to pigs that talk, people that turn into animals, virtual reality agents, and couriers with chips in their head. Magazines such as National Geographic and cable channels such as Discovery and The Learning Channel have succeeded in large part by exploiting our interest in both animals and machines and meditating on what they might tell us about ourselves. Currently, for instance, The Learning Channel is running Desmond Morris’ series The

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Human Animal which explores the biological basis of human behavior and its origins in the animal kingdom. And while the battle between Kasparov and Deep Blue evokes tension between us and our machines, it is an obvious fact that we are spending more and more of our time with them. They have come to define the way we communicate with one another and constitute the basis of our virtual communities.

We are fascinated, then, with animals and machines and our relationship to them. But it is a fascination tinged with fear, apprehension, sometimes even disgust. It is this complex fascination with animals and machines that I would like to reflect on today. What does it tell us about ourselves that our relationships with animals and machines are so complex, so fraught with ambiguity? I think perhaps it can tell us a lot. We are drawn to animals and machines because we find a reflection of ourselves in them. And we are repelled by them, motivated to assert our primacy over them, because we find a reflection of ourselves in them. We reflect on animals and machines as a way to understand our nature and place in the cosmos. But we also recognize that both animals and machine potentially undermine our belief in a distinctive, unique, perhaps special human nature. These anecdotes and examples from the press and popular culture suggest that it is becomingly increasingly difficult to maintain the boundaries between animals and machines on the one hand and human beings on the other. The walls separating us from them are tumbling down and into the breach are coming computers that think and animals that speak, reason, and morally deliberate. At the end of the twentieth century, it is becoming increasingly difficult to conceive of a difference between us and them. There is growing uncertainty surrounding the issue of whether there is anything distinctive about human beings, something that serves to distinguish us from either animals or machines. Do we occupy a special place in the universe or are we simply one more inhabitant among others? Is there any respect in which human beings are superior to their animal cousins or their machine creations? These issues will be at the forefront, I believe, of our study of human beings in the 21st century.

Looking Backwards as We Move Forwards

Of course, it hasn’t always been that way. It is relatively recently that in the West we have begun to question our place and status in the world. Looking at the traditions that make up Western culture it is clear that they have always presupposed a gulf separating human beings from animals and machines. “Again and again in the Western tradition, we humans have assured ourselves that we are unique, separated from everything else by special gifts and qualities.” (1) Judeo-Christian thought

This is clear from the onset of the Judeo-Christian tradition as it is recounted in Genesis, where God “created man in his own image, in the image of God he created them. And God blessed them, and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.’” Having been created in the likeness of God, human beings partake of the divine characteristics of self-consciousness and the ability to love freely which is characteristic of God himself and so are set apart from the rest of creation. While the early Hebrews conceived of the human being as made of “dust from the ground” and saw humanity as part of the natural realm, later developments in Christian theology widened the gulf between human

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beings and animals. Our uniqueness and special place in God’s creation was ensured by the possession of our immortal soul and the resulting fact that human beings belonged to both the spiritual and the material realm while animals only belonged to the material realm. Our proper relationship to animals was that of master. As Saint Augustine taught: “Since beasts lack reason, we need not concern our selves with their sufferings.”

(2) Greek thought

A similar presumption of human uniqueness and superiority was present in ancient Greek thought. As James Sheehan notes, “The Greeks seemed eager to establish human hegemony over nature. Animal sacrifice, which was so central to Greek religion, ritually affirmed the distinctions between humans and beasts, just as it sought to establish connections between the human and divine.” Human beings are to be distinguished from animals by their possession of reason, a rational nature. For both Plato and Aristotle, the power of reason is the highest part of the soul, is uniquely and distinctively human, and is key to our immortality. It is our rational nature that serves to distinguish human beings from all other things and gives rise to the Great Chain of Being, an elaborate hierarchy of living beings in which all creatures were defined on a sliding scale that began with human beings.

(3) Early Modern thought

The humanism of Renaissance thought also reaffirmed this centrality of the human being. In his Oration on the Dignity of Man, Pico della Mirandola, asserting the preeminence of human nature, has God say to Adam, “I have placed you at the center of the world, so that from that vantage point you may with greater ease glance around you on all that the world contains. We have made you a creature neither of heaven nor of earth, neither mortal nor immortal, in order that you may, as the free and proud shaper of your own being, fashion yourself in the form you may prefer.”

Descartes, acting under the influence of the new science and materialism of the day, articulated a position that was to be central to Enlightenment thought.

Descartes argued that human beings were to be distinguished from animals and machines due to our possession of reason and speech. No animal besides man, he claims, shows evidence of the ability to, as he puts it, “arrange words differently, so as to respond to the sense of whatever is said in its presence.” Furthermore, neither machines nor beasts can act from reason or mind, as shown by their inability to do well the vast number of things that human beings are capable of doing. In fact, animals are no better than biological machines, incapable of any mental activity whatsoever. Animals do not act independently, “it is nature that acts in them according to the arrangement of their organs, just as we see how a clock, composed merely of wheels and springs, can reckon the hours.”

This distinction between human beings on the one hand and machines and animals on the other is picked up throughout most of modern Western thought. Rousseau, for instance, agrees with Descartes that animals are merely ingenious machines “to which nature has given a sense of order to keep itself in motion and protect itself.” Humans, unlike animals, are not in thrall to their instincts. Free will, intellect, and language give humans the ability to choose, create, and communicate. The logical extension of this is Kant’s view of the human being as an intrinsic end possessing dignity and being worthy of respect. As Kant writes, “As the single being on earth that possesses understanding, he is certainly titular lord of nature, and…he is born to be its ultimate end.” Animals on this view are mere things possessing only an instrumental value.

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What one sees in the traditions that constitute Western culture then is an often profound divide between animals and machines and human beings. Human beings, it is generally asserted, are unique, possess distinctive characteristics, have a special or unique place in the cosmos, and are owed special or distinctive duties that are not owed either machines or animals. This strain of thought is of course not universal in Western thought. It has had its opponents. In Descartes’ time, for instance, La Mettrie strongly opposed drawing any distinctions between human beings and machines. In Man a Machine, La Mattrie offered a completely mechanistic and materialistic account of the human being which admitted no essential distinction between human beings and machines. And many of Descartes’ critics denied his distinction between human beings and animals. Pierre Gassendi, for instance, in what sounds like a very modern objection to Descartes’ view of animals claimed that “although [animals] do not exercise reason as perfectly or about as many subjects as man, they still exercise reason, and the difference seems merely to be one of degree.…You will say that [beasts] do not speak. But although they do not produce human speech (naturally: they are not human beings), they still produce their own form of speech, which they use in just the same way as we do ours.” So there has been in the history of Western thought objections to the view of human beings as occupying a special place in nature. Nonetheless, the main view has persisted that between animals and machines on the one hand and human beings on the other there is a difference of kind, a qualitative difference that entails an absolute divide between them.

The Great Disrupters

It is this claim to human distinctiveness and superiority, our belief in our unique place in the world that has been increasingly challenged and undermined in the twentieth century. Of course the beginnings of this challenge extend further back in our history. We can identify three early revolutions that have shaken and disrupted our confidence in our place in the world.

(1) The Copernican Revolution

The growing scientific spirit of the 16th and 17th century, represented by the work of Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo, signaled a dramatic shift away from the conception of the universe as a harmonious and coherent whole created by God as a home for human beings, structured according to the religious values and virtues of the time. The cosmos is transformed into a cold and indifferent place in which humanity is no longer at its center. The majesty of the heavens and our place in them is replaced with dread. As Blaise Pascal comments, “The eternal silence of those infinite spaces strikes me with terror.” (2) The Darwinian Revolution

If we could not be at the center of the universe, at least we could be comforted by the thought that we were a species set apart from all other species, granted the dignity that is our birthright. But the divide between us and animals was shaken to the core by the Darwinian Revolution. Where Copernicus upset our physical universe, Darwin upset comforting beliefs about our biological universe. No longer would it be possible to see human beings as the pinnacle of life, the end point of some great chain of being. Nor could we easily continue to believe that we were somehow distinctive, set apart from all other living creatures by some trait or characteristic unknown to nature. Rather, we were the result of completely natural and entirely random events.

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(3) The Freudian Revolution

Perhaps though we could find comfort in the existence of our self and our will. If we were not at the center of the universe or didn’t somehow transcend mere animal life, at least we had a self, a will, and were in control of ourselves in a way in which animals were not. The final nail in our coffin, the third assault on our sense of dignity and self-importance was the Freudian revolution and the recognition that we weren’t even in charge of ourselves. Rather, our self is the product of a battle or conflict that was occurring largely behind the scenes, a drama to which we had little if any access. Self-knowledge and self-control is largely illusory. We no longer have the luxury of thinking of ourselves as masters of our own destiny.

Three Contemporary Revolutions

From Copernicus to Freud, then, we witness a growing suspicion in regard to human nature and our place in the cosmos. But these revolutions, these assaults on our sense of place and dignity, took place over a long period of time. It takes close to four hundred years to move from Copernicus to Freud. In the twentieth century the pace of debunking has rapidly increased and the conflict between our view of human nature and our relationship to animals and machines has deepened. Again we can focus on three contemporary “revolutions” where the challenge to our nature as human beings and our belief in a distinctive place for humanity has been most strongly felt. (1) The Computer Revolution

If we think back through the highlights of western thought, reason has almost always been seen as a distinctively human trait, something that sets us apart from both animals and machines. To Aristotle we were the rational animal. For Descartes, reason distinguished our general problems solving abilities from the limited abilities of machines. Kant found in reason a basis for our dignity and respect and rational ends. It was reason, our mind, that gave us pride of place in the world and it was mind that could not be accounted for on the same principles as we understand material things. Some aspect of our essence as human beings escaped the familiar realm of the merely physical or corporeal. And so it was a blow to our sense of distinctiveness that some fifty years ago ENIAC first started performing some of its calculations. All of a sudden there was a challenger to the throne. More importantly, a challenger with no special or unique characteristics, least of all a mind. The computer was a machine but it was a machine with a psychology. And it was a machine that could outperform us in what we thought of as distinctively human tasks, such as playing chess. It wasn’t simply that the computer seemed to think. It was also that it did so while possessing nothing of what we thought was distinctive about thought: a mind, a soul, a being created in God’s image. And it was increasingly apparent that if we could understand what the computer did without hypothesizing any spiritual or mental entities, it would be possible to understand what human beings do according to the same principles. Human beings and computers now came to occupy the same species: information processor. As psychologist George Miller put it, “Many psychologists have come to take for granted in recent years…that men and computers are merely two different species of a more abstract genus called ‘information processing systems’.” There is no longer a need for a distinctive science of humanity because there is nothing distinctive about human beings. As Bruce Mazlish sums up these points, “To put it bluntly, we are now coming to realize that

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humans and the machines they create are continuous and that the same conceptual schemes that help explain the workings of the brain also explain the workings of a ‘thinking machine.’” The human being becomes simply a complex system composed of hardware and software, not at all different from any other computational system or information processor. Alan Newell, a pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence puts this point directly when he argues that artificial intelligence is just the latest step in the battleground over human uniqueness, the successor to Copernicus, Darwin, and Freud. As Newell writes, “For if humans were like a computer…then humankind would no longer be unique. Or at least its mind would not, so that some other source of uniqueness would have to be found. And the supply is becoming a little lean.” Our minds, Newell suggests, are just another technology like any other technology; not to be distinguished in kind and maybe only modestly in degree.

Newell’s view of mind as technology is the stuff of both science fact and science fiction. Movies such as Johnny Mnemonic and Strange Days present us with a future in which the human being has merged with machines and the mind has been colonized by technology. Virtuosity suggests that perhaps there is no distinction between real human beings and virtual human beings. Lawnmower Man portrays a future in which human beings may one day find themselves living in cyberspace, simply another mechanical part of the computer age. This line of thought is pursued by Hans Moravec in his book Mind Children where he foresees a day in which human beings will be able to download the human mind into cyberspace and where they will then compete with their own software for existence. Indeed, computers have increasingly blurred the distinction between life and non-life. Evolution is now commonly seen as a master programmer and we, or better our genes, are one of its best programs. DNA is simply nature’s way of programming. As Richard Dawkins observes in his recent book River Out of Eden, “The machine code of the genes is uncannily computer-like…Life is just bytes and bytes of information…We…are survival machines programmed to propagate the digital database that did the programming.” Mirroring Dawkin’s enthusiasm for digital life is the artificial life movement. Steven Levy’s book Artificial Life, subtitled “A Report from the Frontier where Computers Meet Biology,” describes a frontier of genetic algorithms and computational DNA where, as he puts it, “human beings will see themselves in a different life. We will not be standing at the pinnacle of some self-defined evolutionary hierarchy but will rank as particularly complex representatives of one subset of life among many possible alternatives.”

So from a species with distinctive traits and characteristics we have become an information processor programmed by evolution, at the mercy of our genes, one subset of life among many possibilities.

(2) The Sociobiological Revolution

The implications of Darwinian evolution suggest that human beings are one with nature and are not distinctive or special. Darwin himself argued that “there is no fundamental difference between man and the higher mammals in their mental faculties.” But it wasn’t until the emergence of sociobiology as a distinctive discipline that the implications of this were brought completely home. With the publication of E. O. Wilson’s texts on sociobiology and human nature, the study of human beings was to become a completely biological study. Homo sapiens is a completely conventional animal species and can be studied according to the same disciplines that study other

animal species: primarily genetics and ethology.

In fact, sociobiology begins with the insight suggested by Melvin Konner that “an organism is, in essence, a gene’s way of making another organism.” As Konner goes on to

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explain, “As long as it is admitted that there can be no forces operating in nature other than physicochemical ones, it must be admitted that continued membership in an ongoing germ plasm is the only goal served by any given gene.” Richard Dawkins emphasizes this same point in The Selfish Gene where he argues that human beings are “survival machines—robot vehicles that are blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes.”

What ultimately matters is not us, we human beings, but our genes. Wilson follows through on this insight to suggest that all manner of human institutions, from religion to the family, gender and morality, are the outcomes of our evolutionary history as a species. The sociobiologist imagines a world in which ethical judgments and aesthetic standards are not a product of our distinctive nature as human beings but simply the programming of our genes. Wilson’s new naturalism suggests that human beings lack a purpose beyond that created by their genetic history, that the human mind is simply a biological instrument designed to ensure our survival, and that religious beliefs and institutions, indeed all human institutions, have evolved to enhance the survival and multiplication of their adherents’ genes. It is the task of the sociobiologist to substitute for the mysteries of religion and ethics, the clarity of science based on genetic analysis. The human being is ultimately sidelined and marginalized in place of his or her genes. Beyond suggesting that human behavior is the product of their genes, sociobiologists also argue that many forms of behavior once thought to be distinctively human, language use, culture, and morality, for instance, can in fact be found in a multitude of animal species. In a recent cover story, for instance, Time raises the question, “Can Animals Think?” and answers it in the affirmative: “yes, and maybe even lie and play politics.” The photo on the cover presents a chimp in place of Rodin’s human thinker. The article suggests that recent experiments with chimp, dolphins, parrots, and sea lions undermines the great divide separating humans from other species. As the article points out, “Even to raise these questions challenges humanity’s belief that it occupies an exalted place in the universe.” Philosopher Mary Midgely argues that the result of recent studies of animal behavior should lead us to conclude that “we are not just rather like animals; we are animals.” Rather than defending the discontinuity between animals and human beings, the gap between us and them that was formerly thought to exist is slowly being filled in. We are now being encouraged to see human beings as continuous with animals and completely part of the natural realm.

(3) The Ecological Revolution

Nowhere has the question of whether human beings hold a special place in nature been more debated than in the environmental and animal rights movement. With the strong distinction in most traditional Western thought drawn between animals and human beings (and we might add for future consideration, human beings and machines, think about android rights) came a strong moral distinction. Animals were generally perceived not to be worthy of moral consideration. Kant, for instance, despite developing what has become a very enduring moral legacy, did not think there was any justification for extending moral consideration to animals. In considering a master’s love for his dog, for instance, he notes “If a dog has served his master long and faithfully, his service, on the analogy of human service, deserves reward, and when the dog has grown too old to serve, his master ought to keep him until he dies.” But Kant doesn’t hesitate to add, “If a man shoots his dog because the animal is no longer capable of service, he does not fail in his duty to the dog, for the dog cannot judge…”

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A marked contrast can be found in the work of more contemporary ethicists such as Peter Singer and Tom Regan. Singer argues that much in the same way that we have extended the basic principle of equality from men to women and from white to black, we should extend it as well to include nonhuman animals. We have rejected sexism and racism and we should reject speceism for similar reasons. On the basis of utilitarian principles, Singer claims that all animals are equally worthy of moral consideration. There is no moral justification for regarding the pain that animals feel as less important than the same amount of pain felt by humans.

Regan argues on a slightly different ground, one concerned with individual moral rights. To be a person is to be an individual who possess moral rights and so is to have an inherent value and be owed treatment that respects this value. Regan argues that at least some animals, adult mammalian animals especially, are persons and therefore possess inherent value. As Regan suggests, “Because all who possess [inherent value] possess it equally, the rights view makes no distinction between the inherent value human persons possess as distinct from those persons who are animals.”

More marked still is the biocentric hypothesis in environmental rights. While Singer and Regan wish to close the moral gap between human beings and animals, it might still be plausibly claimed that their moral theories are premised upon distinctively human conceptions of morality: the centrality of pleasure and pain in the case of Singer and the definition of personhood in the case of Regan. Both views may still be characterized as anthropocentric and this is thought to be sufficient grounds on which to reject them. Godfrey-Smith argues that what is needed in environmental ethics is something tantamount to a Copernican and Darwinian revolution: a shift from man’s conception of himself as the center of the biological world, to one in which he is conceived as a component in a network of biological relations. On such a holistic view, organisms, including human beings, are conceived as nodes in a biotic web of intrinsically related parts. Such a life-centered system of environmental ethics underscores the importance of Earth’s biotic community and rather than being the pinnacle of life, human beings are simply one member in a diverse community. As Paul Taylor notes: “We are members of the Earth’s community of life, holding that membership on the same terms as apply to all the nonhuman members.” Taylor argues that all living things possess equal inherent worth since no one species can be shown to be either higher or lower than any other. While Taylor recognizes such uniquely human characteristics as rational thought, aesthetic creativity, autonomy and self-determination, and moral freedom, he denies that these can be a basis for attributing a higher value to human life. Humans, Taylor suggests, are claiming human superiority from a strictly human point of view, from a point of view in which the good of humans is taken as the standard of judgment. This, Taylor suggests, is an irrational bias in our own favor.

The Posthuman Turning Point

In the past thirty years in Western culture, then, there has been a dramatic shift away from what had been some of the central tenets of Western thought. In considering the computer revolution, the biological revolution, and the environmental rights revolution, what unites these movements of the late twentieth century is an emphasis on the human being as simply a conventional animal or a conventional machine. There is little if anything distinctive about us. We occupy no special place in nature. We are deserving of no special moral consideration. Humanism is dead as a component of Western thought and anthropocentrism is a last vestige of bias and prejudice.

By no means has this movement away from anthropocentrism and humanism been unopposed in Western thought. There are voices out there arguing that we need to preserve an

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emphasis on human uniqueness and human superiority. Alan Wolfe, for instance, in The Human Difference, argues against what he calls the new antihumanistic cosmology and defends the distinctiveness of the human being. Similarly, in On Being and Becoming Human, Willard Gaylin argues that what we are witnessing is an assault on human dignity, “an assault on the singular worth of the human being, whose uniqueness is under attack.” Gaylin characterizes the human being as the noble discontinuity, emphasizing the gap between human beings and all other animals. As he notes, “We are not the next step, or even a giant leap forward. We are a parallel and independent entity; a thing unto ourselves…This being so, the preservation of this species, our species, is vital not only to our selfish ends but also to the preservation of something extraordinary and unique in nature.”

There is then a clear sense of conflict surrounding the question of the place and status of the human being in nature. And as we move into the 21st century this conflict is sure to become deeper and more pressing. As we advance in our understanding of nonhuman animal species we will perhaps learn more about ourselves. As we learn more about how the brain functions we may reach a point where some of those functions can be duplicated in machines. And as we spend more time in the company of machines, our own reflections on human nature are sure to change. Indeed, this has some theorists suggesting we are reaching a turning point in which the human will be superseded by the posthuman.

Consider in this regard the February, 2000 issue of Wired magazine, the magazine of and for the digerati, which features on its cover a photo of “cybernetics pioneer” Kevin Warwick, his shirt sleeve rolled up, as if ready for a fix. But in this case “the fix” is a superimposed x-ray image that discloses a glass-enclosed microchip surgically implanted in Warwick’s left arm. Warwick, the cover announces, is upgrading the human body—starting with himself. “Cyborg 1.0,” the accompanying article penned by Warwick, outlines his plan to become one with his computer. Writes Warwick: “I was born human. But this was an accident of fate—a condition merely of time and place. I believe it’s something we have the power to change. I will tell you why” (2000, 145). Warwick intends to implant a chip in his arm that will send signals back and forth between his nervous system and a computer. For Warwick, being human is merely an accident of time and place, an accident that given the right computing power and the right cybernetics, we might will be able to fix.

Two months later, Wired has had a change of heart—speaking only figuratively at this point in time. The cover of the April, 2000 edition features a crumpled page torn perhaps from a dictionary, maybe Webster’s Twenty-first Century Unabridged. On this discarded page we read: “human adj. 1. of, belonging to, or typical of the extinct species Homo sapiens <the human race> 2. what consisted of or was produced by Homo sapiens <human society> n. an extinct biped, Homo Sapiens, characterized by carbon-based anatomy; also HUMAN BEING.” Bill Joy, cofounder and Chief Scientist of Sun Microsystems, has been having second thoughts about the computer revolution and in his article “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us” explores how it is that “our most

powerful 21st-century technologies—robotics, genetic engineering, and nanotech—are threatening to make humans an endangered species” (2000, 238). It’s time, Joy thinks, to wake up and smell the Terminator.

In setting out to describe our current situation, it is clear that there is a widespread presumption that humanity is indeed at a turning point. Issuing from a variety of perspectives

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and motivated by a cross-section of theoretical concerns, comes the claim that especially owing to technological developments human beings are on the cusp of profound change. Consider, for instance, two diametrically opposed figures in the current debate regarding the future of humanity, Gregory Stock and Francis Fukuyama. Stock begins his largely approving discussion of human germline engineering, Redesigning Humans: Our Inevitable Genetic Future, by noting, “We know that Homo sapiens is not the final word in primate evolution, but few have yet grasped that we are on the cusp of profound biological change, poised to transcend our current form and character on a journey to destinations of new imagination” (2002, 1). While Fukuyama is best known for his critique of the

posthuman, he agrees with Stock that we are on the cusp of profound change: “we appear to be poised at the cusp of one of the most momentous periods of technological advance in history” (2002a, 5). The President’s Council on Bioethics voices a similar claim, quoting the National Science Foundation:

At this unique moment in the history of technical achievement, improvement of human performance becomes possible,” and such improvement, if pursued with vigor, “could achieve a golden age that would be a turning point for human productivity and quality of life. (Beyond Therapy 2003, 6 – 7)

Leon Kass, Chairman of the President’s Council, has often taken the lead in articulating similar claims that we are the verge of a profound transformation. As he writes in Life, Liberty and the Defense of Dignity,

Human nature itself lies on the operating table, ready for alteration, for eugenic and psychic “enhancement,” for wholesale re-design. In leading laboratories, academic and industrial, new creators are confidently amassing their powers and quietly honing their skills, while on the street their evangelists are zealously prophesying a posthuman future. (2003, 4)

In his Foreword to Beyond Therapy, Kass suggests that what is at stake in these discussions of our posthuman future is “the kind of human being and the sort of society we will be creating in the coming age of biotechnology” (2003, xvi). Indeed, this claim has now become quite commonplace, even more so if we take into consideration the many ways in which technology seems to be impacting our understanding of human nature, from biotechnology to digital technologies such as artificial intelligence, virtual reality, cybernetics, and robotics. In Radical Evolution: The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies—and What It Means to Be Human, Joel Garreau focuses on “the future of human nature” and explores the “biggest change in tens of thousands of years in what it means to be human” (2005, 3). Garreau’s discussion focuses on robotics, information science, nanotechnology, and genetics and ponders the question “will human nature itself change? Will we soon pass some point where we are so altered by our imaginations and inventions as to be unrecognizable to Shakespeare or the writers of the ancient Greek plays?” (2005, 21).

As with many of these accounts of the coming turning point, Garreau’s work draws on the notion of a coming Singularity, first popularized by Vernor Vinge and most recently the focus of Raymond Kurzweil’s book The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. In “The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era,” Vinge argues that, “we are on the edge of change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth.

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The precise cause of this change is the imminent creation by technology of entities with greater than human intelligence.” His claim has been taken up by technoenthusiasts such as Kurzweil, Hans Moravec, and the transhumanists. Indeed, the increasing integration of digital technologies in our lives has led many to argue that the once clear boundaries separating human beings from machines are disappearing and we are on the verge of a fundamental transformation in our understanding of what it means to be human. In The Mode of Information, Mark Poster suggests that “[a] symbiotic merger between human and machine might literally be occurring, one that threatens the stability of our sense of the boundary of the human body in the world. What may be happening is that human beings create computers and then computers create a new species of humans” (1990, 4). In The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age Allucquere Rosanne Stone suggests that we are in the midst of a paradigm shift from the mechanical age to the virtual age and we now inhabit the cyborg habitat of the technosocial, in which technology is viewed as natural and human nature becomes a cultural construct. The ubiquity of technology, Stone suggests, rearranges our thinking apparatus and calls into question “the structure of meaning production by which we recognize each other as human” (1995, 173). In The Age of Spiritual Machines, Ray Kurzweil argues, “the primary political and philosophical issue of the next century will be the definition of who we are” (1999, 2). Ed Regis explores our “transhuman, postbiological” future in Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition, suggesting that perhaps the human condition is a condition “to be gotten out of” (1990, 175). O. B. Hardison too suggests that the human being is flawed and that the relation between carbon man and our silicon devices is “like the relation between the caterpillar and the iridescent, winged creature that the caterpillar unconsciously prepares to become” (1989, 335).

There is widespread agreement, then, on the idea that human beings are fast approaching a turning point where we may cease to exist owing to the impact of technology on human nature. There is less agreement, however, regarding how we ought to respond to these technological developments. Returning briefly to our opening contrast between Warwick and Joy, we can read them as fairly paradigmatic of two contrasting, diametric responses to these issues raised by technology and the posthuman. Warwick approaches these issues with a sense of optimism and willing involvement. As he notes: “Since childhood I’ve been captivated by the study of robots and cyborgs. Now I’m in a position where I can actually become one. Each morning, I wake up champing at the bit, eager to set alight the 21st century—to change what it means to be human” (2000, 151). Warwick argues that it is completely natural for human beings to explore and change, that cybernetic technologies represent a natural development in our co-evolution with machines, and that our failure to advance along with our machines risks our survival.

Linking people via chip implants directly to those machines seems a natural progression, a potential way of harnessing machine intelligence by essentially creating superhumans. Otherwise, we’re doomed to a future in which intelligent machines rule and humans become second-class citizens. My project explores a middle ground that gives humans a chance to hand in there a bit longer. Right now, we’re moving toward a world where machines and humans remain distinct, but instead of just handing everything over to them, I offer a more gradual coevolution with computers. (2000, 151)

The Australian performance artist Stelarc, whose creations have long questioned the nature and limits of the human body, argues that we must adopt a posthuman philosophy of erasure in which we reconfigure notions of the body, evolution, and gender distinction as hybridities of human-machine. The body, Selarc writes, is obsolete in the current technological environment. Stelarc envisions a future in which technology “invades” the body, giving us the freedom to transcend the limitations of our DNA.

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It’s time to question whether a bipedal, breathing body with binocular vision and a 1,400 cc brain is an adequate biological form. It cannot cope with the quantity, complexity, and quality of information it has accumulated; it is intimidated by the precision, speed, and power of technology and it is biologically ill-equipped to cope with its new extraterrestrial environment. (1998, 117) Similar claims embracing and promoting the turning point made possible by technology are made by a number of enthusiasts for the posthuman, including Stock, the roboticist Hans Moravec, new age techno-enthusiasts such as the Extropians, and many others. Lest we get caught up in this wave of posthuman euphoria, however, we need only recall the (paradoxical?) sight of proto-cyborgs, their cell phones, palm pilots, pagers and other personal internet devices strapped to their sides, queuing up to see The Matrix, the latest in a long line of Hollywood films which pits humans against machines and imagines a future in which human beings become little more than battery packs for computers, who hold us hostage by generating a virtual reality twentieth century to preoccupy us and keep us busy while they feed off of our bodies’ electromagnetic energy. This is the concern given voice by Bill Joy, who worries that “our most powerful 21st-century technologies—robotics, genetic engineering, and nanotech—are threatening to make humans an endangered species” (2000, 238). Joy worries about the dehumanizing influences of this advancing technology.

But if we are downloaded into our technology, what are the chances that we will thereafter be ourselves or even human? It seems to me far more likely that a robotic existence would not be like a human one in any sense that we understand, that the robots would in no sense be our children, that on this path our humanity may well be lost. (2000, 244)

Joy’s perspective is shared by Joseph Weizenbaum who, in Computer Power and Human Reason, labels obscene any projects that propose to substitute a computer system for a human function that involves interpersonal respect, understanding, and love (1976, 269). Weizenbaum argues that there are important differences between humans and computers and we dehumanize human beings by adopting computers as a metaphor for understanding ourselves. Sven Birkerts agrees that we may be on the verge of species mutation but argues that this mutation pits technology against soul. “My use of soul is secular. I mean it to stand for inwardness, for that awareness we carry of ourselves as mysterious creatures at large in the universe. The soul is that part of us that smelts meaning and tries to derive a sense of purpose from experience” (1994, 212). Others, such as Stephen Talbott in The Future Does Not Compute, Alan Woolfe’s The Human Difference, Bill McKibben’s Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age, and Hubert and Stuart Dreyfus in Mind Over Machine, agree with Birkerts and Weizenbaum that the computer threatens what is most distinctive about humanity. Reflecting on genetic technology, Leon Kass agrees:

Here in consequence is the most pernicious result of our technological progress—more dehumanizing than any actual manipulation or technique, present or future: the erosion, perhaps the final erosion, of the idea of man as noble, dignified, precious, or godlike, and its replacement with a view of man, no less than of nature, as mere raw material for manipulation and homogenization. (2000)

Technologies from genetic engineering to artificial intelligence have wrought fundamental changes in our understanding of human nature. Indeed, technological developments have challenged much of our taken-for-granted knowledge about human nature and the future of the

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human species. At the close of the twentieth century, there is, as Scott Bukatman notes, “an uneasy but consistent sense of human obsolescence, and at stake is the very definition of the human.…[O]ur ontology is adrift” (1993, 20).

Should We Humans Worry?

Is this something to be overly worried about? Perhaps not. To an extent it is the way it has to be. We think about human nature in terms of the tools that we have at hand. Descartes compared human beings to the little mechanical toys that were common in Paris at the time he was writing. Freud compared the functioning of the human psyche to a steam locomotive. Some years ago it was common to think of the brain as a telephone switching network. Darwin drew much of his early inspiration from Victorian attitudes regarding domesticated animals. And our own thoughts on our relationship to animals may be shaped by our cultural attitudes towards house pets. We build our ideas about human nature with the cultural materials available. Perhaps in the future the terms of this discussion will change dramatically and our current set of metaphors and images will be replaced with a new set. The power of descriptions of human beings as complex machines, information processors, genetic survival machines, or nodes in a biotic network may fade.

In whatever terms we think about humans, animals, and machines, what will be important is that we guard against overly reductionistic and simplistic claims that can crop up on either side of this conflict. Ultimately, claims that we are our genes or that human beings are mere machines or mere animals are not informative and border on being caricatures.

Consider again the Time cover story “Can Animals Think?” with its provocative cover photo of chimp as thinker and its suggestion that perhaps chimpanzees contemplate the philosophical issues of their existence. While the cover of the magazine suggests a strong affirmative answer to the question it raises, the article itself suggests that animals’ abilities are very limited. In most language studies of primates, for instance, it is generally discovered that they have abilities the equivalent of your average 2 1/2-year old. Now that in itself is an interesting finding and we may achieve a greater respect for animals and some limited understanding of ourselves because of it. But it also suggests that the sweeping question, “can animals think?” is ultimately misleading and

poorly phrased. Arguments such as “animals are just like human beings because animals think too” or “animals are deserving of equal moral consideration because they feel pain just like human beings” ignore significant differences while forcing us to focus on poorly specified commonalities. Concentrating on the similarities to the exclusion of the differences can ultimately obscure more than it reveals. It is clear that we can learn much about human beings from our study of animals. That there are significant differences does not mean that animal comparisons are not meaningful. Furthermore, to say that we’re all just animals is to ignore what is unique about chimpanzees as much as it is to ignore what is unique about human beings. The important questions are not “are we similar?” or “are we different?” but in what ways might we be similar and in what ways might we be different and what is meaningful or significant about these differences and similarities. What we need are more precise claims that focus more tightly on particular aspects of both. Similar kinds of points are applicable to claims about machines and human beings. The claim that human being process information is ultimately not very informative. Seeing ourselves as machines may reveal certain things to us, but it may also obscure certain things. And at this moment in time it may be important and useful to maintain a vision of ourselves as distinct from machines.

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Similar points apply as well to arguments such as “humans are unique and therefore superior.” The claim “human beings possess unique and special properties” too is relatively uninformative. Which human beings are we talking about? Unique and special in regard to what? Which properties? And by virtue of what about the human being do we possess these properties? Simply saying that we are similar or different begs too many questions that we should insist be raised and answered.

It has been oft remarked that we are living in a fast paced world and the rate at which things change is sometimes disquieting. It is inevitable, perhaps, that in such a world, we will

be led to wonder about our place and role in it as human beings. And it is equally inevitable that we will be led to couch our investigations in terms of the tools at hand, the current set of metaphors, images, and theories that we find about us. In doing so, we may find some of our traditional beliefs challenged. We may also be challenged to discover new and better ways for thinking about our place in the world and our relationship to animals and machines. As we respond to these challenges, we need to keep one eye on those traditions that have shaped Western culture and one eye on the disciplines that are revolutionizing and upsetting these traditions. We should proceed slowly and cautiously, carefully examining the claims and arguments that are put forth. For much rides on this debate: our sense of being at home in

the world, having a place in the cosmos, and our relationship to our animal brethren and our machine creations.

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