Following the historical and philosophical grounding, this chapter draws our attention to the question of what it means to be living in a cyborg era, presents the existential and ontological significance of cybernetics, and describes in detail the known forms of cyborgization. This chapter covers the key considerations including conceptualizations of cyborgs, replacement procedures, normalization procedures, improvement procedures, reshaping procedure, and types of cyborgs (animo cyborgs, homo cyborgs, cyber cyborg, and robo cyborgs). It also deals with targeted areas of human-cyborg enhancement, including bionic arms, bionic fingers, bionic legs, bionic ear, bionic eyes, bionic hearts, bionic skin, bionic tongues, bionic brains, and bionic clothes. The importance of computer interfaces and key applications of cyborg research are described throughout the subsection of this chapter, such as Kevin Warwick's and Stelarc cyborg projects, the popularisation of cyborgs in art, Steve Mann's wearable computers, augmented reality goggles, and robo-cyborgs.
TopIntroduction
The procedures of enhancing man’s biological capabilities through external extensions have been present in the history of mankind ever since the stone age. The idea of enhancing the human body originates in Descartes’s thought whose starting points is a mechanical vision of the world, a vision according to which all natural phenomena can be explained using the principles of mechanics:
This is the way he reached the animal-machine hypothesis. According to this hypothesis, animals are only highly perfected mechanisms, comparable to watches and machines that existed in his time. This idea was supported by revelations from the domain of anatomy of that period, which perceived muscles and joints as systems of levers. However, there is no doubt that the crucial argument came from Harvey’s (1628) discovery of blood circulation, as it proved that the heart, whose role was so vital in the life of man, was just a pump, i.e. a mechanism...He definitely saw the human body as a mechanism, but he accepted the existence of some kind of consciousness, some kind of immaterial soul, which was ascribed higher human activities, such as thought, volition, etc. Descartes’s standpoint was re-accepted and brought to an extreme by La Mettrie in his work Man a Machine (1784). In it, he claims that the whole man, not just his body, must be understood as a complicated machine, a physical manifestation of the activities of this machine. La Mettrie’s major argument was that the activities of the soul, such as thought, consciousness etc., are conditioned by physiological states – brain injuries, consumption of alcohol or tranquilizers have an immediate effect on the psychological properties. (Vermeersch, 1971, p. 186).
Descartes' division of being into res cogitans and resextensa has led to a far-reaching division into the “thinking” and the “extended”, that is, towards the unnatural division of life on its mental and corporeal part. In Jonas’s view, the corporeal represents the central problem for ontology “The body which is alive and mortal, which has the world and belongs to the world as a part thereof, which can feel and be felt, whose external form is the organism and causality and the eternal form only the being and finality – is the memento of the still unresolved question of ontology what the being is…” (Jonas, 1987, p. 39). Furthermore, “without the body and its elementary experience, without this starting point of our most extensive and general extrapolation into the wholeness of the reality, one could not gain any insight into the power and the activity in the world, nor the active connections between all things and, thus, no understanding of nature in general (Jonas, 1987, p. 46). The task of philosophy is to “regain the internal dimension of the organic by reading the biological text” (Jonas, 1987, p. 9), thus overcoming the division into res cogitans and res extensa. This way, man himself, according to Jonas, is returned to the unity of the remaining living world and encompasses the phenomena of life as a whole.
For Jonas, the organic is “spiritualized” in all its essence and at all levels of life, and the spiritual is in its essence aimed at the organic. Both are intertwined in the “mystery of the living body” (Jonas, 1987, p. 9) – the organism. The lowest forms of organic life are imbued with spirit and the highest form of the spiritual aspect of man remains a part of the organic. This perception is reflected not only in anthropology but also in biology, as the being of man and the very phenomenon of life are observed in a new way in the unity of the natural (biology) and the spiritual (philosophy). A new life and new living beings represent an inseparable fusion of the spiritual and the corporeal. These two substances cannot be observed in isolation for the purpose of any kind of scientific and technical research, nor can they be thought of as separate ontological or biological entities.