Review Essay: Andy Clark, Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence

Marsh, Leslie

English

CogPrints Cognitive Sciences Eprint Archive

Review Essay: Andy Clark, Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence.

Cognitive Sciences ePrint Archive

Cognitive Systems Research 6 (2005) 405–409
www.elsevier.com/locate/cogsysBook review
Review of Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and
the Future of Human Intelligence, Andy Clark; Oxford
University Press, 2003, $26.00, 240 pp. ISBN: 0-1951-4866-5
Action editor: Stefan Wermter
Leslie Marsh
Centre for Research in Cognitive Science, Department of Informatics, University of Sussex, Falmer, Brighton BN1 9QH, UK
Available online 5 July 2005The notion of the cyborg has exercised the pop-
ular imagination for almost two hundred years. In
very general terms the idea that a living entity can
be a hybrid of both organic matter and mechanical
parts, and for all intents and purposes be
seamlessly functional and self-regulating, was pre-
ﬁgured in literary works such as Shellys Franken-
stein (1816/18) and Samuel Butlers Erewhon
(1872). This notion of hybridism has been a staple
theme of 20th century science ﬁction writing, tele-
vision programmes and the cinema. For the most
part, these works trade on a deep sense of unease
we have about our personal identity – how could
some non-organic matter to which I have so little
conscious access count as a bona ﬁde part of me?
Cognitive scientist and philosopher, Andy Clark,
picks up this general theme and presents an empir-
ical and philosophical case for the following inex-
tricably linked theses.1389-0417/$ - see front matter  2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserv
doi:10.1016/j.cogsys.2005.05.003
E-mail address: l.marsh@sussex.ac.uk.1. The human mind is naturally disposed to
develop and incorporate tools.
2. Humans have always been to a greater or lesser
degree cyborgs.
These two theses give the informal derivation of
the title: Natural-Born Cyborgs. Clarks appropri-
ation of the image of the cyborg is in the service of
these theses and has little to do with some futurist
utopian manifesto or nightmarish ‘‘post-human’’
scenario. His interest is in addressing a question
central to cybernetics: ‘‘How does human thought
and reason emerge from looping interactions be-
tween material brains and bodies, and complex
cultural and technological environments?’’ In the
service of answering this question, Clark considers
a diverse selection of technological props or aids
from the commonplace (the mobile phone) to dis-
cussion of implants and collaborative ﬁltering pro-
gramming to the more unusual (the prosthetic
performance artistry of Stelarc).
Clarks project is threefold with one primary
task and two derivative tasks. The primary tasked.
406 Book review / Cognitive Systems Research 6 (2005) 405–409is to dispel the fear generated by the sense of exot-
icism typically attached to the notion of the
cyborg. On closer examination the integration of
technology (the artefactual) with the biological is
so ubiquitous, it is in many respects banal: ‘‘It lies
on a direct continuum with clothes, cooking,
bricklaying, and writing.’’ (p. 174). Clarks broad
conception of technology (counterposed by his
overlooking of biotechnology) raises questions
about the concepts extensional and intensional
adequacy. His inclusion of language, for example,
seems to render it so broad as to be vacuous
(Clark, 2004; Clark, 2005b; McKenzie, 2004).
Clarks second task is to emphasize the ‘‘capacity
to creatively distribute labor between biology
and the designed environment is the very signature
of our species’’ (p. 174). And ﬁnally ‘‘who we are is
in large part a function of the webs of surrounding
structure...’’ (p. 174). Discussion of these three
themes cut across the eight chapters that comprise
this book.
Clarks Cyborg metaphor turns on the con-
joined idea that (a) cognitive processes extend into
the world and, (b) cognitive states extend into the
world whereby objects are the repositories of data
that can be accessed. Clark is a leading researcher
in a loose anti-Cartesian non-representational coa-
lition comprising dynamical-, embodied-, ex-
tended-, distributed-, and situated-theories of
cognition (DEEDS). DEEDS should be set in con-
trast to the Cartesian inspired orthodox material-
ist-computationalism which has been closely tied
to a representational theory of mind, the idea
being that the fundamental relation of a person
to the world consists in the relation of the content
of an individual mind to the world of objects,
events, and states of aﬀairs as represented by that
content. Implicit is the methodological supposition
that cognition can be studied independently of any
consideration of the brain, the body, and the phys-
ical or social environment. Cartesian (metaphysics
and epistemology) is highly individualistic in the
sense that it focuses on mental operations of cog-
nitive agents in isolation or abstraction from other
persons and contexts. The DEEDS literature holds
that the most fundamental variety of human
action consists in the apparently unthinking,
skilled action that makes up much of our everydayactivities, and that does not require mental guid-
ance or intervention for its successful accomplish-
ment (p. 33). It should be noted that such a
critique does not commit one to the wholesale dis-
missal of representational theories of mind (Wil-
son, 2004). The relationship of the Cartesian
legacy to cognitive science is often presented in
caricatural form; for a nuanced assessment see
Wheeler (2005). Of course, embodiment has been
amajor theme in robotics (see Bedau, 2005; Ziemke,
2002).
As a DEEDS theorist, Clark understands there
to be a reciprocal relation between our conceptual
creativity and the environment (natural and arte-
factual), to intimate, regulate and inform concepts
and action. Whatever the resistance to the notion
of the cyborg, it does not turn upon the integration
of biological and artefactual as such but upon the
perceived ‘‘transformative potential of this coali-
tion’’ (p. 22). That there is a transformative poten-
tial is precisely Clarks point and this is to be
embraced. To deﬁne ourselves in ‘‘brutal opposi-
tion to the very world in which we live love and
work’’ (p. 142) is an incoherent notion. The history
of human-artefact integration one might say is also
a history of the civilizing process. The pencil and
paper or the hammer are paradigm examples of
transparent tools in that they are so functionally
eﬀective and ﬁnely attuned as to be invisible:
‘‘[t]here is no merger so intimate as that which is
barely noticed’’ (p. 29). The artists iterated pro-
cess of externalising and re-perceiving turns out
to be integral to the process of artistic cognition it-
self (p. 77). Clark here is emphasising the human
capacity to develop practical (situational) intelli-
gence, as opposed to the rigidity of brute (abstract)
computational power – hence Clarks famous slo-
gan ‘‘Good at Frisbee, Bad at Logic’’ (Clark,
2001, p. 133).
Since Clarks self-labelled position ‘‘active
externalism’’ is a species of externalism, we brieﬂy
have to note the fault-line that divides internalism
and externalism in recent philosophy of mind and
language. As there is a voluminous and confusing
array and conﬂation of several philosophical
polarities (Millikan, 2004, p. 228), I make no apol-
ogies for the crude outline. Externalism is the view
that the content of a mental state is in part
Book review / Cognitive Systems Research 6 (2005) 405–409 407determined by elements of the external world. By
contrast, internalism is the view that the content
of mental states is determined by features of the
conscious subject without recourse to environmen-
tal conditions. It should be noted that externalists
are not committed to the claim that mental states
are somewhere other than in the head, and individ-
ualists do not think that what is outside the head
has nothing to do with what ends up in the head.
There is a great deal of resistance to what seems
like counter-intuitive aspects to Clarks ‘‘active
externalism’’, in particular to the idea that cogni-
tive states extend into the world. Sterelny (2004)
takes issue with Clark (and Chalmers) apparent
over-reliance on a functional similarity between
internal and external memory, or to put it another
way, the diﬀerence between cognitive states and
cognitive content (Dartnall, 2004).
Can we accept that a state of believing is really
out there? (Dartnall, 2005, p. 142). Clarks
response is that his and Chalmers concern is with
the dispositional state of believing. So, for example
one might believe some propositional fact such as
‘‘Madrid is in Spain’’ even if this knowledge is not
in use (Clark, 2004). The proposition might be
shared by two or more agents even if the vehicle
as distinct from the content is in one case both
internal and biological and in the other case exter-
nal and non-biological. What this means is that it
just does not matter whether the data are stored
somewhere inside the biological organism or
stored in the external world. What matters is
how information is poised for retrieval. In other
words ‘‘it is not knowing so much as knowing
how to ﬁnd out’’ (p. 67). Our sense of location is
not simply a function of our beliefs about the loca-
tion of our body (p. 91): it is the two-way ﬂow
between brain, body, and world that matters.
Another grade of integration is exempliﬁed by
microchipped pets, implants such as an auditory
prosthesis, the pacemaker, artiﬁcial heart trans-
plantation and implantable neural biomimetic
electronics (Berger & Glanzman, 2005). But it is
the example of Kevin Warwick that seems to cap-
ture the cyborg of the popular imagination: War-
wick has had neuro-surgical implants placed into
the median nerves of his arm linking his nervous
system directly to a computer. These examplesserve to illustrate that whether the technology is
external, invisible or is deeply embedded in the
biological being, is neither here nor there: the mark
of human intelligence and experience is, and has
always been, a coalition with the artefactual. Of
course, there are more ‘‘opaque technologies’’,
technologies that are visible in that the required
skills and capacities are not yet suﬃciently devel-
oped. But this does not detract from Clarks point:
such technology should contribute nothing to the
complexity of the tasks they support – ‘‘complexity
should reside in that of the task, not the tool’’ (p.
45).
These examples have mereological import to
some and it is here the tricky topic of personal
identity comes into play. This topic has, at best,
been very cursorily treated by most DEEDS theo-
rists; at worst, totally ignored. Though there are
problems in the presentation of this topic in
Cyborg, it oﬀers the most sustained treatment
yet. There is a voluminous literature in the analytic
philosophical tradition going back to Locke that
considers the notion of personal identity ab-
stracted from any socio-cultural context. Lockean
theories take psychological continuity to be the
criterion of personal identity. Clark takes the view
that we are not just a kind of rational or intellec-
tual presence but a conglomeration of ongoing
goals, projects and commitments that cannot arbi-
trarily be changed. One recognises oneself in part
by keeping track of this ﬂow of projects and com-
mitments; others recognise me not only by my
physicality but also by some distinctive nexus of
projects and activities. It is Descartes notion of a
centralised controller, some central cognitive and
conscious essence that makes me who and what I
am (p. 138) that Dennett (1991) and Clark take
to task. In Clark (2004) he explicitly says that at
root he is oﬀering a kind of no-self theory. This
has strong resonance with Derek Parﬁts (1984)
and Dennetts (1991: 423) Buddhist-like conclu-
sions. Parﬁt deploys science ﬁction inspired
thought experiments to test our intuitions about
self identity. Parﬁt distinguishes two views about
the nature of persons, one the Non-Reductionist,
the other the Reductionist. The former is the
Cartesian Ego whereby a person is distinct from
his brain, body and experiences. The latter, Parfits
408 Book review / Cognitive Systems Research 6 (2005) 405–409position, is that the existence of a person just con-
sists in the existence of his brain, body, his
thoughts, deeds and innumerable other physical
and mental events – personal identity is not a sep-
arate further fact.
Clarks proposal is that all that should matter is
that the conscious self has a broad sense of what
the entire situated and embodied agent can and
can not do: so ﬁtted with a new prosthetic leg that
now allows me to walk, my sense of what I can do
must rapidly alter and catch up and this bundle of
‘‘taken-for-granted’’ skills, knowledge, and abili-
ties that surely structures and informs our sense
of who we are and what we know (Clark, 2005a,
p. 8).
Orthodox cognitive science has systematically
overlooked not only the location of thinkers in
their physical environments, but has also over-
looked the interactions amongst thinkers in the
ambient social soup. Clarks theme of looping
interactions between material brains and bodies,
and complex cultural and technological environ-
ments is exempliﬁed in another domain – the soci-
ality of minds. The social and distributed cognition
emphasis on the social context of knowledge has
begun to redress the lacuna of de-contextualised
theorising in the Plato-Descartes tradition. While
Clark does not tackle social epistemology per se,
his Chapter 6 entitled ‘‘Global Swarming’’ out-
lines a fertile source of ideas for social epistemol-
ogists. Clark discusses ‘‘collaborative ﬁltering’’
(CF) as exempliﬁed by Amazon.com which ex-
ploits the principles of ‘‘swarm intelligence’’. CF
exploits similar principles to those underlying
pheromone-based self-organization of ants and
bees whereby each episode of use or access by
an agent lays down a trace. After a suﬃcient
amount of activity (here consumer activity),
exploitable patterns emerge. Self-organisation as
a general principle has much wider application
in areas of information extraction and retrieval.
This activity supports a kind of automatic pool-
ing of knowledge and expertise and is so powerful
precisely because tracks and trails in consumer
space are laid down as a by-product (unplanned
and emergent) of the primary activity, online
shopping. One of the great advantages of this un-
planned and emergent activity is that it is ﬁnelyattuned to consumer behaviour. The downside
is that there runs the risk of ‘‘a kind of dysfunc-
tional communal narrowing of attention’’ (p. 158)
that can be self-fulﬁlling. What would be interest-
ing would be to examine the principles of CF in
relation to the notion of group minds – can the
aggregation of individual activity as outlined in
CF give rise to minimal emergent group psycho-
logical properties? (Rupert, 2004, 2005; Wilson,
2004). Another question to be considered is how
are the principles of CF to be integrated into the-
ories of memetics of ideas?
In Chapter 7, Clark highlights some socio-
political and ethical worries he has about
human-centred technology. Clark grants that the
seeds for the nightmarish scenario are latent,
but is sanguine about the prospects of this vision
coming to fruition. Clark is hopeful that there
will be an organic realignment of moral and tech-
nological value. Every technology is a two-edged
sword, conveying beneﬁts and disadvantages.
Clark is a technological agnostic: the prolifera-
tion of digital technology in our everyday lives
is neither intrinsically good nor intrinsically evil.
Of course there are socio-moral-political issues
but these are germane to the general history of
our relationship to technology from the Industrial
Revolution to the Digital Age. I do not think that
Clark can plausibly be characterized as buying
into the unreﬂective hype of techno-culture
hypercapitalism (Thompson, 2003, p. 190) or
‘‘pre-dotcom crash ebullience about technology’’
(McKenzie, 2004). As noted at the outset, Clarks
work has little to do with some misplaced futurist
utopian manifesto or nightmarish ‘‘post-human’’
scenario.
Cyborgs is, in publishing parlance, a trade
book: it has no pretensions to be otherwise. This
said, Cyborgs lays down the gauntlet to main-
stream philosophical discussions of personal iden-
tity by oﬀering some profoundly interesting
metaphysical puzzles. I think the publishers rec-
ommendation that Clark abstain from devoting a
whole chapter to personal identity (in Clarks ter-
minology ‘‘Soft Selves’’) as unsuitable for such a
book (Clark, 2004, note 4) is an aﬀront for the
reader and the author, the author being one of
the most accessible and stylish of writers around.
Book review / Cognitive Systems Research 6 (2005) 405–409 409Clark, ever engaging his critics, has the unusual
distinction of making his critics appear more elo-
quent than they really are. Thus the novice coming
to Clark via Cyborgs should have no problem in
following the debate as set out in either the now
classic primary literature (Chalmers & Clark,
1998; Clark, 1997) or in the secondary literature
referred to below.References
Bedau, M. (Ed.). (2005). Embodied and situated cognition
[Special issue]. Artiﬁcial Life, 11(1–2).
Berger, T. W., & Glanzman, D. L. (2005). Toward replacement
parts for the brain implantable biomimetic electronics as
neural prostheses. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Chalmers, D., & Clark, A. (1998). The extended mind. Analysis,
58, 7–19.
Clark, A. (1997). Being there: Putting brain, body, and world
together again. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Clark, A. (2001). Reason, robots and the extended mind. Mind
& Language, 16(2), 121–145.
Clark, A. (2004). Authors response. Metascience, 13(2),
139–148 (I refer to pre-published MS kindly sent to me by
Andy Clark).
Clark, A. (2005a). Intrinsic content, active memory and the
extended mind. Analysis, 65.1, 1–11.
Clark, A. (2005b). Beyond the ﬂesh: Some lessons from a mole
cricket. Artiﬁcial Life, 11(1–2), 233–244.Dartnall, T. (2004). We have always been... Cyborgs. Meta-
science, 13(2), 139–148 (I refer to pre-published MS kindly
sent to me by Andy Clark).
Dartnall, T. (2005). Does the world leak into the mind? Active
externalism, ‘‘internalism’’ and epistemology. Cognitive
Science, 29, 135–143.
Dennett, D. C. (1991). Consciousness explained. Harmonds-
worth: Penguin Books.
McKenzie, A. (2004). Has the cyborg been domesticated? (Or, is
Lolo a disappointing cyborg?).Metascience, 13(2), 139–148.
Millikan, R. G. (2004). Existence proof for a viable externalism.
In R. Schantz (Ed.), The externalist challenge: New studies
on cognition and intentionality; Berlin and New York: de
Gruyter.
Parﬁt, D. (1984). Reasons and persons. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Rupert, R. (2004). Challenges to the hypothesis of extended
cognition. Journal of Philosophy, 101, 389–428.
Rupert, R. (2005). Minding ones cognitive systems: When is a
group of minds a single cognitive unit? EPISTEME, 1(3).
Sterelny, K. (2004). Externalism, epistemic artefacts and the
extended mind. In R. Schantz (Ed.), The externalist
challenge: New studies on cognition and intentionality; Berlin
and New York: de Gruyter.
Thompson, W. I. (2003). The borgs or borges? Journal of
Consciousness Studies, 10(4–5), 189–192.
Wilson, R. A. (2004). Boundaries of the mind: The individual in
the fragile sciences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wheeler, M. (2005). Reconstructing the cognitive world. Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press.
Ziemke, T. (Ed.). (2002). Situated and embodied cognition
[Special issue]. Cognitive Systems Research, 3.


Being there: Putting brain, body, and world together again.

Consciousness explained.

Does the world leak into the mind? Active externalism, ‘‘internalism’’ and epistemology.

Embodied and situated cognition [Special issue].

Existence proof for a viable externalism. In

Has the cyborg been domesticated? (Or, is Lolo a disappointing cyborg?).

Reasons and persons.

The extended mind.

Toward replacement parts for the brain implantable biomimetic electronics as neural prostheses.

We have always been...

Review Essay: Andy Clark, Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence.

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