Rick said, 'This'- he held up the flat adhesive disc with its trailing wires - 'measures capillary dilation in the facial area. We know this to be a primarily autonomic response, the so-called "shame" or "blushing" reaction to a morally shocking stimulus. It can't be controlled voluntarily, as can skin conductivity, respiration, and cardiac rate.' He showed her the other instrument, a pencil-beam light. 'This records fluctuations of tension within the eye muscles. Simultaneous with this blush phenomenon there generally can be found a small but detectable movement of - '
'And these can't be found in androids,' Rachel said.
'They're not engendered by the stimuli- questions; no. Although biologically they exist. Potentially.'
Rachel said. 'Give me the test.'
Joanna went forward, toward Bobbie standing by the sink with the knife in her hand, so real-looking - skin, eyes, hair, hands, rising-falling bosom - that she couldn't be a robot, she simply couldn't be, and that was all there was to it.
Wider reading introduced problems and new definitions, such as the notion of embodiment, the definition of posthuman and whether I was at liberty to just come up with my own tag. At first, I pursued all possibilities. An internet search introduced several sites with varying definitions, joining the posthuman mailing list introduced me to the concepts of trans-human, humanoids, neo-humans, extropians until, when the techno-pagans started up, I decided I needed to go back to a key reference text. It seemed logical as there was already handbook (The Cyborg Handbook, editor Charles H Gray), this would be the best place to start.
Point one seemed to be there are numerous definitions for the varying machine/human ratio. Since it appeared in a footnote (p 14), I decided that these definitions were not sharply defined and rather than dwelling on the subtle differences between post and neo cyborgs it would be more helpful to get an overall sense of the degrees of cyborgism.
The Cyborg Handbook suggests there is a Cyborg continuum which includes the sci fi representations that formed my first impression of Cyborgs. Terminator 2, Robocop, the Borg the six million dollar man/woman/german shepherd. In effect a machine with some human element which in the extreme case of T2 was skin over a machine. Moving down the spectrum to Steve Austin (the six million dollar man as opposed to Stone Cold the wrestler) who was mainly human apart from his eye, one arm and legs (and acting style). Further along from Steve Austin is Geordie LaForge from Next Generation with just a pair of computer enhanced raybans providing vision.
Where
the continuum may start proved more problematic. The word Cyborg
was first proposed by Manfred
E Clynes and Nathan S Kline as an abbreviation of Cybernetic Organism.
It was a proposal for a modified human for functioning in outer space i.e.
modify the human, not the environment - similar to teaching the goldfish
to walk, not to transport his bowl. In other words, the body is altered
but the mind remains the same. Within this definition it is easy to see
how a person with an artificial organ, prosthetic limb or a pacemaker fits
the cyborg label. However is it necessarily a physical enhancement/addition?
The Cyborg Handbook suggests chemical alteration through steroids or prozac
is another example. Or a triple venti latte at Starbucks,
perhaps.
In an interview with Manfred Clynes (Cyborg Handbook: Gray, CH: An Interview with Manfred Clynes p43), Clynes reveals that he considered the science fiction depiction of cyborgs such as T2 a travesty. He says it "dehumanises" the original concept of cyborg. Although he goes on to say that the original concept of Cyborg ignored some areas that he calls alterations of the "nature" of human beings as opposed to prosthetic organ enhancements (Cyborg Handbook, p48). He explores this in more depth in a sequel to his original paper and his book Sentics. Cyborgs are capable of the same "emotional expression and experience as an uncyborg". He also states that the idea of cyborg is not an IT. It's a he or she (Cyborg Handbook, p49).
He explains that when an uncyborg/homo sapien puts on a pair of glasses this is a modification. He extends this by suggesting when somebody rides a bicycle "He virtually has become a cyborg" in that when somebody rides a bike and it feels as natural as walking, it is an example of "a simple cyborg". (Cyborg Handbook, p49)
This seems to be the other end of the cyborg spectrum
and overlaps with another debate about boundaries. One example of
a cyborg I came across was a blind man and his cane. This provoked me to
think about a friend of mine who is blind but has an email programme which
"reads" aloud anything I email to her. Am I extended past the boundary
of my body into a new identity, for Elke, existing as an entity that springs
into existence whenever she opens an email from me. It resonated
with the point Sandy Stone makes in her book The
War of Desire and Technology at the Close of Mechanical Age, when
she hears Steven Hawking speak. Where does Steven Hawking end? (p4)
Or as Donna Haraway puts it - " Why should our bodies end at the skin,
or include at best other beings encapsulated by skin?"
If the boundary between human and machine is blurred, Haraway suggests other boundaries are also becoming blurred. Gender and sexual differences are constructed rather than naturally embodied. This concept has multiple possible readings. Certainly the suggestion that humans are not bound to nature and can reconstruct themselves seemed to offer a certain kind of freedom. In a virtual existence any kind of gender construction is possible (although whether it is convincing is open to debate). Julian Dibble's My Tiny Life contains several examples of gender-switching in a non-embodied environment. Sandy Stone also relates the story of the virtual-cross-dressing psychiatrist who apparently convinced an internet community he was a female paraplegic. Dibble and Stone's examples raise some ethical points, perhaps, but for the most part seem to suggest the shifting boundaries have quite positive outcomes, not the least of it being entertainment or "play" which is the term Stone suggests. Janet H Murray in Hamlet on the Holodeck suggests the Star Trek holodeck, used for play has these features: "The holodeck, like any literary experience, is potentially valuable... It provides a safe space in which to confront disturbing feelings we would otherwise suppress; it allows us to recognize our most threatening fantasies without becoming paralyzed by them." (p25)
This is similar to the conclusions some of the MUD
case studies Dr Sherry Turkle explores in Life on the Screen and
I think provides a comparable explanation to the pleasure described by
Stone and Dibble experienced in constructing a cyber-personality different
from what Stone calls the "root persona" (p2, The War of Desire and
Technology)
The notion of disembodiment and identity construction,
although containing these positive features also produces an anxiety in
some, debatably, most people. #footnote
2 Hans Moraveck's Mind
Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence argues that
it will soon be possible to download human consciousness into a computer,
taking the suggestion of disembodiment and blurred boundaries to (some
would say) a terrifying extreme. #Footnote
3
N Katherine Hayles in a book rather satisfyingly recommended by Amazon.com rather than my reading list, How We Became Posthuman accepts the notion that age of humanity is past, the boundaries are blurring, however stops short at Moraveck's suggestion. She begins by analysing the Turing test which is designed as a test to prove whether machines can think. The was appropriated by Philip K Dick in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, made into the movie Blade Runner. The test consists of sitting alone in a room except for two computer terminals for communication from two entities in another room whom you cannot see. Relying on their responses to your questions you must make the assumption as to which is human and which is machine. "Your job is to pose questions that can distinguish verbal performance from embodied reality". If you get it wrong, the test concludes the machine can think.
The test may also be used to determine whether the interviewee is male or female, although Hayles suggests that this second test is one that is frequently overlooked in order, she suggests, to reinforce the boundaries of the subject. Turing's biographer Andrew Hodges explains that the second test is a red herring because gender depends on facts that are not reducible to sequences of symbols - although intelligence is. Hayles argues that this is never suggested by Turing, although its not very clear why he includes both examples. She suggests that potentially that if there is a parallel between the two tests, the reason why Hodge's and Turing fail to acknowledge it is because this interpretation is too subversive in the way that it blurs accepted boundaries.#footnote
By this time I'd absorbed a lot of internet sites and texts on cyborgs and to me the key issue of defining the entity Douglas Coupland was embodiment. The Douglas Coupland I had created was disembodied, no question. However, there was the potential issue of the link between my virtual Douglas Coupland and the Douglas Coupland who inhabited a body in the physical world. Somewhat unscientifically I assumed as I had never witnessed the embodied Coupland in the physical world, I need not assume he necessarily existed. In which case I could state I had a completely diembodied Douglas Coupland as my subject. I wasn't sure if this meant I could apply the tag cyborg. Haynes makes a convincing argument that disembodied consciousness is not possible. For a start she questions whether there should be an automatic assumption that mind can be separated from body and even if it could, would that not alter consciousness. However, she also suggests a list of assumptions that can be suggestive of what posthuman is. She acknowledges, as I discovered with the extropians and tranz-pagans, that the term has many different articulations, but a key theme is the union of human with intelligent machine.
With this as my key identifier I felt happy that what I was exploring with the Douglas Coupland entity was a posthuman identity. I was also satisfied that the term posthuman could certainly be applied to myself. Specific instances to support this included an on-line interview with Douglas Coupland or an AOL buddy list chat with one of the Coupland group members. I was also aware of some of the issues surrounding cyborgism and posthumanism and I intended to measure them against the case-study produced on the next page.
I recognised that my level of involvement in the case-study was not exactly scientific. Nor was the tone of this paper particularly academic. This I rationalised by arguing that the medium - the internet - is interactive. In order to understand the medium, I had to interact. I was also reassured when Sandy Stone coined a term for the "complex mode of fieldwork" I was entering called "participant observation". Perhaps case-study is over-inflating the description of the next page, "adventure narrative" another Stone-ism is more appropriate. "A set of provocations whose central ideas remain more or less unstated - hovering, as I would like to imagine them, in the background."
FOOTNOTES
A variation
on this test is described in Life on the Screen where Julia, an attempt
at an intelligent machine circulates a chat room environment. Some
of the transcripts, Turkle notes, raises the question not whether Julia
is an intelligent machine, but also brings into question the intelligence
of some of the surfers posing the questions. You don't have to surf
the net, or experience AOL's instant messages too many times to buy into
this argument.
(USE BACK BROWSER TO RETURN)
The fact
there is a Turing test highlights the anxiety about boundaries, that there
is a need to distinguish between human and non-human - or uncyborg and
cyborg as Clynes may put it. In Do Androids Dream some of
the traditional boxes generally accepted as separating machine and human
do not exist. The machines are creative - the Opera singer for example.
The machines form loyal relationships (although the degree of loyalty varies,
but that's the same for humans). The key difference suggested by
Dick is empathy, although ironically for most humans in the book empathy
is produced by dialing into a box. The fact Deckard achieves empathy
unaided (he can't kill Rachel or Pris after sleeping with Rachel, for example)
is possibly meant to be interpreted as re-instatement of his humanness
(USE BACK BROWSER TO RETURN)
This suggestion provoked two reactions from me. The first reaction was to think on my friend Elke hearing my emails read to her and thinking "Is this image that far away from pulverising a human brain, reading the information in each molecular layer and then transferring it into a computer?" I concluded there were key differences, principally because I/my consciousness was still encased in my body and she was receiving a message some time later from the first thought. However it is clear that the primary form of communication for at least a small proportion of the world's Western population is no longer face to face. The body is at a distance and certainly the body and personal experience have parted company at least for some of the interaction Elke and I have. Indeed, given that Elke is blind and is not particularly tactile, for the most part my voice is the only interaction we have. It's probably significant as well that Elke has poor hearing and wears a hearing aid, so when she does hear my actual voice and I am physically in the same room as her (well as far as she knows I am) then it is not really my actual voice but an amplified version of my voice. Up until that point I had been thinking of a cyborg as a thing. Not an IT, because Clynes had discounted this, but certainly as an embodied entity. Now, I began to wonder if embodiment was indeed a requirement of a cyborg in which case the Entity Douglas Coupland as opposed to the Embodied Douglas Coupland may indeed be a cyborg.
My second reaction was to get slightly nostalgic for Dr Jeff's little black box and wonder why the author who'd just brought Moraveck to my attention was so luke-warm at this suggestion. In the same way, I suppose, that Gibson's cyberpunks come to resent "meat" or embodiment when they are inhabiting the consensual hallucination we call cyberspace, it didn't seem such a horrifying idea to pulverise intelligence and keep it in a box to me. Possibly due to the unconditional acceptance of Dr Jeff's brain in a box theory and possibly because having relocated to Britain from New Zealand my primary contact with my family (thankfully) and most of my friends is now by email. It seems second nature (although perhaps not natural, although for me more natural than riding a bicycle to refer back to Clyne's example) to think of communication beginning with the key board.
Furthermore, Gibson's cyberpunks are not entirely disembodied. The issue of warranty is addressed. If an entity experiences death in cyberspace, then the body also dies. However if the reverse happens, ie the body dies, the entity inhabiting cyberspace in some cases still continues to exist, free form.
A final observation - Dr Jeff is expecting
his first child. I suggested he may like to duplicate its consciousness
into a machine as a back-up if anything happens to the kid. Or better
still run the two at the same time to see whether the organic offspring
learns quicker than the non-organic child (like the computer in War Games).
Dr Jeff did not answer directly except to express a regret that he was
not expecting identical twins as you can do some really neat experiments
on twins. I take from this is principally interested in organic life
form programming these days. And that perhaps he may benefit if I
send him a copy of Michael Powell's Peeping Tom.
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