Natural-born cyborgs
Andy Clark이 2000년 12월 28일에 Edge에 기고한 글.1
- “My body is an electronic virgin.” (고작 24년 전 글인데 벌써 거슬리는 표현이 나온다. 요즘이라면 아마 쓰지 않았을텐데. —ak)
- “We see some of the “cognitive fossil trail” of the Cyborg trait in the historical procession of potent Cognitive Technologies that begins with speech and counting, morphs first into written text and numerals, then into early printing (without moveable typefaces), on to the revolutions of moveable typefaces and the printing press, and most recently to the digital encodings that bring text, sound and image into a uniform and widely transmissible format. Such technologies, once up-and-running in the various appliances and institutions that surround us, do far more than merely allow for the external storage and transmission of ideas. They constitute, I want to say, a cascade of mindware upgrades: cognitive upheavals in which the effective architecture of the human mind is altered and transformed.”
- “In fact, the true power and beauty of the brain’s role is that it acts as a mediating factor in a variety of complex and iterated processes which continually loop between brain, body and technological environment. And it is this larger system which solves the problem. We thus confront the cognitive equivalent of Dawkins vision of The extended phenotype”
- “All this adds interesting complexity to those evolutionary psychological accounts which emphasize our ancestral environments. For we must now take into account an exceptionally plastic evolutionary overlay which yields a constantly moving target, an extended cognitive architecture whose constancy lies mainly in its continual openness to change. Even granting that the biological innovations which got this ball rolling may have consisted only in some small tweaks to an ancestral repertoire, the upshot of this subtle alteration is a sudden, massive leap in cognitive-architectural space. For our cognitive machinery is now intrinsically geared to transformation, technology-based expansion, and a snowballing and self-perpetuating process of computational and representational growth. The machinery of contemporary human reason thus turns out to be rooted in a biologically incremental progression while simultaneously existing on the far side of a precipitous cliff in cognitive-architectural space.”