Skip to main content
Log in

A moratorium on cyborgs: Computation, cognition, and commerce

Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

By examining the contingent alliance that has emerged between the computational theory of mind and cyborg theory, we discern some questionable ways in which the literalization of technological metaphors and the over-extension of the “computational” have functioned, not only to influence conceptions of cognition, but also by becoming normative perspectives on how minds and bodies should be transformed, such that they can capitalize on technology’s capacity to enhance cognition and thus amend our sense of what it is to be “human”. We consider “a moratorium on cyborg discourse” as a way of focusing the conceptual and social–political problems posed by this alliance.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Notes

  1. We accept the view that the concepts one chooses are already part of the process by which evaluation is facilitated; that acts of description are already—as Rorty continually argues–ways of taking a position on matters of cultural concern. Likewise, our analysis here presumes that cyborg-talk is not culturally neutral concerning ontology. Rather, it is already aligned with a context, with a program that slants ontological description in specific ways (see Rorty 2007).

  2. To minimize potential confusion, it should be noted that by foregrounding “metaphor” in this way we are not treating CTM as a false (or true) theory that is to be judged by reference to an independent set of “empirically accurate” (or inaccurate) referents. Rather, we are making the meta-epistemological point that it does nothing extra to compliment a descriptive and explanatory vocabulary in terms of “accuracy” in the first place. In a Kuhnian sense, CTM is a normal vocabulary that makes representational claims, but such claims are always bounded by the operative vocabulary itself; as with all human constructed theoretical frameworks, the possibility of capturing the “mental phenomena themselves” is foreclosed from the start. Thus, when we say that an epistemic alliance “is made in metaphor,” we are not directly contributing to the existing literatures that question the empirical “evidence” for CTM. Rather, our claim is that the vocabularies by which empirical work is facilitated are sustained (or abandoned) only in relation to their perceived superiority to rival vocabularies. Thus, if we appear to be taking a substantive stand by appealing to “metaphor,” it is because we are affirming pluralism: CTM may be quite useful for accomplishing some purposes—for mapping, modeling, predicting, controlling, for aligning digital technologies as tools with diagnostic or therapeutic procedures of a certain type, say—and not for accomplishing others. The critical point, then, is that vocabularies are purposeful, and that the metaphorical alliances between vocabularies are ways in which some of these purposes become shared and mutually reinforcing. The metaphorical alliance we have in mind suggests a larger constellation of forces—a worldview, if you will—is at play, one that is ultimately interpretative in nature, and not reducible to a specific empirical claim.

  3. We concentrate more extensively on Clark’s work in Selinger and Engström 2007.

References

  • Clark, A. (2003). Natural-born cyborgs: Minds, technologies and the future of human intelligence. New York: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Davis-Floyd, R., & Dumit, J. (Eds.). (1998). Cyborg babies. New York: Routledge.

  • Friedman, T. (2006). The world is flat. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.

    Google Scholar 

  • Giesler, M., & Venkatesh, A. (2005). Reframing the embodied consumer as a cyborg: A posthumanist epistemology of consumption. Advances in Consumer Research, 32, 1–9.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Gray, C. (Ed.). (1995). The cyborg handbook. New York: Routledge.

  • Haraway, D. (1991). A cyborg manifesto: Science, technology, and socialist–feminism in the late twentieth century. In D. Haraway (Ed.), Simians, cyborgs and women: The reinvention of nature (pp. 149–181). New York: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Horgan, J. (2005). Brain chips and other dreams of the cyber-evangelists. Chronicle of Higher Education, June 3.

  • Pinker, S. (1997). How the mind works. New York: Norton.

    Google Scholar 

  • Rorty, R. (2007). Philosophy as cultural politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Selinger, E., & Engström, T. (2007). On naturally embodied cyborgs: Identities, metaphors, and models. Janus Head, 9(2), 553–584.

    Google Scholar 

  • Warwick, K. (2004). I Cyborg. Chicago: University of Illinois Press.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgements

We’re grateful to the following people for their assistance with this essay: Shaun Gallagher, Jesus Aguilar, Eric Dietrich, and Art Berman. Andy Clark was an especially generous interlocutor, and we deeply appreciate all of the correspondences that occurred.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Evan Selinger.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Selinger, E., Engström, T. A moratorium on cyborgs: Computation, cognition, and commerce. Phenom Cogn Sci 7, 327–341 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-008-9104-4

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-008-9104-4

Keywords

Navigation