Andy Clark. Natural-Born Cyborgs. Ch2 Pt1 ‘Heavy Metal’

summary by Corry Shores
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Andy Clark

Natural-Born Cyborgs:
Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence

Chapter 2:
Technologies to Bond With

Part  1:
Heavy Metal

Brief Summary:

There are certain tools and technologies that we have incorporated so much into our behaviors that we cease noticing them. They have become so much a part of our operations and functioning that they no longer seem like external objects, but instead seem internal to our biological workings and structure. Other technologies that have not integrated so well are opaque, because they are noticeably exterior to ourselves. Our body can extend itself into the transparent technologies that we have assimilated with.

Summary

 

Clark recounts a visit to Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. Its underground facilities were sturdily built for the heavier machinery of older technology, like giant mainframe computers, but is now sparsely populated with laptops. There is also stores of old pieces of equipment arranged in compartments like in a hardware store. “What we have here is an elephant’s graveyard of Un-transparent, In-Your-Face Technology.” (Clark 36) What is remarkable about the computing equipment is how foreign it seems to human biology: “Heavy, enormous, almost maximally resistant to easy human use, such technologies ran little risk of blurring the boundaries between machine and human, between biological user and technological tool.” (36)

Clark then goes on to distinguish two types of technology: transparent and opaque technologies.

Opaque technology:

a) An opaque technology “is one that keeps tripping the user up, requires skills and capacities that do not come naturally to the biological organism, and thus remains the focus of attention even during routine problem-solving activity.” (37)
b) ‘Opaque’ does not here mean ‘hard to understand’; rather it means more ‘highly visible in use.’ We may not understand how our hippocampus works, but its workings are transparent to us. However, we can know exactly how our computer works, and still “it keeps crashing and getting in the way of what I want to do.” (37)

c) There is a sharp distinction between user and tool in opaque technologies. And “The user’s ongoing problem is to successfully deploy and control the tool.” (37)

Transparent technology:

a) A transparent technology is “so well fitted to, and integrated with, our own lives, biological capacities, and projects as to become […] almost invisible in use.” (37)

b) There is no sharp contrast between user and tool in transparent technologies.

By contrast, once a technology is transparent, the conscious agent literally | sees through the tool and directly confronts the real problem at hand. The accomplished writer, armed with pen and paper, usually pays no heed to the pen and paper tools while attempting to create an essay or a poem. They have become transparent equipment, tools whose use and functioning have become so deeply dovetailed to the biological system that there is a very real sense in which—while they are up and running—the problemsolving system just is the composite of the biological system and these nonbiological tools. The artist’s sketch pad and the blind person’s cane can come to function as transparent equipment, as may certain well-used and well-integrated items of higher technology, a teenager’s cell phone perhaps. Sports equipment and musical instruments often fall into the same broad category. (37-38, emphases mine)

Although it is not always obvious when a tool has become transparent, certain items are better candidates for opacity or transparency than other are. (38)

Further Discussion:
Merleau-Ponty and the Blind Man’s Cane

Merleau-Ponty also uses the example of the blind man integrating the cane into his motor behaviors. We raise this parallel, because we are interested in the nature of the synthesis involved in extended mind / extended embodiment. For Merleau-Ponty, this is an example of the “extension of the bodily synthesis.” (Merleau-Ponty 176) There is an “organic relationship between subject and world” (176).

The blind man’s stick has ceased to be an object for him, and is no longer perceived for itself; its point has become an area of sensitivity, extending the scope and active radius of touch, and providing a parallel to sight. (165)

To get used to a hat, a car or a stick is to be transplanted into them, or conversely, to incorporate them into the bulk of our own body. (166)

The pressures on the hand and the stick are no longer given; the stick is no longer an object perceived by the blind man, but an instrument with which he perceives. It is a bodily auxiliary, an extension of the bodily synthesis.  (176)

[…] the organic relationship between subject and world, the active transcendence of consciousness, the momentum which carries it into a thing and into a world by means of its organs and instruments. (176)

Recall also Clark’s and Chalmer’s discussion of vision when discussing extended couplings of our perceptual systems.

Our visual systems have evolved to rely on their environment in various ways: they exploit contingent facts about the structure of natural scenes (e.g. Ullman and Richards 1984), for example, and they take advantage of the computational shortcuts afforded by bodily motion and locomotion (e.g. Blake and Yuille, 1992). (Clark and Chalmers 9, boldface mine)

Merleau-Ponty speaks in a similar way. But in this case our vision is like the extension that lets us feel the surfaces of world through seeing.

In the gaze we have at our disposal a natural instrument analogous to the blind man’s stick. The gaze gets more or less from things according to the way in which it questions them, ranges over or dwells on them. To learn to see colours it is to acquire a certain style of seeing, a new use of one’s own body: it is to enrich and recast the body image. (177)

For Merleau-Ponty, the blind man’s use of the stick is an instance not only of him extending his tactile perceptions outside its normal limitations of the perimeter of his body, but it is also what extends him into the world around him. This is a matter both of integrating with the tool, and thereby integrating with the world. This is an assimilative and integrational synthesis. [See this entry for a comparison with Deleuze’s non-assimilative, non-integrational sense of the body.] It seems as well that for Clark (and for Clark’s and Chalmer’s extended mind hypothesis) the process of a tool becoming transparent is a matter of it assimilating into our bodily and cognitive functioning (in the case of thinking tools like calculators). The question we pose is, what is more interesting for an analysis of body-extending enhancement technologies, the process of assimilation where the tool becomes transparent, or instead the initial moment of contact where opacity is at its greatest? Now, why might the latter case be more interesting? Because this is where the body-enhancing extensions originate, in a mechanically operative contact of the greatest synthetic disjunction.

Below are larger selections from the Merleau-Ponty quotes:

The acquisition of habit as a rearrangement and renewal of the corporeal schema presents great difficulties to traditional philosophies, which are always inclined to conceive synthesis as intellectual synthesis. It is quite true that what brings together, in habit, component actions, reactions and ‘stimuli’ is not some external process of association. [ft104] Any mechanistic theory runs up against the fact that the learning process is systematic; the subject does not weld together individual movements and individual stimuli but acquires the power to respond with a certain type of solution to situations of a certain general form. The situations may differ widely from case to case, and the response movements may be entrusted sometimes to one operative organ, [p.164 | p.165] sometimes to another, both situations and responses in the various cases having in common not so much a partial identity of elements as a shared meaning. Must we then see the origin of habit in an act of understanding which organizes the elements only to withdraw subsequently? [ft.105] For example, is it not the case that forming the habit of dancing is discovering, by analysis, the formula of the movement in question, and then reconstructing it on the basis of the ideal outline by the use of previously acquired movements, those of walking and running? But before the formula of the new dance can incorporate certain elements of general motility, it must first have had, as it were, the stamp of movement set upon it. As has often been said, it is the body which ‘catches’ (kapiert) and ‘comprehends’ movement. The acquisition of a habit is indeed the grasping of a significance, but it is the motor grasping of a motor significance. Now what precisely does this mean? A woman may, without any calculation, keep a safe distance between the feather in her hat and things which might break it off. She feels where the feather is just as we feel where our hand is. [ft.106] If I am in the habit of driving a car, I enter a narrow opening and see that I can ‘get through’ without comparing the width of the opening with that of the wings, just as I go through a doorway without checking the width of the doorway against that of my body. [ft.107] The hat and the car have ceased to be objects with a size and volume which is established by comparison with other objects. They have become potentialities of volume, the demand for a certain amount of free space. In the same way the iron gate to the Underground platform, and the road, have become restrictive potentialities and immediately appear passable or impassable for my body with its adjuncts. The blind man’s stick has ceased to be an object for him, and is no longer perceived for itself; its point has become an area of sensitivity, extending the scope and active radius of touch, and providing a parallel to sight. In the exploration of things, the length of the stick does not enter expressly as a middle term: the blind man is rather aware of it through the position of objects [p.165 | p.166] than of the position of objects through it. The position of things is immediately given through the extent of the reach which carries him to it, which comprises besides the arm’s own reach the stick’s range of action. If I want to get used to a stick, I try it by touching a few things with it, and eventually I have it ‘well in hand’, I can see what things are ‘within reach’ or out of reach of my stick. There is no question here of any quick estimate or any comparison between the objective length of the stick and the objective distance away of the goal to be reached. The points in space do not stand out as objective positions in relation to the objective position occupied by our body; they mark, in our vicinity, the varying range of our aims and our gestures. To get used to a hat, a car or a stick is to be transplanted into them, or conversely, to incorporate them into the bulk of our own body. Habit expresses our power of dilating our being-in-the-world, or changing our existence by appropriating fresh instruments. [ft.108] It is possible to know how to type without being able to say where the letters which make the words are to be found on the banks of keys. To know how to type is not, then, to know the place of each letter among the keys, nor even to have acquired a conditioned reflex for each one, which is set in motion by the letter as it comes before our eye. If habit is neither a form of knowledge nor an involuntary action, what then is it? It is knowledge in the hands, which is forthcoming only when bodily effort is made, and cannot be formulated in detachment from that effort. The subject knows where the letters are on the typewriter as we know where one of our limbs is, through a knowledge bred of familiarity which does not give us a position in objective space. The movement of her fingers is not presented to the typist as a path through space which can be described, but merely as a certain adjustment of motility, physiognomically distinguishable from any other. The question is often framed as if the perception of a letter written on paper aroused the representation of the same letter which in turn aroused the representation of the movement needed to strike it on the machine. But [p. 166 | p.167] this is mythological language. When I run my eyes over the text set before me, there do not occur perceptions which stir up representations, but patterns are formed as I look, and these are endowed with a typical or familiar physiognomy. When I sit at my typewriter, a motor space opens up beneath my hands, in which I am about to ‘play’ what I have read. The reading of the word is a modulation of visible space, the performance of the movement is a modulation of manual space, and the whole question is how a cretin physiognomy of ‘visual’ patterns can evoke a certain type of motor response, how each ‘visual’ structure eventually provides itself with its mobile essence without there being any need to spell the word or specify the movement in detail in order to translate one into the other. But this power of habit is no different from the general one which we exercise over our body: if I am ordered to touch my ear or my knee, I move my hand to my ear or my knee by the shortest route, without having to think of the initial position of my hand, or that of my ear, or the path between them. We said earlier that it is the body which ‘understands’ in the acquisition of habit. This way of putting it will appear absurd, if understanding is subsuming a sensedatum under an idea, and if the body is an object. But the phenomenon of habit is just what prompts us to revise our notion of ‘understand’ and our notion of the body. To understand is to experience the harmony between what we aim at and what is given, between the intention and the performance—and the body is our anchorage in a world. When I put my hand to my knee, I experience at every stage of the movement the fulfilment of an intention which was not directed at my knee as an idea or even as an object, but as a present and real part of my living body, that is, finally, as a stage in my perpetual movement towards a world. When the typist performs the necessary movements on the typewriter, these movements are governed by an intention, but the intention does not posit the keys as objective locations. It is literally true that the subject who learns to type incorporates the key-bank space into his bodily space. (164-167)

Just as we saw earlier that motor habit threw light on the particular nature of bodily space, so here habit in general enables us to understand the general synthesis of one’s own body. And, just as the analysis of bodily spatiality foreshadowed that of the unity of one’s own body, so we may extend to all habits what we have said about motor ones. In fact every habit is both motor and perceptual, because it lies, as we have said, between explicit perception and actual movement, in the basic function which sets boundaries to our field of vision and our field of action. Learning to find one’s way among things with a stick, which we gave a little earlier as an example of motor habit, is equally an example of perceptual habit. Once the stick has become a familiar instrument, [p.175 | p.176] the world of feelable things recedes and now begins, not at the outer skin of the hand, but at the end of the stick. One is tempted to say that through the sensations produced by the pressure of the stick on the hand, the blind man builds up the stick along with its various positions, and that the latter then mediate a second order object, the external thing. It would appear in this case that perception is always a reading off from the same sensory data, but constantly accelerated, and operating with ever more attenuated signals. But habit does not consist in interpreting the pressures of the stick on the hand as indications of certain positions of the stick, and these as signs of an external object, since it relieves us of the necessity of doing so. The pressures on the hand and the stick are no longer given; the stick is no longer an object perceived by the blind man, but an instrument with which he perceives. It is a bodily auxiliary, an extension of the bodily synthesis. Correspondingly, the external object is not the geometrized projection or invariant of a set of perspectives, but something towards which the stick leads us and the perspectives of which, according to perceptual evidence are not signs, but aspects. Intellectualism cannot conceive any passage from the perspective to the thing itself, or from sign to significance otherwise than as an interpretation, an apperception, a cognitive intention. According to this view sensory data and perspectives are at each level contents grasped as (aufgefasst als) manifestations of one and the same intelligible core. [ft.9] But this analysis distorts both the sign and the meaning: it separates out, by a process of objectification of both, the sensecontent, which is already ‘pregnant’ with a meaning, and the invariant core, which is not a law but a thing; it conceals the organic relationship between subject and world, the active transcendence of consciousness, the momentum which carries it into a thing and into a world by means of its organs and instruments. The analysis of motor habit as an extension of existence leads on, then, to an analysis of perceptual habit as the coming into possession of a world. Conversely, every perceptual habit [p.176 | p.177] is still a motor habit and here equally the process of grasping a meaning is performed by the body. When a child grows accustomed to distinguishing blue from red, it is observed, that the habit cultivated in relation to these two colours helps with the rest. [ft.10] Is it, then, the case that through the pair blue-red the child has perceived the meaning; ‘colour’? Is the crucial moment of habit-formation in that coming to awareness that arrival at a ‘point of view of colour’, that intellectual analysis which subsumes the data under one category? But for the child to be able to perceive blue and red under the category of colour, the category must be rooted in the data, otherwise no subsumption could recognize it in them. It is necessary that, on the ‘blue’ and ‘red’ panels presented to him the particular kind of vibration and impression on the eye known as blue and red should be represented. In the gaze we have at our disposal a natural instrument analogous to the blind man’s stick. The gaze gets more or less from things according to the way in which it questions them, ranges over or dwells on them. To learn to see colours it is to acquire a certain style of seeing, a new use of one’s own body: it is to enrich and recast the body image. Whether a system of motor or perceptual powers, our body is not an object for an ‘I think’, it is a grouping of lived-through meanings which moves towards its equilibrium. Sometimes a new cluster of meanings is formed; our former movements are integrated into a fresh motor entity, the first visual data into a fresh sensory entity, our natural powers suddenly come together in a richer meaning, which hitherto has been merely foreshadowed in our perceptual or practical field, and which has made itself felt in our experience by no more than a certain lack, and which by its coming suddenly reshuffles the elements of our equilibrium and fulfils our blind expectation. (175-177)

In the action of the hand which is raised towards an object is contained a reference to the object, not as an object represented, but as that highly specific thing towards which we project ourselves, near which we are, in anticipation, and which we haunt. [ft.94] Consciousness is [p.159 | p.160] being-towards-the-thing through the intermediary of the body. A movement is learned when the body has understood it, that is, when it has incorporated it into its ‘world’, and to move one’s body is to aim at [p.160 | p.161] things through it; it is to allow oneself to respond to their call, which is made upon it independently of any representation. Motility, then, is not, as it were, a handmaid of consciousness, transporting the body to that point in space of which we have formed a representation beforehand. In order that we may be able to move our body towards an object, the object must first exist for it, our body must not belong to the realm of the ‘in-itself’. (159-161)

Clark, Andy. Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Transl. Colin Smith. London/New York: Routledge, 1958.

Clark and Chalmers:

Based on the pdf version available at:
http://www.philosophy.ed.ac.uk/people/clark/pubs/TheExtendedMind.pdf

Clark, Andy and David Chalmers. “The Extended Mind.”
The pdf lists the following publication information:

"The Extended Mind" (with Dave Chalmers) ANALYSIS 58: 1: 1998 p.7-19
Reprinted in THE PHILOSOPHER'S ANNUAL vol XXI-1998 (Ridgeview, 2000) p.59-74
Reprinted in D. Chalmers (ed) PHILOSOPHY OF MIND:CLASSICAL AND CONTEMPORARY READINGS (Oxford University Press, 2002)