Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
servomechanism make sense and are therefore taken
as messages
only
on the basis of a complex of meaning (what Heidegger called the equip-
mental context) that transcends the strictly cybernetic circuitry or loop.
Yet it is obvious that such reflections go against the grain. The work-
ings of evolution are, in fact, increasingly understood in cybernetic terms;
and feedback models have become a commonplace in biology. Not sur-
prisingly, then, natural selection is interpreted (in essential accord with
the Cartesian outlook) as a mechanistic interaction between organism
and environment, a play of information exchange whereby organisms
“adapt” themselves to their situations solely by means of feedback loops,
especially positive feedback. Here life itself is reduced to a stimulus-
response mechanism, though one infinitely more complicated than
behaviorism could ever comprehend or account for.
Consequently, when the engineering of the human genome is presented
as a kind of cybernetic manipulation and, even more important, is
justified as merely the next step in evolutionary history, as some will
no doubt argue, we should pause and reflect on just what exactly
this “merely” means.
40
In the not-too-distant future, it would seem to
portend, we will subject the metabolism between humans and nature to
our own control, taking on ourselves in a deliberate and willful fashion
the process of natural selection.
41
And we will do this primarily in the
hope of finally re-creating our place in a second nature (having been
ejected from the original four hundred years ago), such placement now
understood not in terms of our nature, as Aristotle believed, but as an
adaptability based on the knowledge and control of the information
exchange between ourselves and the environment we long to call home.
In taking charge in such a fundamental way, we will act in the belief that
we are exercising a freedom never available to previous generations: the
freedom to invent ourselves and subsequent generations by creating a
new image of humanity based on sound scientific principles and power-
ful techniques. It will be the very power to re-create ourselves that we
will attempt to image again and again in such re-creation, most likely
through the genetic enhancement of intelligence.
But the further, and really more crucial, question of whether human
freedom consists simply in the ever-more-sophisticated manipulation of
natural processes, including those in our own bodies, is a problem that,
quite frankly, exceeds the capabilities of either science or technology to
