Year: 1991
Type: article
Abstract: The fear of death, the desire for an immortality... is a tremendously strong factor in determining both peop l e 's overt and covert behavior.Such immortality, when achieved, will doubtless--like our other technological advances-provide more problems than it solves.It could provide us with the worst problem, indeed, since civilization began.--Frank George Still, the fervor of the scientific and philosophical debate over programs for human engineering arises from the extent to which the mechanization of humanity tends to entice those for whom the manipulation of people holds profit.--David Porush In the late 20th century, we are no longer merely surrounded by machines; they have invaded our bodies and brains.Since the Industrial Revolution, humans have often been reduced to cogs in the machinery of the assembly line, enduring labor as repetitious as the motion of a piston in a cylinder.But now, especially with rapid advances in prosthetics, a variety of human limbs and organs can by replaced by mechanical substitutes, and the body itself can become, to borrow a phrase from William S. Burroughs, a "soft machine."Even the human heart, for centuries the imaginative locus of love, anguish, and courage, can n o w be replaced by a Jarvik-7-a steel and plastic blood pump.Since its inception in the 1940's, the science of cybernetics has proceeded on the assumption that a human being is basically a sophisticated, finite mechanism and the brain, in Marvin Minsky's words, is "a computer made of meat"; therefore, human brain patterns and language capabilities can eventually be duplicated by computers.In this uneasy conjunction between human and machine, the organic and inorganic, the animate and inanimate, the logical culmination occurs in the cyborg--the half-human, half-machine w i t h which o u r culture is increasingly fascinated in b o t h literary and visual mediums.Cyborgs are metaphors for the contemporary human condition, for they vividly dramatize t h e fundamental conflict between the human and inhuman, the spiritual trauma which occurs when the mechanical is imposed upon the animal.More than a hundred years ago Hegelian and Marxist concepts of alienation established the philosophical basis of the confrontation of human and machine.H e g e l 's assertions about alienation strongly influenced Marx, and he subsequently grounded them right in the industrial assembly line, emphasizing the emerging gulf between the
Author: Charles W. Rogerson
Institution: The Ohio State University
Language: English
Subfield: Philosophy
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2809542472