Philosophy 101 Unit 1

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn8718

In the above article, we are exposed to a pairing of the biological with the machine, one part fabricated, and the other merely adapted.  The slime mold moves to come closer to food, or further from light, or harm.  Obviously, this cites an example of technology, however, which ’segment’ or ‘aspect’ of the design is what we would call the ‘technique’ or technology behind it?  It seems we have two possible arguments. (There would be three, but I omit the possibility of the slime mold being an implementation of technique, as its functional mechanisms are wholly biological and organic, however one could argue counter to this)

Firstly, the machine itself is the embodiment of the ‘technology’ present in this layout.  That is to say, the machine which can interpret the movement of the slime mold, and augment the slime mold’s physical presence.  The machine is the collective of parts which are considered product of the ‘dumb process of nature’ as Gehlen says, and as such, is the result of a compounding of technology.

Counter to the above, we have the argument that the technology is the process of fusing the slime mold to the machine, or rather, integrating the organic with the inorganic, and producing a hybrid from two separate worlds.  No more is this ‘technology’ a ‘dumb process of nature’, rather a deliberate human creation.  However, the same argument could be made within the machine itself, as it did not develop ‘dumbly out of nature,’ so much as it came into existence as an assimilation of components which ultimately did arrive from nature in an unguided fashion.  In this way, both of these options are truly no different from each other, and technology is merely pervasive through what has been produced.

I pose the open question from the title yet again; what is technology? and where does technology originate?