In the Phaedrus,
Plato warns us of the dangers of entrusting our thoughts to mere mechanical
contrivances outside our minds. He recounts a myth, according to which an
Egyptian god approached King Thabus and offered him the gift of writing. But
the wise king refused the gift, arguing that it would allow people to
substitute the appearance of knowledge for its substance. If we rely upon
writing to preserve our knowledge, our memory will weaken, and we will begin to
mistake the living truth for its shadow.

This line of thought continues to resonate with us today.
Everyone has heard older people clucking their tongues over the inability of
the young to add up a row of figures without a calculator, or to spell without
a spell-checker. We still think that true knowledge is contained within the
head, and our real cognitive abilities are those we can perform without the aid
of prostheses. It is Andy Clark’s aim, in this book as in his earlier Being There, to disabuse us of this
notion.

According to Clark, there is nothing special about the aids
to memory and thought which are so often decried except that they are outside
the head. But it is sheer prejudice to think that physical location
distinguishes illegitimate props from those parts of our mental apparatus which
are essentially ours. Clark argues that the human mind, without its external
scaffolding (which comes in very many forms, from natural languages to the cues
of culture, as well as sketch pads and notebook computers) is not all that
impressive. Its great flexibility and ability comes from the fact that it is
designed, by nature, to enter into complex relationships with nonbiological props.

Consider how the ability to think by manipulating symbols
expands our cognitive capacities. Chimpanzees can use their unaided brains to
distinguish between pairs of objects which are the same and those which are
different. But only chimpanzees that have been taught to associate the concepts
of ‘sameness’ and ‘difference’ with physical tokens can solve the higher-order
task of sorting pairs of pairs of objects into those that are the same and
those that are different. By using symbols, they transform a difficult
higher-order task into the simple first-order task of judging the sameness or
difference of symbols. In the same way, language transforms our cognitive
landscape, allowing us to perform the kind of tasks for which our brains are
suited, and thereby to achieve the kind of results which would otherwise be
beyond them. It is because of the supportive environments we create that we can
think so well.

We are, therefore, natural-born
cyborgs. We shall not become cyborgs when new technologies add silicon and
wiring to our brains: we have been cyborgs — creatures who are only part
flesh-and-blood, and whose abilities crucially depend upon the nonbiological —
at least since we became speaking animals. As Clark points out, this has
interesting consequences for the debate currently raging, between people like
Francis Fukuyama and Gregory Stock, over the extent to which we ought to
embrace a ‘posthuman’ future. Adding implants to the brain, and making the
world smart, is a not a new departure for homo
sapiens, which will transform its nature. Instead, it is what we are best
equipped to do, by our very nature.

This is an important insight, one which ought to relieve us
of a great deal of anxiety about our abilities and our histories. It ought to
transform our learning strategies, and the way we think about cognition. It
also, as Clark points out, has important consequences for the debate over
evolutionary psychology and sociobiology, since it relegates the modules and
dispositions which these sciences claim to discover to a relatively minor role
on the cognitive stage. However, the insight may not be quite as important as
Clark believes. There are two reasons for thinking this: one connected to
Clark’s conception of knowledge, the other to the ethical questions to which he
devotes his last chapter.

First, though Clark may be right that most of us tend to
overplay the difference between our brains and the external props we use to
think, he seems to underplay — or more correctly, to fail to notice — the
differences there are. An example of his makes both the strengths and the
weaknesses of his approach apparent. He asks us to consider the everyday
experience of asking someone for the time. We might use the locution ‘do you
know the time?’, and receive the answer, ‘yes’, even before the obliging stranger looks at her watch. Clark argues that
we ought to take this response literally: there is a sense in which she does
know the time, since knowing how to rapidly and effectively retrieve
information suffices for knowledge (on anyone’s view, you do not count as
knowing only the thoughts you currently entertain, but also the dispositional
knowledge you know how to retrieve). So technology can expand the range of what
we know, and there is no interesting difference between the facts we recall
from our biological memory and those we recall from our prostheses.

So far so good. Now Clark asks us to imagine a new
technology, which would enable us instantly to access reference books (perhaps
by having the words directly projected on our retinas). Someone asks you if you
know the meaning of an unusual word. Shouldn’t you answer ‘yes’, even as you
look it up? Clark argues you should. But in so doing, he’s ignoring a crucial
difference between knowing the time and knowing the meaning of a word. Knowing
a dictionary definition is neither necessary nor sufficient for knowing the
meaning of a word, which is a skill best captured by our ability to use the
word appropriately. It is not a mere fact, like the current time. But our
skill-based capacities — of which Clark himself has made so much elsewhere —
seem quite different, in kind, from anything of which our prostheses have so
far been capable. Moreover, these skills seem to retain an essential link to
the embodied mind. They can be extended by prostheses, but prostheses cannot
replace them.

Now the ethical problem. Clark argues that if we are already
cyborgs, then we have nothing to fear from the new technologies. But this is
just a non sequitur. We have nothing to fear from cyborgization, per se, butwe still have to evaluate each new technology on its own merits,
both in terms of what they shall mean for individuals and for larger human
groups. Though Clark considers some possible ethical problems posed by the new
technologies, his arguments here are sketchy and unconvincing. And many
problems go unnoticed by him. For instance, the fear, to which Cass Sunstein
has devoted a recent book, that new technologies will weaken the democratic
polity because they encourage people only to communicate with like-minded
individuals, and reduce the number of chance encounters which throw the
disparate together and make them appreciate each other’s problems, is not
addressed by Clark. Instead, he celebrates the extent to which mobile phones
already allow us to ignore the passengers with whom we share a subway car,
while maintaining our chosen relationships instead, and to which software
agents will increasingly tailor our environment to our tastes.

 This is half a great
book, and a missed opportunity. The half addressing the fear that scaffolding
is an alien addition to the brain is the great part, but the half devoted to
addressing the remaining ethical problems is the missed opportunity. We may
think as much with the world as with our brains, but that does not excuse us
from having to think about each bit of the world, independently of the others.

© 2003 Neil Levy