I’m not directly reading or responding to Andy Clark’s Natural Born Cyborgs (NBC), I did that rather awkwardly in a review to be published in Minds & Machines. Instead I’m taking a closer look at other folks who have taken the risk of commenting on this surprisingly slippering book in print. There’s certainly no lack of comment, the reviewers at Metascience weren’t satisfied by providing a single review. Their “review symposium” included 4 reviews and a response by Clark.
In the most recent issue of Janus Head, (Special Issue on “The Situated Body”, Evan Selinger and Timothy Engström respond to Clark’s book from a phenomenological position and Clark responds (I don’t expect Clark to respond to or even finish reading my own review when it appears, I can’t remember much about what I wrote except that it was pretty shallow.).
The Metascience and Janus Head approaches are on either end of possible responses to NBC. The Metascience reviewers are very taken with Clark’s optimistic techno-futurism and share his general belief in the great possibilities for the emerging cognitive technologies. They will not only increase our power over the natural world, but they will deepen our understanding of ourselves. The `active externalism’ presented by Clark contrasts with the position that we’re are spirits trapped in a cage of bone, rather we are collections of relatively processes centered in our skulls but also inextricably integrated with our environment. Building machines to enhance these processes requires a greater understanding, even if the machines become invisible in day to day practice. Selinger and Engström also focus on Clark’s futurism, but they’re more disturbed than excited by Clark’s optimistic approach. Clark’s arguments can be considered at least semi-phenomenological since he is both aware of the literature of the phenomenological tradition and focussed on the details of the lived environment. For a hardcore phenomenologist however, changes in the lived environment are not necessarily good. A change in horizons is bound to obscure as much as it reveals and the grounds for making an evaluation of the relative worth of the new horizon and the older horizons. Not only are things lost in the new horizon, but we may not be able to recall why they were valuable to begin with. Once the river has been put into the standing reserve, a Heideggerean might observe, it will seem as if that is the only natural way to consider the river.
One reason that my review was as uninteresting as it turned out is that I don’t think that NBC, or really any of Clark’s books, are technical treatises on ontology or such things. He writes in a vibrant tradition of popular scientific writing and thus has more in common with Carl Sagan than with Don Ihde.
The key to Clark is that his books (as opposed to papers and reports of research) have a strong element popularization. Wetware didn’t pretend to be anything else, and it was very successful in making complex material accessible to a non-specialist audience. (I used that particular book as a supplementary text in an undergraduate seminar on philosophy and cognitive science.) These books do not provide final answers so much as they synthesize and present more detailed, and thus more accurate work, written in journals for specialists.
