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Extimate Technology Extimate Technology This book investigates how we should form ourselves in a world satu- rated with technologies that are profoundly intruding in the very fabric of our selfhood. New and emerging technologies, such as smart technological environ- ments, imaging technologies and smart drugs, are increasingly shaping who and what we are and influencing who we ought to be. How should we adequately understand, evaluate and appreciate this development? Tackling this question requires going beyond the persistent and stubborn inside-outside dualism and recognizing that what we consider our “in- side” self is to a great extent shaped by our “outside” world. Inspired by various philosophers – especially Nietzsche, Peirce and Lacan – this book shows how the values, goals and ideals that humans encounter in their environments not only shape their identities but also can enable them to critically relate to their present state. The author argues against understanding technological self-formation in terms of making ourselves better, stronger and smarter. Rather, we should conceive it in terms of technological sublimation, which redefines the very notion of human enhancement. In this respect the author introduces an alternative, more suitable theory, namely Technological Sublimation Theory (TST). Extimate Technology will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in philosophy of technology, philosophy of the self, phenomenology, pragmatism and history of philosophy. Ciano Aydin is Full Professor of Philosophy of Technology, Head of the Department of Philosophy and Vice-Dean of the Faculty of Behavioural, Management and Social Sciences (BMS) at the University of Twente, The Netherlands. He has published in Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, Philosophy and Technology, and other journals. See www.cianoaydin.nl for more information about his c urrent research. Routledge Studies in Contemporary Philosophy Caring for Liberalism Dependency and Liberal Political Theory Edited by Asha Bhandary and Amy R. Baehr Language and Phenomenology Edited by Chad Engelland The Philosophy and Psychology of Ambivalence Being of Two Minds Edited by Berit Brogaard and Dimitria Electra Gatzia Concepts in Thought, Action, and Emotion New Essays Edited by Christoph Demmerling and Dirk Schröder Towards a Philosophical Anthropology of Culture Naturalism, Reflectivism, and Skepticism Kevin M. Cahill Examples and Their Role in Our Thinking Ondřej Beran Extimate Technology Self-Formation in a Technological World Ciano Aydin Modes of Truth The Unified Approach to Truth, Modality, and Paradox Edited by Carlo Nicolai and Johannes Stern Practices of Reason Fusing the Inferentialist and Scientific Image Ladislav Koreň For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge. com/Routledge-Studies-in-Contemporary-Philosophy/book-series/SE0720 Extimate Technology Self-Formation in a Technological World Ciano Aydin NEW YORK AND LONDON First published 2021 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Ciano Aydin The right of Ciano Aydin to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. The Open Access version of this book, available at www. taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this title has been requested ISBN: 978-0-367-68728-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-13940-9 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra To Nur, Zeno, Daniël and Helena Contents Acknowledgments xi Introduction 1 From Inside to Outside and from Outside to Inside 1 Understanding Human-Technology Relations 4 Extimate Technology and Self-Formation 7 Research Question 11 Outline of the Book 12 PART I What Is the Self? 15 1 The Essentialist and Dualist Self and Why It Cannot Be Sustained 18 1.1 Aristotle’s Grounding of Essentialism 18 1.2 Descartes’ Elevation of the Self to an Independent Substance 24 1.3 Why the Essentialist Approach Is Alluring but Untenable 31 2 From “Self” to “Self-Formation” 41 2.1 Nietzsche’s Will to Power as an Anti-Essentialist Ontology 41 2.2 Peirce’s Phenomenological and Pragmatist Categories as Basis for an Interactionist Account of Self-Formation 52 Conclusion Part I 74 viii Contents PART II Is Self-Formation in a Technological World Possible? 83 3 The Autonomous Self and the Determined Self 86 3.1 Kantian Notions of Autonomy and Responsibility 86 3.2 Freedom and Determination in the Context of Social Psychology and Neuroscience 91 3.3 The Inside-Outside Distinction as a Blind Spot in Free Will Debates 95 4 The Artifactual Mind 100 4.1 The Extended Mind Thesis and the Parity Principle 102 4.2 Challenging the Notion of Introspection and Blurring the Criteria of What it Means to Be “Internal” 103 4.3 EMT, Second-Wave EM Theorists and the “Inside–Outside” Distinction 107 4.4 The Artifactual Mind 111 4.5 AMT, Normative Technologies and the Question of Self-Formation 120 5 Brain Imaging Technologies and Critical Self-Formation 124 5.1 Brain Imaging Technologies as Functional Evidence in Free Will Debates 126 5.2 Technological Inscription from Camera Obscura to fMRI 128 5.3 From Self-Determination to Self-Formation 136 5.4 Brain Imaging Technologies, Extrospection and Self-Formation 141 6 How Critical Is Critical Self-Formation? 147 6.1 Are our Longer-Term Goals and Ideals Ultimately Determined by Society? 148 6.2 Are our Cognitive and Neurological Means to Form Ourselves Determined by Institutions? 151 6.3 Reinterpreting Freedom as Self-Formation 153 Conclusion Part II 160 Contents ix PART III How Should We Technologically Form Ourselves? 165 7 Technological Self-Formation as Enhancement 168 7.1 Transhumanists and Their Ideal Human 169 7.2 Nietzsche’s Overhuman 172 7.3 Sounding Out Hollow Idols 178 7.4 Reframing “Enhancement” 187 8 The Technological Uncanny as a Permanent Structure of Selfhood 191 8.1 The Uncanny Valley 193 8.2 An Alternative Explanation of the Uncanny Valley, or the Importance of “Minor Differences” 197 8.3 The Otherness of the Self as “Extimacy” 199 8.4 Being “Closed Open” for Technology 203 8.5 Alterity in Selfhood and the Question of Technological Self-Formation 206 9 Self-Formation as Sublimation and the Question Concerning Technology 210 9.1 Sublimation as Substitution of Raw Drives for Social Valuations 211 9.2 Sublimation as Organizing Drives Around a Disruptive Void 214 9.3 Sublimation as Imposing Form to Great Diversity 224 9.4 Technological Sublimation Theory 235 10 Technological Sublimation Theory Applied to Three Technological Fields 243 10.1 Self-formation as Sublimation in Smart Technological Environments 244 10.2 Self-formation as Sublimation through Brain Imaging Technologies 253 10.3 Self-formation as Sublimation with Smart Drugs 263 Conclusion Part III 273 Epilogue: Groundwork for a Philosophy of Existential Technology 279 Text Abbreviations 285 References 287 Index 313 Acknowledgments The book incorporates reworked versions of the following texts: Aydin, Ciano. (2007). “Nietzsche on Reality as Will to Power: To- ward an ‘Organization-Struggle Model’.” Journal of Nietzsche Stud- ies 33: pp. 25–48 (©The Pennsylvania State University Press; reworked in Chapter 2); Aydin, Ciano. (2009). “On the Significance of Ideals. Peirce and the Good Life.” Transactions of the C.S. Peirce Society 45: pp. 422–443 (©Indiana University Press; reworked in Chapter 2); Aydin, Ciano. (2015). “The Artifactual Mind: Overcoming the ‘Inside-Outside’ Dualism in the Extended Mind Thesis and Recognizing the Techno- logical Dimension of Cognition.” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 14(7): pp. 3–94 (©Springer; reworked in Chapter 4); Aydin, Ciano. (2018). “From Camera Obscura to fMRI: How Brain Imaging Technologies Mediate Free Will.” In Postphenomenological Methodol- ogies: New Ways in Mediating Techno-Human Relationships (Jesper Aagaard, Jan Kyrre Berg Friis, Jessica Sorenson, Oliver Tafdrup, and Cathrine Hasse, eds). Lanham/Boulder/New York/London: Lexington Books (©Rowman & Littlefield; reworked in Chapter 5); Aydin, Ciano, and de Boer, Bas. (2020). “Brain Imaging Technologies as Source for Extrospection: Self-formation through Critical Self-identification.” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 19: 729–745 (©Springer; reworked in Chapter 5 and 6); Aydin, Ciano. (2017). “The Posthuman as Hollow Idol: A Nietzschean Critique of Human Enhancement.” Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 42(3): pp. 304–327 (©Oxford University Press; reworked in Chapter 7); Aydin, Ciano. (forthcoming). The Tech- nological Uncanny as a Permanent Structure of Selfhood. In Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Technology (Shannon Vallor, ed.). Oxford University Press (©Oxford University Press; reworked in Chapter 8). I would like to thank the respective publishers and journals for their kind permissions to reuse this copyrighted material. IEEE I thank for permission to use the uncanny valley graph from Mori, Masahiro. (2012). The Uncanny Valley, IEEE Robotics and Automation Magazin 19: pp. 98–100 (Figure 8.1 included in Chapter 8). This book has a long history and originated from a seemingly simple idea that became an obsession: in Western culture and philosophy, the xii Acknowledgments notes are often mistaken for the melody (after Bergson). Different forms of dualism, essentialism and reductionism, which are also reflected in our views of technology, seem to be manifestations of this misconcep- tion. This book is an attempt to uncover and disentangle this confusion and to provide a more appropriate framework for understanding how technologies shape the human self. I am indebted to everyone who contributed to the realization of this book, if “only” by creating the conditions under which it could be writ- ten.
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