326 Book Reviews
of meanings are distinctively literary? And why suppose that a whole novel or
poem has a meaning? How could anyone complete the sentence, ‘The meaning of Pride and Prejudice is …’? All that said, if you want arguments for
intentionalism then start with Carroll. On this, as on all topics, he is careful,
undogmatic, generous to his opponents, and pleasingly easy to follow in the
wealth of detail and examples.
Department of Philosophy
University of York
York YO10 5DD
UK
peter lamarque
Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of
Human Intelligence, by Andy Clark. New York: Oxford University Press
USA, . Pp viii + . H/b $..
You may very well baulk at the idea but, at least according to Andy Clark’s illuminating new book, Natural-Born Cyborgs, you are, and always have been, a
cyborg. The fact that you are unlikely to have more than a very small percentage of non-biological components incorporated into your body (if any at all)
is, we are told, rather beside the point. What it is that makes human beings
cyborgs (or ‘human-technology symbionts’) is the very real sense in which
human beings assimilate the tools they create into their own (ever-broadening) identities. Clark is quick to point out that a cyborg needn’t be fully integrated physically with its technological scaffolding. What matters, what is
paramount when determining the nature of a cyborg, is the extent to which
someone’s sense of self can be said to encompass, to extend to, both the biological and the non-biological. And as Clark is eager to show us, humans have
been on this road since the birth of language.
The first being actually recognized and labelled as a cyborg is distinctly
unimpressive. It was nothing more than a rat with an osmotic pump attached
to its rear. However, what this rat represented was the very potent idea of
something which, as Manfred Clynes (who first coined the term ‘cyborg’ in
) put it, ‘deliberately incorporates exogeneous components extending the
self-regulating control function of the organism in order to adapt it to new
environments’ (p. ). After looking at a number of other, equally unremarkable, cases of what he calls ‘flesh-and-wire’ cyborgs (involving the implantation
of non-biological materials under the skin) Clark hits on what for him are the
two key factors when considering cyborgs: these are ‘the potential of technology to become integrated so deeply and fluidly into our existing biological
capacities and characteristics that we feel no boundary between ourselves and
the nonbiological elements’, and the fact that we ‘care about the potential of
such human–machine symbiosis to transform (for better or for worse) our
lives, projects, and capacities’ (p. –). It is from this foundation that Clark
Book Reviews 327
sets about his primary task, which is to show that human beings are, as a species, cyborgs by nature.
Whether it is computers, cellular phones, integrated prosthetic limbs, neural implants, ABS braking, or more well-established forms of technology such
as pen and paper, and wristwatches, our brains are keen to merge their performance with the technological scaffolding within which they operate and
thrive. Clark claims that the smarter the world becomes (and by smarter he
means to invoke premium levels of world-to-person responsiveness) the less
we will be able to distinguish persons from their customized smart worlds.
Clark uses the distinctly commonplace example of someone claiming to know
the time simply because they are wearing a watch that is a wrist turn and a
glance away from conveying it to them, in order to illustrate just how bound
up we are as individuals with the tools readily at our disposal. He then compares knowing the time with somebody asking you the meaning of a word, and
you claiming to know just because you happen to have a good dictionary in
the house. There is a discrepancy in the second case that is not there in the
first, a discrepancy that for Clark indicates how ease of access to information,
how ready-to-hand it is (to employ Heidegger’s phrase, an influence Clark
acknowledges, and whose notion of the existential analytic of Dasein as Beingin-the-world can surely be felt), directly influences the degree to which we
consider it as part of what we actually know. The ability for technology to
become transparent to its user is decisive when it comes to thinking about
cyborgs. The plasticity of human brains coupled with technology that is ‘invisible-in-use’ allows a dovetailing of mind to world and world to mind. As Clark
neatly puts it, ‘What really matters is the complex reciprocal dance in which
the brain tailors its activity to a technological and sociocultural environment,
which—in concert with other brains—it simultaneously alters and amends’
(p. ).
For those readers who remain hostile to his vision, Clark deploys a useful
analogy that becomes something of a standard retort to certain types of scepticism throughout the book. The idea is neatly put by Ramachandran, whom
Clark acknowledges, by means of the notion of ‘the zombie in the brain’
(p. ), which refers to the non-conscious automated subsystems that underpin and contribute so crucially to our lives. Consciousness is after all, as Clark
puts it, merely ‘the tip of the “I” berg’ (p. ), and it is therefore a huge mistake to discount all that goes on beneath the surface of conscious thought. It is
misguided to disapprove of non-biological components of the self on the
grounds that they are merely automated, when the same can be said of the biological subsystems that appear quite unproblematically to help compose the
self. All of this has, of course, been touched on before by others, most notably
by Daniel Dennett, whose work on the nature of selves Clark briefly discusses.
Clark is favourable towards Dennett’s view, which fully allows for cyborg
selves. But what Clark doesn’t do, and rightly so in my opinion, is get bogged
down with the all-too-laboured arguments that surround our concept of the
328 Book Reviews
self as being that of a (illusory) central controller. Clark’s notion of selves differs from (among others) Dennett’s in his drive to, as he puts it (p. ), ‘pay
more than lip service to’ the way in which the self can legitimately be thought
to extend its boundaries to incorporate the technological scaffolding that has
become invisible-in-use to it.
Towards the end of the book Clark tackles nine of what he considers to be
the primary causes for concern among those who are rather less optimistic
than himself about the threat posed to humanity by its continued affiliation
with technological advancement. On the whole Clark handles these worries
very well and, without overstating his case, manages to assuage, or at least put
into context, a good deal of them.
If I had one criticism it would be the rather short shrift Clark gives to the
possibilities for technological advances to provide us with the means for
immortality (or at the very least, considerable life extension), which I feel, like
the scientist Hans Moravec whose optimism he questions, is a crucial issue
when considering our propensity to merge with our technology. As naturalborn cyborgs— if indeed we are, and Clark certainly makes a good case for
it—isn’t one of our primary drives, in addition to streamlining and accentuating our lives, also to extend them through the manipulation of our non-biological resources? Clark is hostile to the idea that future advances in
information transmission might eventually bring about a situation where the
human body itself starts to look like a superfluous part of the equation, and
where it will be possible for the self to enjoy immortality as transferable patterns of information. As he puts it, ‘I roundly reject the vision of the self as a
kind of ethereal, information-based construct. There is no informationally
constituted user relative to whom the rest is just tools’ (p. ). It is however, to
this reader at least, not clear why the kind of immortality that Moravec envisions cannot be regarded as a very real (if somewhat distant future) possibility,
why a post-human phase could not be the outlying consequence of our nature
as natural-born cyborgs, without having to revert to talk of users and tools.
Also, I am not at all convinced that Clark, given his position on the self, can
dismiss it out of hand with quite the ease he does. His position, after all, is one
which is favourable to the possibility of telerobotics displaying genuine telepresence (during which one’s point of view is said to shift between the local and
the distant through interaction between the two locations), and to us successfully being able to break down neural signals into patterns of reducible information. According to Clark, ‘There is no special magic associated with direct
physically wired links between components. The differences between links
forged by nerves and tendons, by fibre-optic cables, and by radio waves are relevant only insofar as they affect the timing, flow and density of informational
exchange’ (p. ). This being the case, I see no reason why it wouldn’t be considered possible for the biological to eventually be usurped by the non-biological, without the necessity of reverting back to talking in terms of central
controllers and their utilities. More from Clark on this issue would certainly
Book Reviews 329
have made a welcome addition.
Clark has written a very readable and well-balanced book, which, with an
inspired use of anecdotes, a wealth of empirical data, and a commendable
degree of clarity, more than lives up to its provocative title. I found it easy and
fun to read, while also displaying a considerable depth of insight.
London
UK
g. j. shipley
Recreative Minds, by Gregory Currie and Ian Ravenscroft. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, . Pp. x + . H/b £., $.., P/b £., $..
The imagination is enjoying a burst of scholarly attention. Over the last
decade, a number of researchers at the intersection of philosophy and psychology have explored the nature of the imagination. Gregory Currie has played a
central role in these discussions, both as an insightful critic and as an apologist
for a ‘simulation’-based account of the imagination. As a result, Recreative
Minds, the new book by Currie and Ian Ravenscroft, has been widely anticipated by those in the field. The book delivers. It stakes out an interesting,
detailed, and provocative view of the imagination. The account that emerges
has broad ramifications for central issues in aesthetics, philosophy of psychology, and philosophy of mind. The book is also distinguished throughout by
fair and balanced readings of their opposition.
Like other work in this tradition, Currie and Ravenscroft do not attempt to
give an account of the creative imagination, the capacity that led Einstein to
discover relativity and Borges to invent Menard. Rather, Currie and Ravenscroft offer an account of what they call the recreative imagination, the imaginative capacity for putting oneself in another person’s place, or ‘perspective
shifting’ (p. ). There are, according to Currie and Ravenscroft, a number of
different aspects of another person’s perspective that might be occupied
through recreative imagination. We can shift to take on beliefs, desires, perceptions. Crucially, these recreative states have the same ‘character’ as their counterpart states. So, belief-like imagining has the same character as belief, desirelike imagining has the same character as desire, and vision-like imagining has
the same character as vision. Currie and Ravenscroft never define the notion of
character very precisely, but they do make quite clear that character needs to
be distinguished from content. What makes something count as belief-like
imagining or vision-like imagining, they maintain, is not the content of the
imagining, but the character of the imagining. This allows them to skirt familiar problems that face other accounts. For instance, visual imagining is sometimes characterized as imagining that has, as part of its content, I see X (see, for
example, Kendall Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe, Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, , p. ). This leads to obvious puzzles about whether, for
example, it is coherent to visually imagine an unseen landscape. Currie and