%distributed cognitive environments:
mechanomorphism - the seeing of humanity in the light of whatever machine dominates contemporary life - in 1750 with http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/LaMettrie/Machine/ La Mettrie "L'Homme Machine" it was the clock - and in the 60's a watered down vision of man machine symbiosis was put forward by http://medg.lcs.mit.edu/people/psz/Licklider.html Licklider as a means for controlling complexity - typically nowadays we call a computers storage of data a "memory", and HCI's impose functionalist models on the user as an idealism, fine tuned and executed (and conceptually stalled) as the user is effectively incorporated into its models
limiting nihilistic doctrines have been posited in various frameworks (eg. http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~jsa3/hum355/readings/ellul.htm Jacques Ellul ), generating a classical ontology of what is being vis a vis trivial machining from which is inferred that technology dominates and thereby threatens future possibilities of subjecthood by enslaving humans to technological practice and value, and furthermore cutting away meaning which endow life with significance and purpose: "there is something in the system itself, in the formal logic of programs and data, that recreates the world in its own image… …we place this small projection of ourselves all around us, and we make ourselves reliant on it. to keep information, buy gas, save money, write a letter…..we conform to the range of motion the system allows. we must be more orderly, more logical. answer the question, yes or no, ok or cancel…..then, slowly, we incorporate the whole notion of systems: we'll link registration data to surveillance, to contract compliance…finally, we arrive at a tautology: the data prove the need for more data! we think we are creating the system, but the system is also creating us. we build the system, we live in its midst, and we are changed." http://www.twurled-world.com/EllenUllman/Update/Vocabularies_for_Ullman/_technoculture/close_to_the_machine.htm Ullman . also see http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/borghayl.html Borgmann + N.Katherine Hayles' discussion and http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/13/timelines.php timelines
this double inversion of organisms into machines and non-organic non-trivial machines into organisms, although clouded by equivalences of intelligence and tool using, suggest that the opposition between organism and machine has never been a given but the distinction has been the main stay of western metaphysics and is why, at its time, La Mettries thesis was so shocking. http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/k/k16j/ Kant , in the Critique of Judgement, classifies a machine as possessing a "motive force" in contrast to an organism which is that which has within it a formative, reproductive force. Kant specifically focusses on the watch, which lacks "natural purpose", a teleological distinction he makes to render machines as only existing for the sake of the other.
1) the human being is an unfinished project, open to future and non-normative modes of experience and behaviour 2) human beings stand shaped by traditions and norms that form an economy of identity and selfhood
Martin http://directory.google.com/Top/Society/Philosophy/Philosophers/H/Heidegger,_Martin/ Heidegger, by embracing 1) recognized, through Nietzsche, that the condition of 2) could be overcome through the re-understanding of technology as a new stage in being
with self-directing, self-reproducing, non-trivial machining, a new machinic phylum evolves along new lines of differentiation, introduced through Lacan's concept of "in-mixing", and as which Gilbert Simondon 1 proposed as the mark of individuality, referring to the inherent dynamical status of a systems non-self equivalence and where individuation is achieved through a process of "going out of step" within itself so maintaining a differentiated difference from its environment - a condition he labels "metastable equilibrium"; and to which Maturana and Varela expand as autopoeisis, the living process whereby a living system can be understood as a non-trivial machine that not only reproduces itself but constantly regenerates itself primarily through its second order machining (or programming)
code marks out new conceptual terrains - systems self organize and machines are mediated by machines - and supply their own ontological specificity ……
1. Simondon proposed the idea of a "metastable equilibrium' as a way of thinking individuating living systems. for him, a being does not possess a unity in its identity', which would be that of a stable state in which transformation is not possible, but rather it enjoys a transductive unity, meaning that it is able to go out of phase with itself. so becoming is a dimension of the being and not simply something that happens to it following a succession of events that affect a being which is already given and established (Simondon,G. 1992: The genesis of the individual (trans. M. Cohen & S. Kwinter). In J. Cary and S. Kwinter (Eds.), Incorporations. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 301-2, 311). - evolution is a complex, vital and dynamic process. Simondon was convinced that all processes of invention, whether in the domain of biology or that of epistemology, can be understood as transductive. . . since what is of primary importance in invention is the discovery of the dimensions according to which a problematic can be defined (ibid: 313). in other words, transduction is nothing other than the process of ontogenesis itself - this means for him, in a powerful argument he uses against the dialectic, that time is also invented in accordance with the becoming of this ontogenesis (the dialectic presupposes a previous time period in which the activity of auto-genesis unfolds) (ibid: 315)