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Prosthetic Perception: Turn on, Tune in, Tune Out
(and then hit
Replay)
Wrye Sententia,
Ph.D
Director, Center for Cognitive Liberty & Ethics
http://www.cognitiveliberty.org
(wrye@cognitiveliberty.org)
Journal
of Evolution and Technology - Vol. 15 Issue
1 -February 2006 - pgs 93-95
http://jetpress.org/volume15/sententia.html
PDF Version
Review of Michael Chorost’s
Rebuilt: How Becoming Part Computer Made Me More Human (2005)
Michael Chorost’s story is like no other today and
his book is as riveting as it is timely. Rebuilt: How Becoming
Part Computer Made Me More Human is an intimate depiction of
important aspects of some of today’s most pressing controversies in
emerging health science technology concerned with improving the
human capabilities. Told from the vantage point of a self-reflective
Cochlear-implant patient who is a keenly perceptive writer,
Rebuilt is a pivotal tale from inside a period of rapid and
consequential techno-social transition. Medical interventions to
replace failing body parts—whether a heart pacemaker, a pig liver,
or a metal hip—are becoming increasingly routine in technologically
advanced societies, and prosthetics for virtually any therapeutic
need are generally accepted without objection from patients or
society. Yet, the adaptive neural hardware technologies like
Chorost’s brain implant, or more pandemically, “software”
psychopharmaceuticals and other drugs affecting cognition, tend to
provoke more controversy than other medical technologies because
they bring into play long-cherished assumptions about our
‘humanness’ as thinking, emotive, and perceptual beings. When it
comes to perceiving, or knowing what it means to be human, we
are inevitably caught in an organ tautology: its the human brain
that counts.
Aside from conceptual mavericks like Stelarc or Ken
Warwick, it is unlikely that anyone will soon seek (or be allowed!)
non-therapeutic brain implants. It’s too soon to line up for
elective brain surgery, which is why it’s so valuable to have a
perceptive and articulate writer like Chorost shouting back to us
from the epicenter of this technocultural storm. As therapeutic
techniques become increasingly capable of changing and extending the
human body and brain through drugs, prosthetics, and other technical
means, views on such viscerally lived societal changes are nearly
always divided. Add in, a dash of distain or morality for good
measure and you’ve got the predictable antagonism of a debate
between a George Annas v. Greg Stock. The use of the past-tense in
the subtitle to Rebuilt (How Becoming Part Computer Made
Me More Human) clues the reader in advance that Chorost, for
one, has weathered the looming social debates over what it is or
isn’t to be human in relation to radically transformative
technologies.
Chorost is, through his own astute observations in
an economy of signs and surgeries, an important guide to this next
wave. While other stories about cyborgs abound, Chorost’s narrative
is the first nonfiction autobiography of a perceptual cyborg—someone
whose senses are transformed by technology directly wired, or rather
wirelessly transmitted, to his brain. And yet, Chorost is not just
another prop in a Wired fantasy of techno-fetishistic,
commercialized masculinity. Chorost describes in detail the
fragility of his technological self—and the precarious humanity at
risk. In this book, Chorost hears past the cultural static of
essentialized versions of what it means to be human in a way that
Donna Haraway proclaimed
a theorized and fabricated hybrid mind might: “The cyborg is
resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity”.
Yet Chorost, because his life is not just a theoretical
manifesto in syncretic understanding, describes his ambivalence,
shares his losses, and recounts his pain in the way that organic
humans do. In doing so, always with a bit of self-reflective humor,
he cautions consumer-patients eager to embrace body modifications
with human-computer technological interfaces. He deftly addresses
the good, the bad, and the awkward in getting to know and use his
own advanced hearing apparatus without mincing the frustrations of
compromise as he strains for an approximation of ‘normalcy’ in
hitting his head against the ceiling of current technological
limitations.
What might we face individually and collectively
when our eyes, ears, and sense of smell are re-engineered on the
operating table? With convincing authority, Chorost assesses the
pros and cons of such interventions in perceptual human faculties
not only for himself, but also for society. He critically analyzes
some of the impending societal consequences. For instance, he
explains the nested issues for minority groups whose freedom of
choice and identity may be threatened by the ability (or pressure)
to “fix” their disabilities. He also assesses the situated
economics of corporate-driven medicine as consumers’ sensory choices
become mediated by hard/software design decisions: what does it mean
to ‘see’ ‘hear’ smell’ or ‘taste’ through a particular company’s
execution of corporate-ratified product capabilities?
Rebuilt hits the pause button on the
accelerated pace of innovation and marks an important moment in the
transition of society towards human enhancement technologies. Will
these lead to greater freedom in human expression and
understanding? In heeding Chorost’s cautionary tale as both a
warning and a celebration of next steps in culture, readers will
hear a timeless and visionary assessment of the human condition; a
valuable gift that good writers and timely thinkers share with their
contemporaries and provide as their own legacy. Twentieth-century
author, Aldous Huxley (aside from crafting his over-cited dystopian
novel about a brave new world) lamented the more subtle limitations
of human thinking caused by truncated, limited perception. Huxley
and his wife, Laura Archer-Huxley, sought and promoted ways to open
the “reducing valve” of consciousness—those calcified perceptual
filters that all too often allow us to select and ignore, even as we
see, hear, touch, taste, and live.
Chorost’s careful testimony of early
twenty-first century growing pains is invaluable for those
activists, researchers, and thinkers concerned with human rights and
emerging prosthetic technologies. Rebuilt is an explicit
manual on human self-awareness during a time of massive
technological transition and extreme vulnerability. If enhancement
technologies are to become routinely hard-wired under the skin as
readily as antidepressants, stimulants, and other perceptual drugs
are prescribed or taken for better lives, listening to Chorost makes
sense.
Haraway, D. 1991. A cyborg manifesto: Science, technology, and
socialist-feminism in the late twentieth century," in
Simians, cyborgs and women: The reinvention of nature,
149-181. New York: Routledge.
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