Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
The Emergence of Cybernetic Humanity
Looking back over the last two centuries, it is clear that Descartes'
attempt to safeguard human consciousness from determinism has failed
in at least two respects. First, the theoretical detachment from the world
for which his res cogitans was constructed has, as Marx and Heidegger
predicted, not held up under intense scrutiny. Theory itself, in the hands
of modern science, has come to be a powerful form of praxis replete with
its own interests and agenda for changing the world. Science has become
technoscience. Second, the breakdown of Cartesian dualism has resulted
not in the dissolution of its two terms but in the triumph of the res
extensa, a nature objectified and disenchanted, leading scientists and
many philosophers (at least in the English-speaking world) to conclude
that mind or consciousness is reducible to brain functions and the body
to a complex mechanism whose workings are no longer the province of
philosophy.
And yet, despite the influence of both Marx and Heidegger, the myth
of a value-neutral science has continued to assert itself, challenged, with
a few exceptions, by only a handful of continental and feminist philoso-
phers of science. In our confusing and at times chaotic world, science
and engineering are still looked to as standing above the fray, concerned
with matters far from the messiness of human affairs and the contin-
gencies of historical particularity, paradox, and anomaly. We supposedly
can take solace in the fact that there still remains the lawful world of
nature and the pristine beauty of its expression in mathematical formu-
las. This has been the dream. But it is beginning to dawn on many, slowly
and in different quarters, that even science can no longer claim to
progress on a track separate from the rest of human life, that it is, in
fact, implicated in nearly everything we know and do, and permeates in
known—and unknown—ways the very texture of our being. One has
only to point to recombinant DNA research to show that what happens
in the laboratory happens to all of us. Stubborn adherence to the neu-
trality ruse is, as Toulmin observes, “to argue as though a scientific exper-
iment today were still a piece of mere 'spectating' rather than an action
performed by a participant in the real world, with actual and possible
effects on both Nature and the rest of Humanity.”
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Because modern
technoscience in many cases directly and almost immediately affects the
