Digital Dilemmas In The Information Age

December 19, 1999|By Susan Duhig. Susan Duhig is a writer and scholar.


Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics

By N. Katherine Hayles

University of Chicago Press, 350 pages, $18


By Patricia M. Wallace

Cambridge University Press, 264 pages, $24.95

Could it be possible someday for your mind, including your memories and your consciousness, to be downloaded into a computer? Anyone who has ever used a computer that bugged, glitched, lagged, or crashed might be leery of entrusting their being to such a touchy machine. Yet the idea that the self could be distilled into an informational pattern and that this pattern could be supported just as well by a silicon-based substrate as by a decaying carbon-based body offers up an intriguing promise of immortality.

In her important new book, "How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics," N. Katherine Hayles examines how it became possible in the late 20th Century to formulate a question such as the one above, and she makes a case for why it's the wrong question to ask. Hayles, an English professor at UCLA, holds advanced degrees in chemistry and English. With the publication of "Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science" in 1990, she established herself as an eminent voice in the study of the cultures of science. Her new book traces the evolution over the last half-century of a radical reconception of what it means to be human and, indeed, even of what it means to be alive, a reconception unleashed by the interplay of humans and intelligent machines.

In the mid-1940s, the first digital computer was built, and the first of a series of conferences, known retrospectively as the Macy Conferences on Cybernetics, was convened. Cybernetics, a term coined by Norbert Wiener in 1948, is a science dealing with the comparative study of the operations of complex electronic computers and the human nervous system. A core idea to emerge from the Macy Conferences, which were held from 1943-1954 and which gathered together researchers from fields as diverse as neurophysiology, electrical engineering, anthropology and philosophy, was that human neural structures are basically input-output systems constituted by the flow of information. On this view, human beings themselves are sophisticated information processors, with essential similarities to the information processors they build.

According to Hayles, this equation between the human and the intelligent machine creates a powerful feedback loop: Intelligent machines are built on the model of intelligent humans, but humans also increasingly come to view themselves in terms of the machines they build, using the concepts of computer science to explain their own construction and behavior. Hayles labels the groundshifting assumptions that emerge from this feedback loop the "posthuman," and she examines how posthuman ideas develop through three waves of the cybernetic movement-the period of the Macy Conferences, the development of the theory of self-generating systems in the 1960s, and contemporary innovations in the field of artificial life. She throws into the mix a raucous assortment of science-fiction writers -- such as William Burroughs, Philip K. Dick and Neal Stephenson -- in order to consider how cybernetic notions are reverberated and reinvented in the culture at large.