Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
recognized, as others have not, the continuing influence of Cartesianism
and its mechanistic ideal on our understanding of evolution and ecology,
and so on reconceiving our place in nature.
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There is, Jonas conceded,
no inherent reason why evolutionary theory—or even the science of
ecology, for that matter—will not continue to take a manipulative and
even aggressive stance toward the natural processes to which we must
now adapt. Thus, he made it clear that the question of what is meant by
adaptation
becomes critical, not only in light of Darwin, but also as part
of our response to technology in general and the prospect of genetic engi-
neering in particular.
Given the growing dependency of molecular biology on computeri-
zation and the metaphysics it embodies, an answer to this question
seems to have emerged: cybernetics.
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Defined in the
Oxford English
Dictionary
as the science of systems of control and communication in
both organisms and nonliving machines, cybernetics has given new
life to the clockwork universe and the growing conviction that the
human mind and body are best understood on the model of a me-
chanistic pas de deux with their surrounding environment. This should
come as no surprise. Modern technology, after all, has always been cyber-
netic to a degree in its concern with an automation and, more recently,
roboticization that are believed to render superfluous direct human
control over the operation of tools and machinery, freeing us from
the drudgery of labor and immediate involvement in the natural world.
What is new today is the extension of mechanical techniques and hard-
ware to living things, including, of course, human beings and their
bodies—more or less the scenario foreseen by Descartes in his linkage of
the mastery of nature with the promise of a new medicine modeled on
the success of the mechanical arts.
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This is important for two reasons,
one epistemological, and the other metaphysical. First, and more obvi-
ously, this extension makes possible a computerized model of the human
brain, the kind of paradigm that artificial intelligence research has been
employing for decades. Further, in claiming to overcome Cartesian
dualism, while at the same time failing to address the threat of the
metaphysical determinism that first gave rise to it, the biologistic ap-
propriation of cybernetic models allows for a questionable and rather
surreptitious transference of the notion of telos from the human to the
mechanical sphere. And this has led, oddly enough, to a projecting of
