body: an introduction

Body: An Introduction

California College of the Arts

April 2014

piero scaruffi

www.scaruffi.com

Piero Scaruffi

• Cultural Historian

• Cognitive Scientist

• Poet

• www.scaruffi.com

Demystifying Machine Intelligence (2013) A History of Silicon Valley (2011) Synthesis: Poems and Meditations (2010) A History of Rock and Dance Music (2009) A History of Jazz Music (2007) The Nature of Consciousness (2006)

Act 1.

THE PAST

What is it?

• Mummies

– The Egyptians dissected the dead, even

(especially) their kings and queens

– Figurative representation was approximate and

not as “immortal”

vs

2400 BC

What is it?

• Graecoroman sculpture: Accuracy of

exterior representation

Funerary stele of Hegeso (410 BC) Augustus (1st c AD)

What is it?

• Anatomy – Aelius Galenus/ Galen (Roman

Empire, 2nd century AD)

– Sushruta Samhita (India, 4th c AD)

– Ibn Sina Avicenna: “The Canon of

Medicine" (1025)

– Anatomy in 1500: still Galen’s

manual of the 2nd c AD!

What is it?

• A universal source of knowledge about the

human body: torture

– To extort information

– To punish (collectively)

– For fun: gladiators, Inquisition, French

Revolution, serial killers, etc but also…

children

What is it?

• Torture

What is it?

• Mondino de Luzzi’s “Anatomia” (1315):

the first manual on dissection (and first

public demonstration of human anatomy)

• Leonardo da Vinci (1510) compares

muscular structures in humans and

animals (unpublished in his lifetime)

10

What is it?

• Seeing inside the human body/ Medicine

– Paracelsus (16th c): “Opus Paragranum” (1530)

• Disease is caused by external agents and chemistry can be used to heal the body

• But also magic and astrology – “Man is a microcosm, or a little world, because he

is an extract from all the stars and planets of the whole firmament, from the earth and the elements; and so he is their quintessence.”

– Jean Fernel: “De Naturali Parte Medicinae” (1542)

• Medicine founded on science and not on superstition

What is it?

• Anatomy

– Vesalius: “De Humani Corporis

Fabrica” (1543)

• Dissection of human cadavers

• Scientific foundation of anatomy

• Refutation of traditional doctrines of

Galen

• First major book with engraved

illustrations

What is it?

• Charles Estienne’s “La dissection des parties

du corps humain” (1546)

What is it?

• Juan de Valverde’s “Anatomia del Corpo

Umano” (1560)

14

What is it?

• Seeing inside the human body/ Medicine

– Santorio’s “Ars de Medicina Statica” (1612)

– William Harvey explains the circulation of blood and that the heart is nothing but a pump, not the site of thought (1628)

– Thomas Willis’ “The Anatomy of the Brain and Nerves” (1664)

– Anton van Leuwenhock discovers spermatozoa (1677)

– Marcello Malpighi founds microscopic anatomy (17th c)

15

What is it?

• Rembrandt

Rembrandt: “The Anatomy Lesson of

Dr. Nicolaes Tulp” (1632)

Michiel Jansz van Mierevelt:

“Anatomy lesson of Dr. Willem

van der Meer” (1617)

Aert Pietersz: “Anatomical

Lesson of Doctor Sebastian

Egbertsz” (1603)

16

Astral Bodies

• Mikolaj Kopernik/ Nicolaus Copernicus

– Heliocentric theory (1530)

17

Astral Bodies

• The study of astral bodies – Galileo Galilei: the very far and very big and

the very near and very small

• Uses a telescope to document the

mountains of the Moon and the moons

of other planets (1610)

• Builds a microscope (1614)

18

Astral Bodies

• Telescope

– Probably invented in 1600 in Holland

– Transition from naked-eyed observation to device-

mediated observation

– The Church had no problem with Copernicus’

mathematical theory but has a problem with

Galileo peeking into God’s realm (the heavens)

– The telescope reveals many more stars that the

human eye cannot see

19

Astral Bodies

• Galileo’s microscope (4 years after the telescope) – In a letter dated October 4, 1624, Bartolomeo

Imperiali informs Galileo that a physician in Genoa "says that with this occhialino we will know for sure the site of a certain tiny particle of the heart, which it has never been possible to see with simple vision, and which will show itself to be a thing of great consequence for medicine ...".

– The first iconographic document realized with the aid of the microscope is printed in Rome, a gift from the Accademia dei Lincei to Pope Urbano VIII, the Melissographia (1625), presenting the observations of a bee conducted by Francesco Stelluti

Stelluti’s plate as engraved by Matthaus Greuter (1630)

20

Astral Bodies • Microscope

– Robert Hooke’s “Micrographia” (1665): the cell

– Anton van Leeuwenhock sees and proves the

existence of microorganisms (1674)

Hooke’s microscope

21

Astral Bodies

• The study of astral bodies

– Greeks: The behavior of Nature can be explained (intuitive explanations)

– Aristoteles: Motion is the basis of the explanation

– Kopernik: The explanation must be simple

– Galileo (1632): Any explanation is good if it satisfies an experimental test ,i.e. provides correct predictions (non-intuitive explanations are acceptable)

– Isaac Newton (1687): The world is a machine

22

Human and Astral Bodies

• What anatomy and astronomy had in

common

– The Council of Tours (1163) bans

dissection of cadavers

– The “Index Expurgatorius” (1559)

bans three quarters of the books

printed in Europe (including

Copernicus and Galileo)

23

Where is it?

• Michelangelo: The Sistine Chapel ceiling

(1512)

– Bodies in celestial cartography

24

Where is it? • Sebastian Münster’ “Cosmographia” (1544)

– Earliest German description of the world

– Much more successful than Copernicus’ book

– Spawned revival of geography

25

Where is it?

• Cartography

– Abraham Ortelius/Wortels (1570):

"Theatrum Orbis Terrarum/

Theatre of the World": first atlas of

the world

– Gerardus Mercator (1567):

Rumold's world map, drawn in

1587 after his father's map of ‘67

26

Where is it?

• Francesco Carletti (1594)

– First tourist to travel around the world

– Leaves for slave-trading expedition to Cape Verde

– Boards Spanish ship to Panama

– Colombia and Peru

– Crosses Mexico to Acapulco

– Ship to Philippines

– Visits Japan

– Boards Portuguese ship from Macao to Goa

– Boards Portuguese ship from Goa to Lisbon

– Robbed by pirates in St Helen

– Returns home after eight years

27

What does it do?

28

What does it do?

• Base 10 and decimals

– Babylonians: base 60 (sexagesimals)

– Francois Viete: "Canon-mathematicus" (France,

1579)

– Simon Stevin: "De Thiende" (Nethelands, 1585)

– John Napier (Scotland, 1617): modern decimals

(eg, 3.24)

29

What does it do?

• Infinites and infinitesimals

– If a line segment is composed of an infinite number of zero-width infinitesimal points, how does it have a finite length?

– Bonaventura Cavalieri: "Geometria indivisibilibus continuorum nova quadam ratione promota" (1635)

– Galileo Galilei: "Discorsi e dimostrazioni matematiche intorno a due nuove scienze" (1638)

– Evangelista Torricelli: "Opera Geometrica" (1644)

30

What does it do?

• What infinitesimals has in common with anatomy

– The Jesuits ban infinitesimals in Italy

– John Wallis: “Arithmetica Infinitorum” (1656)

• the symbol for infinity:

31

What does it do?

• Mechanical calculators

– Wilhelm Schickard: the first mechanical calculating

machine (1620)

(Computer History Museum, Mountain View)

32

What does it do?


– William Oughtre: the slide rule, a mechanical analog

computer (1622)

(Computer History Museum, Mountain View)

33

What does it do?


– Blaise Pascal: a mechanical adding machine (1642)

Pascal's "Calculating Machine" (1642)

(Museum of Science, London)

34

What does it do?

• René Descartes (1644)

– Equivalence between living and non-living

matter

– Animals are machines

– Everything material can be reduced to

mechanics

– Human bodies are machines too but the soul

is not

Jacques de Vaucanson:

The Canard Digérateur, an automaton (1739)

35

What does it do?

• Julien Offray de LaMettrie (1748)

– Organisms are machines

– Man is an animal

– The mind is a machine

36

What does it do?

• Pierre Jaquet-Droz (1774): automata

Musée d'Art et d'Histoire, Neuchâtel, Switzerland

Body

• Mapping of the human body

– Astronomy (astral bodies)

• Scientific revolution, industrial revolution, etc

– Cartography (places for the body)

• Exploration, colonialism, etc

– Calculators and automata (mechanical bodies)

• Computers, robots, etc

Act 2.

THE PRESENT

What is it?

• Anatomy

– Europe, 18th century: Dramatic increase in demand for

cadavers, esp Italy

– Britain, 1832: The “Anatomy Act” to regulate

dissections

– Henry Gray: “Gray's Anatomy” (1858)

– …

– MRI (Raymond Damadian, 1972) and CAT Scanning

(Godfrey Hounsfield and Allan Cormack, 1972)

Where does it come from?

• Proteins are the molecules that carry out all the work in your body

• Proteins are made up of amino acids (250 on average), and fold up into a 3D shape that allows it to carry out a specific function

• Proteins fold themselves quickly and properly into a 3D structure with no help from any hardware

• We can’t predict from the amino acid sequence how the corresponding protein will fold

Where does it come from?

• Embryo development

– The ability of embryonic stem cells to differentiate into different types of cells with different functions is regulated and maintained by a complex series of chemical interactions

Maintenance

• Medicine, pharmaceuticals,

surgery, prosthetics…

• The gym

Other Bodies: Sensory Exotica

• The bat can avoid objects in absolute

darkness at impressive speeds and even

capture flying insects

• Dolphins generate their sonar calls also

through their nose, besides their larynx

• Migratory animals (birds, salmons, whales…)

can orient themselves and navigate vast

territories without any help from maps

• Butterflies take more than a generation to

complete the journey, i.e. those who begin

the journey are not the ones that reach the

destination

Other Bodies: Sensory Exotica

• Birds are equipped with a sixth sense for the

Earth's magnetic field

• Bees know where the Sun is even when they

cannot see it because their eyes can see

ultraviolet sunlight

• Many animals can camouflage

• Some fish emit electrical current

• Cephalopods can even change body shape

Where does it end?

• James Jerome Gibson (1966)

– Bodies pick up information that is

available in the environment

– Bodies are vehicles for the continuous

energy flow of the environment

Where does it end?

• Humberto Maturana (1970)

– Bodies are units of interaction

– “Autopoiesis“, the process by which an

organism continuously reorganizes its

own structure

Where does it end?

• Francisco Varela (1979)

– Cognition is embodied action (or "enaction")

Where does it end?

• Richard Dawkins: The extended

phenotype (1982)

– The body alone does not have

biological relevance

– The control of a body is never

complete inside and null outside

– The “body" must include more than

just the body, something that extends

beyond its skin

Where does it end?

• Richard Gregory (1981)

– A human is both a tool-user and a tool-

maker

– Tools are extensions of the body

– There are "hand" tools (such as level,

pick, axe, wheel, etc) and "mind" tools,

which help measuring, calculating and

thinking (such as language, writing,

counting)

Where does it end?

• Artificial Intelligence

– Disembodied reasoning

The “Turing test”: a computer can be said to be intelligent if its

answers are indistinguishable from the answers of a human

being

? ?

Where does it end?

• Rodney Brooks (1986)

– Robot = situated agent

– The world contains all the information that the

body needs

– The environment acts like a memory external to

the organism, from which the organism can

retrieve any kind of information through perception

– Cognition is rational kinematics

– Every intelligent being has a body!

Endosymbiosis

• The problem:

– Darwinian variation alone is hardly capable of accounting for the extraordinarily complex assembly of a new organism

– Gould’s punctuated equilibrium is hard to explain if the forces at work are linear

– Lateral gene transfer: genes are passed not only vertically from generation to generation but also horizontally from one species to another (e.g., eukaryotes evolved from archaea but with a little help from bacteria)

Endosymbiosis

• The solution:

– Structural coupling creates more and more complex organisms

– Humberto Maturana: "autopoiesis” is a process to generate progressively more and more complex organisms

– Ben Goertzel (1993): organisms capable of effectively coupling with other organisms are more likely to survive

– Darwinian evolution can occur much faster and can exhibit sudden jumps to higher forms

– Organisms are composites

Endosymbiosis

• Konstantin Merezhkovsky (1909): symbiogenesis

– One fateful day a mycoid managed to become

the nucleus of an ameboid rather than its meal

• Ivan Wallin (1927): endosymbiosis

– Bacteria may represent the fundamental cause

of the "origin of species"

Endosymbiosis

• Lynn Margulis (1966):

– Mitochondria (that generate the energy required for metabolism in humans) look like bacteria

– Mitochondria have their own DNA, separate from the DNA of the cell

– Chloroplasts (that carry out photosynthesis in plant cells) look like bacteria

– Bacteria can trade genes

– Bacteria can reproduce at amazing rates

– Endosymbiosis of bacteria is responsible for the creation of complex forms of life

– Our multicellular bodies are amalgams of several different strains of bacteria

Endosymbiosis

• A world of bacteria

– Life can be viewed as a plan for bacteria to exist forever

– The biosphere is controlled mostly by bacteria

– The biosphere is "their" environment, not ours

– Even the geology of our planet is due to the work of bacteria (shaped by the work of bacteria over million of years)

– We are allowed to live in it, thanks to the work of bacteria, which maintain the proper balance of chemicals in the air

Endosymbiosis

• A world of bacteria

– More than 90% of the cells that make up the human body are not human: they are bacteria

– Commensal bacteria are vitally important for our survival

– There are more than 1000 species of bacteria in the human digestive system alone (and many more in the respiratory system, in the urogenital tract, on the skin, etc)

– We are a superorganism, or, at least, a walking and thinking ecosystem

Superbeings

• Collective beings

– Single-celled bacteria form large colonies in countless ecosystems, particularly visible in seaside locations.

– Soil amoebae join together in one huge organism that can react quickly to light and temperature to find food supplies.

– Sponges are actually collections of single-celled organisms held together by skeletons of minerals

– Ants and bees show that the difference between a multi-cellular organism and a society of organisms resides only in the type of internal communication

Superbeings


– Karl Von Frisch (1967)

• The individual is an oxymoron: a bee cannot exist

without the rest of the colony

• The colony, on the other hand, constitutes a

complex and precise self-regulating system

• The hive exhibits a personality, the individual is

totally anonymous

Superbeings


– Lewis Thomas (1974)

• "I have been trying to think of the earth as a

single organism, but…I cannot think of it this

way. It is too big, too complex, with too many

working parts….it is most like a single cell.“

Superbeings

• Guy Murchie (1978)

– The entire Earth is an organism which uses as food the heat of the sun, breathes, metabolizes

– All living organisms, along with all the minerals on the surface of the Earth, compose one giant integrated system that, as a whole, controls its behavior so as to survive

– And so do galaxies

– Everything constitutes a living superbeing

• James Lovelock (1979): Gaia

– The entire surface of the Earth, including "inanimate" matter, is a living being

Superbeings

• Vladimir Vernadsk (1926)

– "Noosphere“: the Earth is developing its own

mind, the "noosphere", the aggregation of the

cognitive activity of all its living matter.

Identity

• There are ~100 trillion cells in your body

(of which 100 billion neurons)

• The intelligence of the body: It builds

itself from 1 cell into 100 trillion cells in 9

months, and it rebuilds 98% of itself in

less than a year

Identity

• Your body is younger than you think: the

average age of all the cells in an adult's

body is 7 to 10 years (Jonas Frisen,

2005)

• Every year about 98% of the atoms in

your body are replaced

• You are physically someone else

Identity

• There are 10 times more bacterial cells in your body

than human cells (bacteria are far smaller than

human cells) - 500 species in the intestine alone

(Human Microbiome Project, 2012)

• Where they came from: your mother's uterus, your

mother’s milk, natural water, food, air…

• What they do: help your immune systems and your

digestion (“commensal bacteria”)

• “Human bodies are an assemblage of life-forms living

together” (David Relman)

A tool to communicate

• Body in visual arts



Yayoi Kusama

Botticelli



Monywa, Myanmar

Sanjusangendo, Kyoto, Japan

Da Fo,

China


• Body in performing arts

A tool to communicate • Ray Birdwhistell (1952)

– “Kinesics”, paralinguistic body communication,

such as facial expression

– All movements of the body have some kind of

meaning

– Non-verbal behavior obeys its own grammar, with

a "kineme" being the kinesic equivalent of the

phoneme.

(Julia Woods, 2012)


• Sport

Nadia Comaneci

Martina Navratilova

Pele

Eddy Merckx

Haile Gebrselassie

Yang Wei

Act 3.

THE FUTURE

The future of Body

• Prostheses

• Cyborgs

• Biotech

• Robots

A Brief History of Bionic Beings

1957: The first electrical implant in an ear (André Djourno and Charles Eyriès)

1961: William House invents the "cochlear implant", an electronic implant that sends signals from the ear directly to the auditory nerve (as opposed to hearing aids that simply amplify the sound in the ear)

1952: Jose Delgado publishes the first paper on implanting electrodes into human brains: "Permanent Implantation of Multi-lead Electrodes in the Brain"

1965 : Jose Delgado controls a bull via a remote device, injecting fear at will into the beast's brain

1969: Jose Delgado’s book "Physical Control of the Mind - Toward a Psychocivilized Society"

1969: Jose Delgado implants devices in the brain of a monkey and then sends signals in response to the brain's activity, thus creating the first bidirectional brain-machine-brain interface.

A Brief History of Bionics

Jose Delgado


1997: Remotely controlled

cockroaches at Univ of Tokyo

1998: Philip Kennedy develops a

brain implant that can capture

the "will" of a paralyzed man to

move an arm (output

neuroprosthetics: getting data

out of the brain into a machine)


2000: William Dobelle develops an implanted vision system that allows blind people to see outlines of the scene. His patients Jens Naumann and Cheri Robertson become "bionic" celebrities.

2002: John Chapin debuts the "roborats", rats whose brains are fed electrical signals via a remote computer to guide their movements


2002: Miguel Nicolelis makes a monkey's brain control a robot's arm via an implanted microchip

2005: Cathy Hutchinson, a paralyzed woman, receives a brain implant from John Donoghue's team that allows her to operate a robotic arm (output neuroprosthetics)

2004: Theodore Berger demonstrates a hippocampal prosthesis that can provide the long-term-memory function lost by a damaged hippocampus

A Brief History of Bionics The age of two-way neural transmission…

2006: The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) asks scientists to submit "innovative proposals to develop technology to create insect-cyborgs

2013: Miguel Nicolelis makes two rats communicate by capturing the "thoughts" of one rat's brain and sending them to the other rat's brain over the Internet

A Brief History of Bionics The age of two-way neural

transmission…

2013: Rajesh Rao and Andrea Stocco devise a way to send a brain signal from Rao's brain to Stocco's hand over the Internet, i.e. Rao makes Stocco's hand move, the first time that a human controls the body part of another human

2014: An amputee, Dennis Aabo, receives an artificial hand from Silvestro Micera's team capable of sending electrical signals to the nervous system so as to create the touch sensation


Neuro-engineering?

(http://targetedindividualscanada.com) (http://its-interesting.com)


The future of your brain is coming faster

than your brain can think…

A Brief (literary) History of Cyborgs

Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline: "Cyborgs and

Space" (1960)

George Martin: "Brief Proposal on Immortality"

(1971), i.e. mind uploading

Donna Haraway: "A Cyborg Manifesto" (1985)

Fereidoun Esfandiary: "Are You a Transhuman?"

(1989)

Biotech

• 1990: William French Anderson performs the first procedure of gene therapy

• 1997: Ian Wilmut clones the first mammal, the sheep Dolly

• 2010: Craig Venter and Hamilton Smith reprogram a bacterium's DNA

• 2012: Markus Covert simulates an entire living organism in software (Mycoplasma Genitalium)

• Personal genomics

Meditation

• Is it “murder” if someone kills your clone?

You are still alive, after all.

Robots

Robots

• Stats

Robots

1962: Joseph Engelberger deploys

the industrial robot Unimate at

General Motors

1969: Stanford Research Institute's

Shakey the Robot

Robots

• Valentino Breitenberg’s “vehicles” (1984)

– Vehicle 1: a motor and a sensor

– Vehicle 2: two motors and two sensors

– Increase little by little the circuitry, and these

vehicles seem to acquire not only new skills,

but also a personality.

Robots 2000: Cynthia Breazeal's emotional robot, "Kismet"

2003: Hiroshi Ishiguro's Actroid, a young woman

Robots 2004: Mark Tilden's biomorphic robot Robosapien

2005: Honda's humanoid robot "Asimo"

Asimo over the years

Robots Special purpose robots:

2001: NEC PaPeRo (a social robot targeting children)

2005: Toyota's Partner (designed for assistance and elderly

care applications)

2007: RobotCub Consortium aggreement, the iCub (for

research in embodied cognition)

2008: Aldebaran Robotics' Nao (for research and education)

2010: NASA's Robonaut-2 (for exploration)

Robots 2005: Boston Dynamics' quadruped robot "BigDog"

2008: Nexi (MIT Media Lab), a mobile-dexterous-social robot

2010: Lola Canamero's Nao, a robot that can show its

emotions

2011: Osamu Hasegawa's SOINN-based robot that learns

functions it was not programmed to do

2012: Rodney Brooks' hand programmable robot "Baxter"

Robots

• Rod Brooks/ Rethink Robotics (2012)

– Vision to locate and grasp objects

– Can be taught to perform new tasks by moving its

arms in the desired sequence

Robots

• Stats

Case study: Japan

Takayama Festival of Mechanical Puppets

Case study: Japan

• Joruri/ puppet theater (~1650)

• “Automated mechanisms, or karakuri, were originally

separate from the puppets, used only in stage machinery or

in robot dolls that performed between acts. But the

machinery eventually found its way into the bodies of the

puppets” (Chris Bolton)

Case study: Japan

• What sense does it make for a puppet to put on a

God-like mask?

Case study: Japan

• Oriza Hirata’s robot theater

“I, Worker” (2008)

“Sayonara” (2010)

Case study: Japan

• Oriza Hirata’s robot theater

– Actors have always been robots: they repeat

sentences they memorized, they repeat

movements they were taught

– What is unusual is not that a robot would be an

actor, but that a human would do such a robotic

thing as to be an actor

Case study: Japan

• Why build “domestic” robots?

– Xenophobia: instead of importing foreign

workers, let’s build more Japanese people

– Shinto: animism

– Note: in the USA most of the advanced robots

are for military use and industrial automation

(war and productivity)

Case study: Japan • The uncanny valley

– Ernst Jentsch: “On the Psychology of the Uncanny” (1906)

– Masahiro Mori: “The Uncanny Valley” (1970)

Case study: Japan

• The uncanny valley

– Japanese robots tend to be female because they

look less threatening

Case study: Japan

• What remains after all human skills have been

downloaded into a machine?

• Are we just sophisticated automata?

– Evolution designed us to survive in the environment

– DNA programs our lives, even our diseases

– Neurons react to external stimuli and direct our actions

– Memes invade our minds and steer our thoughts

Case study: Japan

• Bibliography

– Christopher Bolton: “From Wooden Cyborgs to Celluloid Souls: Mechanical Bodies in Anime and Japanese Puppet Theater” (2002)

– Timothy Hornyak: “Loving the Machine: The Art and Science of Japanese Robots” (2006)

– Marina Warner: “Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors, and Media into the Twenty-first Century” (2006)

– Jennifer Parker: “Cyborg Theatre: Corporeal-Technological Intersections in Multimedia Performance” (2011)

– Kara Reilly: “Automata and Mimesis on the Stage of Theatre History” (2011)

– Jennifer Robertson: “Robo Sapiens Japanicus” (2007)

107

Case study: Japan

• Painting

– Makoto Aida (1965, Japan)

“Picture of Waterfall” (2010)

"A Path Between Rice Fields"" (1991)

108

Case study: Japan

• Painting


“The Giant Member Fuji Vs King Gidora” (1992)

"Harakiri School Girls" (2002)

109

The Age of Globalization

• Painting


"Ash Color Mountains" (2011)

110

The Age of Globalization

• Painting


“Blender" (2001)

The future of Body

• No body?

– We spend an increasing amount of time in a

disembodied virtual world of emails, websites,

social media and even e-learning

The future of Body

• Meditation:

– The longest living bodies on the planet have no

brain: bacteria and trees.

Body

piero scaruffi

www.scaruffi.com

body: an introduction

Education