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 ? “One of the first , 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 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, , neurophysiology, and providing sensory input and active output). On psychiatry, worked and thought with this account, only consciousness was necessary 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 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. (true/off), therefore the sensorium is always “There is no theory we may hold and no becoming more full, with no knowable back- observation we can make that will retain ground that can simply be dismissed as “noise.” so much as its old defective reference to Life is immersion, and decisions are carved the facts if the net be altered.” Here was out of an ever-thickening whole. a logical basis for understanding paranoia The maddening anxieties we can feel inside and other sensory problems: “Tinnitus, these circuits of communication are not just paraesthesias, hallucinations, delusions, attributions. The very force of McCulloch’s confusions, and disorientations inter- work was to suggest that anxiety is wired into vene.”11 Descartes’s doubt is here realized the circuits themselves—their shape determines in the very logical structure of this net. the affective life of the subject. Each of Mc- McCulloch is making an existential Culloch’s papers sought to prove this hypothesis point: To the extent that our brains have and explored its uncanny consequences. Par- structures like these nets (which they ticularly famous is one he co-authored with do), they are structurally and logically Walter Pitts, “A Logical Calculus of the Ideas paranoid, hallucinatory, etc. And to the Immanent in Nervous Activity.”10 Credited extent that mechanisms have subjects, with inventing the concept of neural nets, this they too must be thought through as 1943 paper took the nervousness of the nervous neurotic, haunted, etc. The Cartesian system quite literally, proving that even the “ghost in the machine” is no longer spiri- simplest neuron could calculate anything tual nor occult—it is a circuit action that that a Turing Machine could. This is the first can be traced through Boolean as a function of the nervous net. Every gap is a proto-subject, every neuron-transponder in a sea of gaps is a proto-subject, and every neuronal interaction introduces interpretable delay. So each group of neurons, any cut or isolated circuit can be thought of as a subject with relation to the rest. And the form of that cut is psyche (or subject)—with its own sensorium, its own affect. Change a portion of the sensorium, change the timing, and the form of life is different. 00 This kind of neuroexistentialism (as I call it) counters all of those in cognitive psychology who presume to know already the “normal” programs of the brain/mind. The functioning machine is the model for such views of cognition, but if the machine itself is neurotic, we end up in a very different place. Machines always “work”—the question is how we might understand this “working.” McCulloch’s machines generate mysteries that are comparable to human ones—humans in all their neurotic, pathological, wily strangeness. He doesn’t bother with defining differences between humans and machines, but looks at kinds of circuits. His question is not: “Is man a machine?” but more productively, “Which machines are neurotic in ways that some people are neurotic? Which people get sick the way that some machines get sick? Which machines remember the ways that some people remember?” Memory, for instance, is carried by regenerative circuits in nervous nets, identical in structure to circuits found in the human brain. Once their criteria for firing is reached, they continue to fire indefinitely. They thus retain the memory of the criteria having been reached, but this “regenerative activity of constituent circles renders reference indefinite as to time past.” Again, Mc- Culloch explores the consequences for our nervous epistemology: “Thus our knowledge of the world, including ourselves, is in- complete as to space and indefinite as to time. This ignorance, implicit in all our brains, is the counterpart of the abstraction which renders our knowledge useful.”12 Like Borges’s character in “Funes the Memorious,” who lacked the sensory selection or deprivation mechanisms that modulate these “regenerative circuits,” we would be condemned to live in an eternal present, “almost intolerable it was so rich and bright.” Funes, “let us not forget, was almost incapable of general, platonic ideas. It was not only difficult for him to understand that the generic term dog embraced so many unlike specimens of differing sizes and different forms; he was disturbed by the fact that a dog at three-fourteen (seen in profile) should have the same name as the dog at three-fifteen (seen from the front).”13 constitute) our relationships with others. Neuroexistentialism clearly relies on com- “Synchronous” and “asynchronous” were piling data from fuzzy sensoria; aggregating once sufficient to describe major differ- uncertain signals, sorting them, and ranking ences between real-time communications them for truth. This accounts for the way sub- (such as face-to-face or telephone), and jects constitute themselves in the gaps, fissures, delayed one-way messaging (answering and delays between signals, and suggests how machines, e-mail). But chatting, texting, our hyper-developed technological signal and instant messaging continue to alter systems play into the neural net’s variable our sensorium and create new modes of 01 capacity for , or psychosis. neuroexistentialism. Teenagers can have Several telling examples emerged after one set of friends “at school” and another the events of September 11, 2001, when succes- set of friends “online” even if all of them sive system breakdowns revealed some of the share the same building during the day. socio-technical infrastructures of our sensorium. [See “Tethering.”] It is as if the different Scholars have studied, for example, the trans- speeds and temporalities of these interac- formation of the search engine Google after tions render the different groups invis- 9/11.14 The immediate precipitate was an un- ible, insensible to each other. We might imagined surge in the desire for mainstream say that they inhabit different time zones, Internet news sites such as those of the New York different switchable sensoria. Times and CNN. These sites quickly exceeded All circuits take time, and in that time capacity and their servers crashed. As the day is anticipation (eagerness and prediction) went on, Google became aware of this, and and apprehension (anxiety and under- began to describe its automatically cached standing). Is the signal true or false? The sites (still available when “real time” versions specific structure of anticipation and ap- were not) as featured “recent” news links on prehension is the subject or psyche of the its main page. At some point, Google further circuit. Each splits internally into affect realized that the most current stories were not and rationality. Thus we can analyze a always the ones people wanted, so it offered a second example of neuroexistential anxiety set of links to “current” and “earlier” versions from 9/11, when the cell-phone network together with explicit instructions that the as well as most other communication infra- most up-to-date news could be found on TV structures overloaded and people inside (which does not have the same bandwidth and outside of NYC were unable to con- problems). Like regenerative signals that continue nect for days or even weeks. The anxiety to fire long after the event, older data was re- produced by this delay was often described played during delays in the real. Delays and as “totally frustrating” because one knew gaps were crucial to the sorting and ranking of that at any moment packet switching stored memories. Repeating synaptic sequences could enable a call to go through. Anxiety were laid down to form collective memories, here was subject to a stochastic system, on tap via the technological sensorium. another level of properly social circuitry Users of the Internet thus became inescap- mirroring the circuitry of individual ably aware of the fractured temporality of their subject and in-dividual neuron.15 sensorial relation to the real, just as cell phones Distributed, reticulate, acephalous and other devices increasingly mediate (and networks form particularly robust social movements.16 Each “cell” (neuron) can be aggregated into a body (a social movement, per Luther Gerlach; and a body without organs, per Deleuze), but also each cell is its own sensorium, reacting and interacting with a local environment to constitute new interpretations. Another example from the wake of 9/11 involves the techno- sensorial awareness of airplane tracking. A grassroots pilot move- ment in the early ’90s had tried to gain access to the FAA in-flight 00 database and finally succeeded through a Freedom of Information Act appeal to Congress. By 1997 the FAA released its streaming data of planes in flight, stripped of military aircraft; FlightView.com (among other sites) made this data easily accessible.17 In the days following 9/11, FlightView became the forty-sixth most popular website. Most people, according to the company, were seeking reassurance that planes were flying —anywhere in the . Collective anxiety here passes through both the Internet and FAA databases. Providing a form of technological therapy, the database functions to confirm signals for the subject, constituting a specific form of “seeing” normalcy. A 2005 TV commercial for the pharmaceutical Strattera exemplifies the new technological sensorium and its normative cues. The commercial begins with a series of rapid cuts; a woman floats in front of this visual barrage and a male voiceover asks:

What if this wasn’t your TV, what if it was your mind? . . . Like the channel keeps changing . . . and you don’t have control of the remote. If you’ve felt this kind of frustration most of your life, you may have adult attention deficit disorder. A.D.D. A condition your doctor can help treat. Visit adultADDtest.com, take a simple test . . . take it to your doctor, and stay tuned.

The premise here is that normal reality is like a TV station to which you should “stay tuned.” One’s brain is a receiver; A.D.D. messes up the remote, and this drug can return you to normal, TV reality. But you can’t know it will work until you take the online test to produce the signal that you are in fact ill. Your internal sense of wellness may be defective, false. You need more data from the technosensorium to confirm or deny your neuro- existential anxiety. We are back where we started—with a mobius twist. The very invisibility of our sensorium to us, its apparently silent, straight- forward, and reliable functioning, is precisely what we need to be trained to doubt. Neuroexistentialism, all the way down. NOTES

1. Manfred Clynes and Nathan S. Kline, “Cyborgs and like dizziness, as if some invisible limb were being Space,” in Astronautics, September 1960, 26–27, 74–75; threatened with immediate amputation—his sixth reprinted in Chris Habels Gray, Steven Mentor, and Heidi sense, in effect, which was his link to Anna. All of Figueroa-Sarriera, eds., The Cyborg Handbook (New York: a sudden he understood how completely he took his Routledge, 1995), 29–34. state of permanent communication with her for 2. Frederik Pohl, Man Plus (New York: Random House, granted.” Kim Stanley Robinson, Forty Signs of 1976). Rain (New York: Bantam Books, 2004), 331–32. 3. McCulloch chaired the wide-ranging 16. Luther P. Gerlach and Virginia H. Hine, 01 on (1946–1953) and moved to MIT in 1951 to People, Power, Change; Movements of Social work alongside Wiener and others. Transformation (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1970). 4. Warren S. McCulloch, “Physiological Processes 17. The first FAA in-flight tracking site, http:// Underlying Psychoneuroses,” Proceedings of the Royal Society www.avweb.com/sponsors/fe/review.html, is no of Medicine 42 (1949): 71–84. Citations to reprint in Warren longer in service; FlightView provides this data to S. McCulloch, Embodiments of Mind (Cambridge, MA: most airline websites; ABC used it to show how MIT Press, 1965), 373–86; quotation from 373. efficiently the FAA was able to clear the U.S. skies 5. Warren S. McCulloch, “Machines that Think and of airplanes in the hours after 9/11, http://www. Want,” in Ward C. Halstead, ed., Brain and Behavior, flightview.com. Comparative Psychology Monographs (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1950), 39–50. Also anthologized in Embodiments of Mind, 307–18; see particularly 309. 6. Warren S. McCulloch, “The Brain as a Computing Machine,” 1949 lecture anthologized in The Collected Works of Warren S. McCulloch, vol. 2, ed. Rook Mc- Culloch (Salinas, CA: Intersystems Publications, 1989), 586. 7. McCulloch, “Brain as a Computing Machine,” 1949, 585. 8. McCulloch, “Physiological Processes Underlying Psychoneuroses,” 1949, 373–74. 9. McCulloch, “Brain as a Computing Machine,” 1949, 586. 10. Warren S. McCulloch and Walter H. Pitts, “A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity,” in Bulletin of Mathematical 5 (1943): 115–33. Citations to reprint in Embodiments of Mind, 19–39. 11. McCulloch, “A Logical Calculus,” 37. 12. Ibid., 35. 13. Jorge Luis Borges, “Funes the Memorius” in Ficciones, ed. John Sturrock (1942; reprint, New York: Grove Press, 1962), 114. 14. Richard W. Wiggins, “The Effects of September 11 on the Leading Search Engine,” http://www.firstmonday. dkorg/issues/issue6_10/wiggins/index.html. 15. Social circuitry underscores the existing opportunities for derangement of the sensorium, as described by science- fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson: “[He] got a quick reply: ‘All circuits are busy. Please try again.’ This was a recording he hadn’t heard in many years, and it gave him a bad start. Of course it would happen now if at any time, everyone would be trying to call someone and lines would be down. But what if it stayed like that for hours—or days? Or even longer? It was a sickening thought; he felt hot . . . He was overcome by something