Philosophy 101 Unit 1

This was a fun class.

Thoughts everyone?

Google Flu Trends

Each week, millions of users around the world search for online health information. As you might expect, there are more flu-related searches during flu season, more allergy-related searches during allergy season, and more sunburn-related searches during the summer. You can explore all of these phenomena using Google Trends. But can search query trends provide an accurate, reliable model of real-world phenomena?

We have found a close relationship between how many people search for flu-related topics and how many people actually have flu symptoms. Of course, not every person who searches for “flu” is actually sick, but a pattern emerges when all the flu-related search queries from each state and region are added together. We compared our query counts with data from a surveillance system managed by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and found that some search queries tend to be popular exactly when flu season is happening. By counting how often we see these search queries, we can estimate how much flu is circulating in various regions of the United States. Our results have been published in Nature.

 

How’s this for sharing values?

Towards responsible use of cognitive-enhancing drugs by the healthy (Nature.com)

Human ingenuity has given us means of enhancing our brains through inventions such as written language, printing and the Internet. Most authors of this Commentary are teachers and strive to enhance the minds of their students, both by adding substantive information and by showing them new and better ways to process that information. And we are all aware of the abilities to enhance our brains with adequate exercise, nutrition and sleep. The drugs just reviewed, along with newer technologies such as brain stimulation and prosthetic brain chips, should be viewed in the same general category as education, good health habits, and information technology — ways that our uniquely innovative species tries to improve itself.

What do you guys think about the use of cognitive enhancing drugs? The BoingBoing guys talked about this earlier in the semester, and Nature just published this (already controversial) article arguing for their use and acceptance.

I will be at Cafe Paradiso between 1-3pm on Thursday. Please leave a comment in this thread if you are planning on coming to talk to me, so I know what I am getting in to.

When you read Jenkinson’s ‘Collaboration with Machines’ a few things become clear.  Jenkinson sides with Gehlen in that both believe that technology frees man by creating new possibilities for him.  For Jenkinson, this means new ways to make music, fundamentally changing the music created.  This freedom strikes a frightening note when the composer finds himself “in a wasteland of desolate freedom” (169).  Jenkinson finds anyone who believe he is solely in control (and machines innocent bystanders) to be delusional, and furthermore to be hampering their own creative efforts.

What implications does this have?  Going back to the book Dan mentioned in class a while back, Nudge, about how our surrounds impact all our choices, I think this has a huge impact.  Not to side with a Nazi, but Heidegger was right about enframing.  Living in this technological world does impact the way that we think.  Expanding that to a moral context, our technological surroundings impact what we ought to do by changing what we can do.  The possiblity of a “curtosy call” or a quick email changes our societal obligations and expectations.

But Nudge has something to say about Jenkinson’s Collaboration that goes beyond the social realm and says something about cognition.  The way food in a cafeteria is arranged, for example, impacts the choices we make.  If healthier food is in the front and we see it first, we tend to eat healthier (consider that when your first stop in Allen is the desert counter and perhaps veer left to the fruit instead).  In that same way, if machines are around, they impact our choices.  Having a music-making machine, like in Jenkinson’s article, changes the type of music he made.  Jenkinson romanticizes that a little in saying the machine should also get credit for the music produced, but from the Nudge perspective the inspiration  for the music was the machine.  He goes so far as to say that the person making music on a computer is a “machine user-artist” (170).  To me, that’s like saying, “he’s not a pianist, he’s a piano user-player.”  It seems wordy and unnecesary to make such statements.

Then Jenkinson makes a jump to the island of conclusions that is nearly impossible to follow.  He says that music frees us from “the problem of bodily death” (171).  He says that the goal of an artist is to encode himself in his work which becomes an envoy of the self, therefore surviving past the death of the body.  As machines’ involvement in the artistic process increases, our work serves as a dual envoy of both creators, we begin to feel both inferior to and jealous of machines.  I cannot deny that my word processor changes the writing process, but I cannot agree that producing a novel makes me feel any less afraid of death.  I would like to finish a novel by the time I die because it is one of my goals, but it in no way changes the nausea  I experience when I consider being dead.  As a creative person, I appreciate the romanticized view of leaving part of oneself in art, but even if I agreed with that premise, my fears about death remain.

I have a problem with Jenkinson’s writing.  The further you get into the article, the less need he feels to explain any of his premises with examples or explainations.  That entire last paragraph needs expanding.  I’m not saying I disagree with everything, but frankly the arguement is unwarrented.

I have some more stuff to say, so stay tuned to this website for more of my rants.

However, I have a really quick request from Tim. He is starting a new project called IDEALS @ UIUC, where Allen Hall students upload work they do in unit one courses into a database that other future students have access to. If you are interested in participating in this program, visit the website and see whats up!

If you want to upload your papers for future classes, you need to fill out a form granting UIUC the right to archive your intellectual property. You can get this form, print out a copy, and turn it in here. If you have any question, contact Tim McDonough at timmcdonou at gmail.com

“It is in this trick of perspective, from the humble “it happened” to the questionable “I made it happen” to the disastrous “I can make it happen” that lies the labyrinth of paradoxes that is our “modern” world”- Tom Jenkinson

I found this article really stiking, perhaps because I’m a musician, but most of what Jenkinson has to say is excellent (when it doesn’t come off as just slightly elitist).  Anyways, as I was reading it and nodding my head furiously, I thought of a bunch of artists and just random examples that sort of related to what he had to say, so I thought I would share those with you today.  First up, Mr. Bird!

“I feel like it is a deliberate creative process to hear a sound in my head and then rummage around for the object that makes that sound. Sometimes, as I’ve noted before, the object itself gets assigned a mystical value and must be on a song, though I know most listeners could not care less whether we use a Telefunken mic or a 30-year-old calf skin drum head… perhaps that’s why I ascribe mystical/religious properties to microphones, tape machines record players”- Andrew Bird (taken from the NY Times blog Measure for Measure)

As we see, Andrew Bird follows along the lines of what Jenkinson has to say; he ascribes a lot of character to his violin, his guitar, and even to the bare basic things of recording like microphones, tape reels, etc.  These things add something that he alone obviously could not.  Just because he is the one putting the instruments and mics in place does not make him the priveleged user, however.  He is in fact, perhaps just another tool, the one that puts everything in place and orchestrates it all.  Indeed, he plays a vital part in the making of songs, but ultimately, every tool involved is just as pertinent to the song as the next (including himself).

“This is why I decided to start in Nashville with the basics - voice and guitar - because it’s easy to lose your rudder in overdub realm”- Also Andrew Bird

Again, we see that Andrew Bird acknowledges the studio (overdub realm) as almost its own entity, in that it’s easy to lose direction.  In fact, things are bound to lose some direction in the studio.  “Recording is full of counterintuitive stuff like this, so you can see how quickly the original sentiment of a song can get derailed.” - Again, Andrew Bird

———————

According to Wikipedia, on a radio show in 2003 to publicise the release of Hail to the Thief, Yorke remarked that he would rather make a record just with a computer than with only an acoustic guitar.

Here, I think the implication is that Yorke can pull more sounds out of a computer than he can out of an acoustic guitar.  I think that goes to say that the computer is a more versatile tool and would thus serve a greater role in the system of tools that would define Yorke’s songs.  This is a great example of the collaboration of artist and machine.

———————

“…we gave absolutely no thought to what we were doing, whatsoever. This music is unblemished by any expectations of a specific result, on our part. The three of us simply got together to hear what music had to say that week. We had fun together and this is the record of that fun.” - John Frusciante

This was said of Frusciante (of the Red Hot Chili Peppers) about the recording of a side project called Automatic Writing II.  Really, I think this is the best example of what Jenkinson wrote about.  No explanation needed.

Donna Haraway describes the idea of a cyborg in her manifesto. She actually sets out to describe “an ironic political myth faithful to feminism, socialism, and materialism,” so it’s not entirely clear when she describes the cyborg whether she means the myth or her idea of what a cyborg should be. Haraway describes the cyborg as “a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction,” created through non-organic means and thus not needing to bother with sexual pleasures, or rather distractions. The cyborg “does not revere” and thus has no religious delusions. Cyborgs are sunshine, “ether,” invisible. Haraway presents this idea of “Informatics of Domination,” which are modern concepts of tomorrow’s cyborg world, replacing the “Old Hierarchal Dominations” of the White Patriarchal Society and religion. Some of it seems arbitrary or just rewording, where “noise” replaces “heat,” “subsystem” replaces “small group,” “optimization” replaces “perfection,” “comparable worth” replaces “family wage.” Some of it, though, makes sense, depicting a scary, emotionless future if it comes true: “science fiction, postmodernism” replaces “bourgeois novel,” “biotic component” replaces “organism,” “Star Wars” replaces “Second World War,” “cyborg citizenship” replaces “public/private,” “communications enhancement” replaces “cooperation,” “robotics” replaces “labor,” the list goes on. Haraway encourages throughout her paper that feminists should strive to become like cyborgs, which would thereby eliminate the endless dualistic struggle plaguing the past centuries.

This idea of the cyborg, however, of eliminating awareness of gender, doesn’t seem like the way to solve the heated interactions between men and women. By replacing sexual reproduction with “replication,” and “organic sex role specialization” with “optimal genetic strategies” seems not to blend humanity with machine, but rather to throw away all humanity for only the machine. Since we can’t be machines, this replacement only results in a poor attempt to imitate a being completely and utterly different from us, both in makeup and cognitive capacity, which translates to the destruction of ourselves. Haraway discusses a few ideologies in the beginning of her manifesto, among them biological determinism and technological determinism. Biological Determinism rejects monotheistic thought that man lords above the animals and the earth, celebrating the blend between humans and animals, given that we are really not so different. Technological Determinism accepts the blend between humans and machines, revealing how blurred the lines have become between man and machine: “Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves are frighteningly inert.” This very quote describes how inherently bad Technological Determinism is for humanity, and how they function as an inverted relationship: when one gains strength, the other loses it. Should we all alter ourselves to emulate the qualities of a cyborg, we would lose touch with our humanity.

I don’t understand this article, but I think I understand why I don’t understand. If anyone wants to help, that would be nice.

If you haven’t read it, Lihy wrote a lovely post that, as far as I can tell, accurately captures the general idea. Bruno’s thesis seems to go as follows: the object-subject dichotomy, while useful, is out dated, and a nonhuman-human dichotomy provides a more accurate way of approaching the distinction between the contrasting entities that compose a society. He illustrates this with a chart that shows that the concept of “object” and “subject” merge over time, and the resulting “imbroglio of humans and nonhumans” is what demands a new perspective.Then, he goes on to explain the eleven sociotechnical levels of this concept. I don’t know what he means by sociotechnical, and therefore can’t quite grasp what these levels are for, but I can only assume it is to break down the social aspects of technology, going from a mass scale (11. Political Ecology), to a more individualized level (1. Social Complexity). “Mass” and “individualized” aren’t exactly the right words for that, though. I’m think of this scale as level 11 looking at the planet as a whole, moving closer and closer until you reach the little electrons and stuff at level 1. That was an analogy, not what the article is seriously about (in case my obvious confusion and mental clutter is making you equally lost).

So, Bruno introduces these layers by saying, “For my present pragmatogony*[mythic origin of technology], I have isolated eleven distinct layers.” Calling it a “mythic origin of technology” made me think he was saying, “these layers are not real,” as though he were explaining what people mistake as layers when they use the object-subject frame. However, the levels seem to be defined by using examples of the appropriateness of the nonhuman-human paradigm. At this point, I decided I didn’t know the real definition of pragmatogony, and neither does the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and so I still don’t know. Between that and “sociotechnical,” I feel a little less than confident about my comprehension of this article.

Additionally, Bruno uses all these phrases such as “Machiavellian primates,” “Daedalus’s maze,” “Durkheim,” and so on, which presuppose knowledge about things that I apparently have no knowledge about. I’m hoping those were unimportant details that I missed, though.

That all sounded less academic and much more whiny than I intended it to. Whoops.

I feel like I kind of understand what the layers mean, even if I don’t know what they’re for. So, in the spirit of Lihy’s post, I’m going to continue summarizing the final six levels.

6) Internalized Ecology

“… we find the most extraordinary extention of social relations to nonhumans: agriculture and the domestication of animals. The intense socializeation, reeducation, and reconfiguration of plants and animals- so intense that they change shape, function, and often genetic makeup…” (186) .

He says that we need to give nonhumans-plants, animals, and proteins-social characteristics for them to fit into the “collective.”

5) Society

“a society is primitive indeed: it precedes individual action, lasts very much longer than any interaction does, dominates our lives… it is externalized, reified, more real than ourselves…” (186).

- He believes that society is not socially constructed, because “humans proliferate below the bottom line of social theory” (187), even though the term society is socially constructed.

-It is interactions that do construct society, and since so many “techniques” aid and enable interactions, they too are part of society.

4) Techniques

“articulated subprograms for actions that subsist (in time) and extend (in space)” (187).

-At this point, he isn’t talking about humans anymore, but “social prehumans.” Basically, stuff that is reorganized (he uses the example of a hammer and net), to make them different from the original.

3) Social Complication

“no society, no overarching framework, no dispatcher of roles and functions; there are merely interactons among prehumans…Here complex interactions are marked and followed by nonhumans enrolled for a specific purpse. What purpose? Nunhumans stabalize social negotiations” (187).

2) The Basic Tool Kit

“The extension of social skills to nonhumans” (188).

- He uses the example of monkeys who don’t have much technique, but still create and use social tools in a process of altering each other. This ability is also given to nonhumans, by “treating a stone, say, as a social partner, modifying it, then using it to act on a second stone” (188).

1) Social Complexity

“primates…engage in social interactions to repair a constantly decaying social order. They manipulate one another to survive in groups…” (188).

-Note: even though this is the last stage, it still uses techniques and tools just as much as the other ones.

The End.

I forgot that I still have some money left over for this class. Enough to get, say, a few pizzas or something.

If you leave me a note in this thread before 6pm I will be running to the store to get food/snacks/candy/soda or whatever. Make suggestions and I’ll see what I can do.

Douglas Adams is brilliant. His article, while a little dated, seems very accurate. He makes several great points about the Internet in many ways.

He first talks about age gaps, essentially. Everything invented before we were all born, is completely normal. We never question the use of telephones, or really go, wow this thing is quite amazing, unless your really thinking about what life must have been like without it. Next, anything that is invented when we are under 30, is creative and cool. I think it is safe to say that everyone in this country who is older than 10, has a cell phone. 10 might be low, but I think you understand my point that cell phones are abundant and have become a very normal part of our generation’s society. Well, most of them anyway. Because, Douglas states that after 30, anything new is against the natural order of the world and “is the beginning of the end of civilization as we know it.” He says 30, but I think it is between 30 and 40, with the latter being the more probable. It is just that people over that age take longer to adjust to new things. My parents took a rather long while to get used to computers, and I believe they still don’t really understand the capabilites and whatnot. It’s just natural. People who are over 65, the generation that brought us hippies and the psycholdelic movement, were the only age group Obama didn’t win. It’s because that they just cannot change that quickly anymore. But as Douglas says, “until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.” They will adjust. A great example is Strom Thurmond, an extremely racist senator who blocked the civil rights act, even he eventually became less racist…I think.

The next point that Douglas makes is the stereotype about how you cannot trust what you read on the web. It’s an old argument that we all know and some of us have probably said before (I am guilty, though I think I usually said it in a joking manner). Douglas correctly states that “Of course you can’t ‘trust’ what people tell you on the web anymore than you can ‘trust’ what people tell you on megaphones, postcards, or in restaurants.” I mean, he just hit the nail on the head. It’s all about properly filtering information. We talk about how we cannot trust what he see on the web, when we turn on the TV and are subject to Faux News. I mean, are you going to go to an anti-choice website for information about “Partial-Birth Abortions”? Not if your interested in accurate information. You must learn who can and cannot be trusted and to use natural skepticism when it starts going off.

There are many other great points in the article, but I cannot touch on all of them. So I will quickly go over ones I found important. Getting back to how the article is dated, it talks about things like Netscape, dial-up, and external modems…whatever all that is. Basically that there are criticisms that the Net is another divide of the rich and poor. I kinda disagree with that completely. I think if anything, the internet has narrowed the rich-poor gap. I mean, prices of computers have dropped greatly in the last decade and have become as affordable as a TV, and honestly much more useful. Cheap internet is possible. If there is one thing that the rich and the poor have in common is their ability to use and surf the internet with no restrictions. Obviously I am referring to low income, not the dirt poor, and also money would play apart in how good the computer/internet are, and I mean people in this country, because poverty in other countries is another story. It is a weak argument I know, but I still believe that the Internet narrows the divide more than it broadens it.

The last point I would like to comment on is how Douglas talks about kids improvement. He talks about people coming together and speaking different languages and that they will somehow develop a way of communicating with each other, but there wont be any real grammar; that it would be the First Generation who starts to develop it. I wont comment on that exactly, as I don’t really understand it and am not a Linguistics major. But the point is is that, yes, the older generations did indeed create the Internet. They started it a good 15-20 years ago. However, the Internet is what it is today because of us. Essentially hackers, ages ranging from 10-30, are responsible for the Internet that we have. MySpace was virtually created by people in their mid to late 20’s and Facebook, by a 20 yr old kid, and these are some of the most popular websites on the web. To put it in a Douglas Adams way, we have created the grammar, improved it, and pushed it’s boundaries all within a single generation.

From USA Today

NEW YORK (AP) — What does a teenage brain on Google look like? Do all those hours spent online rewire the circuitry? Could these kids even relate better to emoticons than to real people?

These sound like concerns from worried parents. But they’re coming from brain scientists.

While violent video games have gotten a lot of public attention, some current concerns go well beyond that. Some scientists think the wired world may be changing the way we read, learn and interact with each other.

There are no firm answers yet. But Dr. Gary Small, a psychiatrist at UCLA, argues that daily exposure to digital technologies such as the Internet and smart phones can alter how the brain works.

When the brain spends more time on technology-related tasks and less time exposed to other people, it drifts away from fundamental social skills like reading facial expressions during conversation, Small asserts.

I strongly suggest reading the full article. It also recommends the book iBrain, which I just ordered (and yes I’m geeking out). <

Question: Does this mean that both Clark and Dreyfus are right: Technology fundamentally shapes the way our minds work, and in so doing it undermines our basic humanity?

Post questions and discussion on the final in this thread. I’ll do my best to help, but everyone should feel free to contribute.

I’ve sent around comment count updates, so you should know how many more comments you need before the deadline on Friday at midnight. Most of you are nearly finished, and quite a few of your are already over the requirements, so good job.

I’ll probably send around a more extensive grade update later this week, so you know exactly what you have going into the final.

One of Dreyfus’ problems with the internet is the fact that there is higher authority of the internet; one giant figurehead that controls all the information being published on the net at all times of the day. First I would like to point out is that that is impossible. The internet has become so vast, it is impossible for an organization, let alone one person to monitor everything that goes on the net. Nevertheless, let us delve into the realm of possibility and assume that it is doable, or better yet, we start smaller and go with out good friend Wikipedia.

Wikipedia, the thing that makes teachers smile with glee when they see it in a Works Cited page as they reach for a red marker, is a great source for learning vast amounts of (sometimes useless) information. Let us say we had a Supreme overlord of Wikipedia, Supreme Wikipedian. This person had the ability to correct all articles and make it so that once he has had the last word, they cannot be edited again unless the event is ongoing (articles dealing with living people, modern films, etc.) in which case a new development would have to occur for someone else to be able to edit it. Nevertheless, the Supreme Wikipedian always has the final say.

Now my problem with this is that no one person is the expert on EVERYTHING! It is extremely improbable that one person could be an expert on Nuclear Physics, Cartesian Philosophy, Hulk Hogan, Metal Gear Solid, Sailor Moon, Sebastian Bach, Chinese history, Renaissance Art, and Romantic period Literature. I mean, it is so unlikely, that I would even say it is impossible. Now if say you had two people, then they might be able to cover a much wider range of topics, but then if they have conflicting views on an issue, the history of the Manhattan project, then who takes precedence? The history expert or the nuclear physicist? The more ‘experts’ you have that run things, the more problems like this you would have. It becomes much trickier when you get into more subjective areas like the Arts. Dan Pierson mentioned in a post that he disagrees with critic in the Tribune. While I am not saying that Dan is wrong (I am by no means a musical expert, let alone Jazz), all I am saying is that things like music and the arts are very subjective and there really is no official saying, this is good or this is bad, it is all a matter of opinion. I imagine that if enough artists get together and declare something good/bad, then that’s the majority opinion, but there will always be those dissenters who feel the opposite because it appeals/doesn’t appeal to them. This is different than say mathematics where you cannot argue that 1+1=2. We know that it is fact, and anyone who disagrees either doesn’t understand or/and is a moron. Yes, I know comparing math to art isn’t necessarily fair, but I am just trying to show why a supreme authority, especially for art won’t work.

I believe the system currently at play in Wikipedia is a good one. People check pages and read them and if they notice things are all wrong, they get corrected and re-corrected until you get the truth or as close as you can to the truth. Of course, you should always take everything with a grain of salt, but I prefer the few inaccuracies to the Supreme Wikipedian (SW) and their lack of all knowledge and probable bias. Yes, I believe it is impossible for the SW to be totally and completely unbiased. Every human has a bias in something, and if they had to be the supreme decider on the arts, their bias would easily come out in some manner. So no SW, let the masses be the correctors of the Internet and they will also decide which websites are credible and which not.

SOCIALISM BABY…only on the net, of course.

Bruno is trying to say that the dichotomy between subject/object cannot be outdone by human/nonhuman but that we are heading in a direction where the latter distinction is more appropriate. There seems to be a confusion concerning objects (which I believe can refer to technology of sorts): “What gives thrust to the arrow of time is that modernity at last breaks out of a confusion, made in the past, between what objects really are in themselves and what subjectivity of humans believes them to be, projecting onto them passions, biases, and prejudices” (180).  I believe that this is the problem many of the philosophers that we have encountered deal with, the notion of projecting our subjectivity onto technological devices that are capable only of objectivity. He goes through a series of levels to break down the meaning of what sociotechnical refers to…feel free to add segements!

11: Political Ecology

–”Political representation of nonhumans seems not only plausible now but necessary, when the notion would have seemed ludicrous or indecent not long ago”

This odd notion was discussed in a previous post when the AIdan was place in a scenario, and the question was how to punish a robot? If nonhumans have the same rights as humans, will it be as effective to charge them the same way? If they have the same rights…how far are they from being our equals? Is our society ready for that?

10: Technoscience

I’m confused in this section how yeast and the scientist are related…but this part is interesting:

“…a scientist introduced himself, ‘Hi, I am the coordinator of yeast chromosome 11.’ The hybrid whose hand I shook was, all at once, a person (he called himself ‘I’), a corporate body (’the coordinator’), and a natural phenomenon (the genome, the DNA sequence, of yeast). The dualist paradigm will not allow us to understand this hybrid” (182).

My question is, how is this a hybrid? The scientist may interact with yeast in a lab, but that doesn’t mean that he is “of” yeast. How does he fall under this category? I guess the last part of the quote is correct, I still can’t seem to grasp this concept.

He also makes another interesting claim, “Nonhumans are endowed with speech, however primitive, with intelligence, fore-sight, self-control, and discipline, in a fashion both largescale and intimate” (183). I have a hard time with this claim because he uses terms that are too broad and elicit certain capacities that technological devices don’t have. Self-control? How so? Intelligence? Very VERY primitive at best. Speech..okay…maybe. Though, from the examples that I’m aware of, these nonhumans are endowed by HUMANS all these capacities..and at this point they are very limited capacities.

9: Networks of Power

I don’t really understand what Hughes has done, but I think this writing is based on previous knowledge of sorts. I do know that Bruno claims that humans and nonhumans borrow from one another’s realms for two purposes, “to socialize nonhumans” and “to naturalize and expand the social realm.” Gehlen would prefer to call this “crossover” manipulation of sorts rather than the implied exchange by use of the word “borrowed.”

8: Industry

“…there is no difficulty in defining material entities because they are objective…composed of forces, elements, and atom. Only the social, the human realm, is difficult to interpret…because it is complexly historical…’symbolic’” (184).

Haraway referred to this notion of history/symbolism as a detriment to the human race. The beauty of cyborgs is that they have no “origin story,” whereas every human has one and builds their lives based on many elements composed from their origin story. Bruno of course is trying to suggest otherwise, that objects do have a history, that they aren’t primitive or immutable. This is because of all the crossovers that he has already discussed in the essay thus far.  He believes that industry has this capacity to extend to “matter a further property that we think of as exclusively social, the capacity to relate to others of one’s kind” (184). Bruno also believes that when you have machines working together, as in, a system of machines, “ruled by laws and accounted for by instruments, is to grand them a sort of social life” (185).

7: The Megamachine

“the organization of large numbers of humans via chains of command, through a range of ‘intellectual techniques’ of the many nested subrograms fro action” (185).

–Bruno believes that nonhumans replace some of these subprograms, “machinery and factories are born.” These subprograms seem to be the feedback loops that some philosopher was talking about.

I’m being too nitty-gritty (sp?) so yeah…you guys give it a go!

one last bit:

“But my main point is that, in each of the eleven episodes I have traced, an increasingly large number of humans are mixed with an increasingly large number of nonhumans, to the point that, today, the whole planet is engaged in the making of politics, law, and soon, I suspect, morality. The illusion of modernity was to believe that the more we grew, the more separate objectivity and subjectivity would become, thus creating a future radically different from our past” (190).

Below the jump is the final. Post questions you have in this thread, I’ll be doing a review session sometime after we get back.
Read the rest of this entry »

Wow! Okay so writing this post is partially to help me work through my thoughts. I’m having a really hard time understanding what the hell she’s trying to say because she makes soo many allusions to things I have no knowledge of. Here goes….

I believe that she is trying to say that women need to “get on” top of the whole cyborg and technology culture because this avenue is still open for change. From a linguist perspective, our language is very gendered. So much of our social interactions are gendered and thus limiting to women. Often times, these same limitations are posed towards minorities as well. “Liberation rests on the construction of the consciousness, the imaginative apprehension, of oppression, and so of possibility” (139). By making a sizable indent in cyber culture, feminists can define the cyborg. By actively constructing the cyborg identity, Haraway believes women can create a realm that isn’t limiting. “The cyborg is a matter of fiction and lived experience that changes what counts as women’s experience in the late twentieth century” (139). The cyborg will impact the women’s movement because it has no gender. Currently, until the notion that we are all cyborgs is widely accepted, this field is still open terrain. By constructing the reality of cyborgs, one can affect change on “social and bodily realit{ties}” (139). 

Just as Gehlen believed, Haraway claims our society has a “tradition of reproduction of the self from the reflections of the other” (140).  Whereas Gehlen claims that humans manipulate and use nature to suit our needs, Haraway insists that “Nature and culture are reworked; the one can no longer be the resource for appropriation or incorporation by the other” (140).

I believe that Haraway brings up a very interesting point about our own origin stories. They are very gendered in that our interactions with our mothers or even our own experiences in a gendered role impacts how we relate to our surroundings. She mentions the “oedipal calendar,” {yes I had to look it up} for those of you who don’t know what that means it refers to the oedipus complex, a complex of emotions aroused in a young child by an unconscious sexual desire for the parent of the opposite sex. The uniqueness of the cyborg is that it doesn’t have an origin story that entails this (the oedipus complex) or any other gendered origins. Because of that, we {I believe she refers to women in the feminist movement} have the wonderful opportunity to affect change. 

There is this notion that online, boundaries of race, class, and gender are erased. I believe that Haraway agrees with this notion but insists that this concept be monopolized by feminists? Clarify anyone?

I believe that Haraway cites the importance of recognizing consequences of ones actions and the necessity of being aware of our inability or at least our track record of our lack to identify the consequences of our actions. She states, “The home, workplace, market, public arena, the body itself–all can be dispersed and interfaced in nearly infinite, polymorphous ways, with large consequences for women and others—consequences that themselves are very different for different people and which make potent oppositional international movements difficult to imagine and essential for survival” (144). 

A later quote that supports my earlier claim that Haraway insists that women must construct the cyborg, “The cyborg is a kind of disassembled and reassembled, postmodern collective and personal self. This is the self feminists must code” (144). Since there is no real, firm, or established notion about cyborgs, women must “code” or create this image to their benefit. Since the cyborg is very much considered to be a human or at least we identify with them, women need to have a say in constructing this image. 

Haraway spends some time discussing the negative impact technology has had on women. The “homework economy” refers to a “restructuring of work that broadly has the same characteristics formerly ascribed to female jobs, jobs literally done only by women” (146). Many types of jobs are being feminized in that they are essentially being made extremely vulnerable. Technologies of sorts have replaced many men in the workplace, and there is ever more pressure on women to generate income for the family unit as well as keep up with the “home” front. 

Another point that Haraway touches on is this notion of “identity tourism.” I don’t think she uses this term, but it was brought up in an article I read for my GWS class. She does say, “These are the technologies that promise ultimate mobility and perfect exchange–and incidentally enable tourism, that perfect practice of mobility and exchange, to emerge as one of the world’s largest single industries” (147). The internet allows us to reinvent ourselves and take on other identities (opposing genders, reside in a different class, identify with a different demographic than our own). Technology enables this easy tourism because there are no consequences. People believe that they “understand” what it is like to be some other identity because they have played with their online identity. However, they can’t truly understand, because they don’t have a true, lived experience.

Donna Haraway, a philosopher and biologist, is a socialist feminist with unique viewpoints concerning several societal problems.  Cyborgs, however, were her focus in her Cyborg Manifesto.  Enjoying “blasphemy” and employing irony as a political and rhetorical method, she attempts to create a new political idea that is faithful to both feminism and materialism; she decides to use a cyborg as her metaphor.  She defines a cyborg in four ways:

1) “Cybernetic organism”

Cybernetics is defined as the study of communication and automatic control systems in both machines and living things.  A cybernetic organism, therefore, must be one that functions through a communication and control network.

2) “Hybrid of machine and organism”

Her “hybrid of machine and organism” contains organic and inorganic materials.  This provides some problems for the conventional definition of biological life - the cyborg parts would not increase in size, do not consume energy in the sam way, require no homeostasis, and do not respond to stimuli.  Defining life in unequivocal terms is still challenging for any scientist, and the argument could easily be made that as long as the system still exhibits all requirements as a whole, the cyborg is still alive.

3) “Creature of lived social reality”

The cyborg is a creature of the present, and It exists now.

4) “Creature of fiction”

The cyborg is a creature of the future, and will continue to advance.

These four definitions, for Haraway, exist simultaneously; they are codeterminate.  Philosophically, Haraway sees no difference between “fiction” and “lived social reality” because they constantly define and refine one another.  Feminists, she says, use the idea of “women’s experience” as both political fiction and crucial fact.  The cyborg, then, changes the methods for acquisition of experience and the definition thereof.  Her conception of a cyborg differs from that of other socialists and feminists in that she does not buy into the dualism - mind / body, organic / inorganic, idealism / materialism - that they see.  She regards their perception of dualism as entirely meritless.

Perception of cyborgs, Haraway says, is largely a “border war” - people might believe that cyborgs are confined to science-fiction, but she cites modern manufacturing and medicine as fields in which cyborgs are employed and created.  The cyborg, she says “gives us our politics” - we are already cyborgs according to her view.  Military history is important to this idea, as she regards transformation into a cyborg as a sort of termination of our attempts to increasingly dominate our environments.  Our combination of organics and inorganics places humans in the middle of the scale, between the absolute organic nature of animals and the mechanical, inorganic essence of a machine.  These, too, are borders.  The return to nature, she says, is impossible - pollution and medical experimentation cause ethical problems that pull us too far from that extreme.  Baboon heart transplants, for example, pose ethical dilemmas for animal rights activists as much they do for human purists.  The second boundary, that between humans and machines, is approached through our refinement of autonomy.  Haraway states that modern machines “make ambiguous the difference between the natural and the artificial” - “our machines,” she says, “are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert.  She cites the universal presence of microprocessors in modern technology as an example of how “small is not so much beautiful as pre-eminently dangerous.”  The cruise missile and microchip are two different examples of technology that plague us; the former represents technology’s destructive potential, and the second implies a sort of “invisible illness” - we constantly consume and interact with technology despite our unawareness that much of it exists.  These “border crossings” are significant for socialism and feminism in that they are essential to convince modern socialist feminists that negotiating in a technological world is an undertaking worth improving upon.  The poorest women - those who would benefit from her socialist ideas most - are those who suffer the greatest from scientific progress.  Home-workers are underpaid, sweatshop workers are exploited, and medical trial guinea pigs undergo potentially harmful tests.

To attempt to summarize: Haraway wants socialist feminists to actively engage technological economies.  The political struggle is not a complete adoption or an outright rejection of technology and its culture, but the capacity to understand both extremities.  Each position, she says, “reveals both dominations and possibilities unimaginable from the other vantage point.”  The cyborg, to Haraway, is a monstrous and illegitimate myth of feminism.

Okay, this was part one.  I might have been a little redundant at times, but this text is monstrously dense.  Perhaps I’ll do part two later.

I would like to make a proposal that I somewhat made in class today, which was along the lines of what Brad said (actually, I interrupted him… sorry, Brad). It was in regards to the need of face-to-face relationships and wasn’t taken very seriously or much into consideration, so maybe I was completely wrong, but I can’t see why. Here goes:

The reason people won’t break up over text message is because relationships are built off of face-to-face contact. That’s the way our brains have adapted, so that’s the way relationships are handled, so if your relationship is started and structured off of that personal communication, then it would only be right for it to end that way as well. However, if your relationship was started and structured over text, then it would be completely fine to end it over text, because your brain has adapted towards that kind of communication so it’d be permissible to act that way throughout your entire relationship (beginning to end). In that instance, a face-to-face breakup would be more deficient than a text, and text more deficient than a face-to-face in a relationship built off of personal contact, so there is neutrality here (like Clark might suggest). If this doesn’t work for you, then let me illustrate what I am trying to say…

Imagine a kid that is raised without any human contact, but the way he communicates with people is through text and some sort of webcam. You would probably deny that as a child he will not experience the same emotions as someone who does have personal contact in their life, but I would disagree. Children are always affected by what they see off of TV (Sesame Street makes them laugh. Frosty the Snowman made me cry- the part where he died really hit home), so if that is the case, then why wouldn’t this hypothetical kid feel similar emotions that are brought by what he sees or reads from the webcam or text? This happens all his life until he dies, and he has completely adapted to this way of communication. The only reason I would see as to why he would want to seek personal contact would be out of curiosity and none other, because human contact is only “essential” because that is the way our brains have adapted. Also, technology has only recently allowed us to begin adapting to impersonal communication, and look where it’s gotten us thus far- Myspace/Facebook/Textmessage addicts. My girlfriend’s 12-year-old sister insists upon texting her friend that is literally 10 feet away from her, because the technology has become available, and although it is somewhat ridiculous, she is embracing that way of communication, much like a large portion of the upcoming generation, so try telling them how “essential” human contact is to communication. Hopefully, I didn’t miss anything, but if there’s any questions or disagreements, then feel free to comment.

Kelly-Text Message Breakup