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Neuroexistentialism JOSEPH DUMIT neuroexistentialism Parsing the neuronal sensorium is already to dismantle through 00 analysis that which we imagine to be a comprehensive totality. If our sensorium is the sensing package that constitutes our parti- cipation in the world, then it follows that this assemblage of sensory inputs defines our boundaries, making the world present to us and by subtraction making us present to ourselves as beings in the world. This package can only seem to do this if it dis- appears—if it works invisibly, silently, quickly, and reliably. The first cyborg? “One of the first Cyborgs, this 220-gm rat has under its skin the Rose osmotic pump designed to permit continuous injections of chemicals at a slow controlled rate into an organism without any attention on the part of the organism,” Manfred E. Clynes and Nathan S. Kline, “Cyborgs and Space,” Astronautics, September 1960. In this manner, we (our sensorium + us) fit the original definition of a “cyborg” (cybernetic organism): “a homeostatic system functioning unconsciously.”1 Coined in the nascent space age by engineer-musician Manfred Clynes and pharmacologist Nathan Kline, the word cyborg was first used in 1960 to refer to a mouse dragging an attached insulin pump that osmotically regulated its blood sugar level. The mouse was certainly aware of and distracted by this new tail, so the authors’ reference to an “unconscious” system was an attempt to describe a func- tion that did not require constant active attention, or intention, on the part of the mouse-pump. This reduction Change one “part” and all parts change. in intention was seen as crucial for imagining How does the subject, the “I,” sense the astronaut-cyborg who would be too busy the sensorium? We might imagine that guiding the spacecraft, wondering at the cosmos, once the eye or fingertip processes the or conducting experiments to manage his air sense data it makes a coherent message supply, temperature, and other needs. The in- and sends it up, but this message is itself terface between the body and the technology an impulse that must be sensed by the would be “unconscious,” automatic, and taken next nerve. Each nerve or neuron in turn for granted—reflected in the etymology of the is in the position of the sensorium for 01 prefix “cyber,” which refers to the Greek word the rest of the system, being impacted for oarsman. and transponding a signal to other neu- At first the cybernetic organism’s existential rons and so on, up to the brain. Even the status was of little concern. The only question neurons in the brain are thus in a relation Kline and Clynes raised was how far we should of sensorium for their neighbors. go in embodying the cyborg. They thought And senses can lie. Recall the philoso- that the typical 1960s solution to space travel, pher Descartes sitting by his fire, won- which lugged the earth (in the form of a dering how he could trust his sense of spaceship) along with the astronaut, could be heat, light, and crackling flames. He replaced by voyagers rendered spaceworthy decided that he had no way of know- through cyborg skin, eyes, limbs, etc. They ing whether he was being deceived by thus imagined that the cyborg process would his sensory apparatus. Perhaps there was preserve “man” the subject, and especially no world outside and he had only false his projects, his will and his desires—in other signals from his senses. Implicit in this words, cyborgs would still be existentially age-old doubt is what polymath Warren human. The ’60s concept of cyborg divided McCulloch called the engineering theory man into consciousness (cognitive and defined of signals. McCulloch, trained in philoso- by attention) and body (systems-mechanical, phy, psychology, neurophysiology, and providing sensory input and active output). On psychiatry, worked and thought with this account, only consciousness was necessary Norbert Wiener from the early 1940s and to existential “man.” helped found the nascent field of cyber- But Frederik Pohl’s 1976 science-fiction book netics.3 “A signal has a double nature,” Man Plus already envisioned the existential out- wrote McCulloch in 1949, “it is a physical come of producing prosthetic cyborgs: The event, which happens only once in a book’s protagonist was provided with artificial singular world, yet it is essentially capable limbs, spectral eyes, wings with solar power; of being true or false.”4 The sensorium, his genitalia were removed because he would in this account, is thus a semiotic inter- ingest and excrete differently.2 In the end, this face with existential implications. When man-plus became other-than-man, a Martian a neuron fires, it offers a bivalent propo- subject with different desires, projects, and will. sition—it only “implies” that it was What Pohl intuited was that there could be tripped by something in the world (true); no obvious separation between sensorium and it could also be cause for existential doubt subject, consciousness and body—nor between (false).5 Or, as McCulloch noted, “If you sensation, cognition, attention, and affect. press on your eye, you will see a light when there is no light. The signal is just as physical as ever, but because it arose in the wrong way or in the wrong place, it is a false signal, just as false as a ring on the telephone when light- ning strikes the wires.”6 McCulloch read a lot of Leibniz and some Spinoza. As an engineer he thought constantly about the problems of real machines, but as a psychiatrist he thought constantly about problems that humans have with their thinking. He found both 00 realms uncanny. He was fond of identifying what he called “ex- istential objects” in which each neuron-to-neuron connection is itself an interface, a sensory problem, and therefore a truth problem. For McCulloch, the difference between physics and communication engineering was profound. While the physicist saw the signal as the same signal when it arrived, the commu- nication engineer began to comprehend that signals were mere messages in a game of telephone (where each person whispers an “identical”phrase to the next, invariably garbling it in the pro- cess). Every transponding event generates a new signal. Every reception must make a judgment: “Man always has a background of nervous activity . it separates physics, for which the signals are only something that happens or else does not happen, from communication engineering, for which these same signals are also either true or false.”7 What McCulloch posed with his semiotic systems theory is, then, neuroexistentialism. Each interface, gap, and infinitesimal delay poses the question of truth. A physicist can cheat with his absolute, but a neuronal system exists in time and as such is already past zero. So as his physicist colleagues fantasized about pure information, a signal positioned against noise, the systems theorist McCulloch, with his uncanny psychic objects, wanted to know much more. A sensation of light—was it a real flash of photons, or was it just pressure on a closed eyelid? A single phone ring—was it a secret admirer finally getting enough nerve to call, or lightning on the phone line? The phone did ring, the signal is undeniable, but is it true? Such inquiries summoned yet another existential question: Could one speak of circuits or machines that desire and will? For the communication engineer, appetitive circuits and the sensorium they produce are infinitely networked and expansive —they both act on the world and get signals from the world.8 What McCulloch was locating in such circuitry was the stuff of human will: “Because what we intend and what we do are not always the same, we are forced to distinguish between what we will and what we shall do. Hence the notion of existential fact about our neurons: They are the ‘will’. Any computing machine which can capable of calculating all calculable things. detect a discrepancy between what it calculated But that was only the beginning. The and its actual output may be said to have a will conclusion to the paper is more startling, of its own.”9 and little discussed. Here the authors not- The subject or circuit is thus already a ed that if even simplistic “neurons” could “desiring machine” (to use Deleuze and be considered already human, then the Guattari’s phrase), already stuck trying to decide question of the “subject” of these neurons whether it is willing successfully, whether it is needs to be posed. These nervous nets 01 functioning correctly, and whether it is getting are deterministic forward in time, but good information, all at the same time. Yet undetermined backward. That is, given time, too, is part of the problem because com- the state of a net at time T, the state of the munication circuits are in time and take time. net at the time segment T+1 is predictable, We see this clearly as we try to adjust to but the state of the net at the earlier time new technologies. If someone doesn’t respond T-1 is not. Was it a photon or a fingertip? to an e-mail, how do we interpret this signal? That simply cannot be determined at the Our anxieties take historically specific forms: level of a single neuron, or even within Did the server go down? Did it get there, did the neural net. they not check, did it get put into spam, did If we were such subjects as these they read and not reply, are they mad at me, neural nets, reasoned McCulloch, we did they send a response that got lost? Every really couldn’t know whether what we moment of waiting is interpreted as a signal think just happened actually happened.
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