FLIRTING WITH THE MACHINE Dr. Dennis M.

Weiss Professor of Philosophy English and Humanities Department York College of Pennsylvania dennis.m.weiss Ever mindful of the solemnity of these occasions, the rarefied atmosphere of a philosophy lecture in the august halls of a richly traditioned liberal arts institution, I thought I ought to start it out on just the right note, and so I would like to share with you this little piece of philosophical wisdom I found occupying our airwaves. Madonna Video: Human Nature Well, as Madonna has so ably pointed out, this is a talk about human nature. And certainly Madonnas video provides us with a lot to talk about. We could talk about expressing yourself rather than repressing yourself, the Freudian overtones of her message, its wisdom in the age of AIDS. We could consider the implicit message of the video that we break out the leather and chains and break out of the boxes into which society has forced us. But what I find most fascinating about this video is the simple fact that you can turn on MTV or VH1 and hear someone singing about human nature. Imagine that one of the fundamental philosophical problems of Western thought, who are we? what are we human beings? what is our nature?, that this very philosophical theme shows up in a Madonna video. Regardless of what you might think about her take on these issues, you have to admire someone who can take a timeless philosophical theme and put it to music. On the other hand, though, perhaps its not all that strange to find this philosophical theme popping up in a Madonna video. While its true that the issue of human nature has been central to the history of Western thought, it has also been an issue that has fascinated more people than just your academic philosophical type. They show up on a fairly regular basis

throughout the mass media. Human nature is frequently explored in shows and series on cable channels such as The Learning Channel, Discovery, and Public Broadcasting stations. The issue is either explicitly or implicitly raised in the attention such weekly newsmagazines as Time and Newsweek give to accounts of the Human Genome Project, claims regarding supposed correlations between race and intelligence, the issue of nature versus nurture in regard to gender, aggression, sexual orientation, and the moral status of animals. So on second thought perhaps it is not all that unusual to find even Madonna singing about human nature. Whats really ironic about all this is that while you can flip on MTV or VH1 and watch a music video on human nature, youre much less likely to walk into a philosophy class and hear a discussion about it, or listen to a discussion of it at a philosophy conference, or pick up a contemporary philosophical journal and read about the topic. In philosophy today and more broadly in the humanities, the topic of human nature has largely disappeared. Man is dead and humanism has become pass. In an atmosphere defined by the postmodern shift away from universalizing, totalizing perspectives toward more local, fractured systems and modes of analysis, no theory of human nature can survive scrutiny for evidence of bias: racist, sexist, classist, eurocentric. As Charles Taylor notes, weve become very nervous and squemish about human nature. The very words ring alarm bells, he writes. We fear that we may be setting up some reified image, in face of the changing forms of human life in history, that we may be prisoners of some insidious ethnocentrism. So we humanists find ourselves in a strange position. On the one hand, there is a consistent perhaps growing interest in the topic of human nature in the popular media. And this has been a topic central to the history of the humanities in Western thought. But, on the other hand, the topic has largely disappeared from academic discourse and is often met with suspicion. This is as unfortunate situation as I believe that the humanities still have something to offer on behalf of this theme and that we ignore it at our own peril. It is in support of this claim that I would like to consider this evening our love affair with the computer and the culture we have spawned with it.

While weve been involved in a decades long flirtation with the computer, recently the relationship has turned hot and heavy. Anybody who witnessed the orgy of self-promotion surrounding Microsofts unveiling of Windows 95 must be convinced of this. Beyond this program or that machine, the computer truly has become a pervasive force in our culture. In thinking about our current craze with computers it is important that we look beyond the mere machine itself and consider how it is being consumed, portrayed, and represented in our culture. Computers are commonly found in our literature, our video games, Saturday mornings cartoons, and Madison Avenues advertising. If youve been to the movies lately, you cant help but notice the presence of the machine in our cinema: Johnny Mnemonic, The Net, Virtuosity, Hackers, Strange Days. When were not being enticed by computers in our movies, were being urged to bring them home and hook them up to our phone lines. Everybody wants to be hooked up, downloaded, e-mailed, and cyberized. Youre either wired or tired. And no one doubts that the frenzy wont increase as we approach the next millennium. Anyone interested in the topic of human nature has to find these developments thought provoking. Marshall McLuhan has argued that the introduction of new media reshapes and restructures every aspect of our personal lives. All media work us over completely, he writes. They are so pervasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered. We need to understand how the computer and the culture that surrounds it is working us over, how it touches, affects, and potentially alters us. In focusing on the computer culture, I believe we can see how a profoundly inadequate view of human nature can insinuate itself into our thought in such a way as to become an accepted and largely unquestioned view of what we as human beings are. What I would like to do then is consider four respects in which the computer culture influences our thought about human nature. The four areas which I discuss do not add up to a completely coherent view of human nature in the manner that philosophers are accustomed. But they are suggestive of the place and nature of the human being in the computer culture. 3

1. In the twenty-first century, the boundary between human and machine implodes. Human beings have long been fascinated by mechanical simulacra of themselves and have puzzled over the distinctions between ourselves and our machines since the 17th century when Rene Descartes observed the parallels between the human body and complex physical mechanisms. In movies, beginning as early as 1924s The Thief of Bagdhad and running through to 2001, Colossus, Demon Seed, and on to the Terminator series, Star Trek, Bladerunner, and now Virtuoisty and Voyager we are repeatedly presented with figures that disturb the boundary between human being and machine, figures which provoke endless questions not only about their nature but ours as well. The computer, with its artificially intelligent, almost human-like ability to process information, introduces an added dimension to these issues. As Sherry Turkle points out in The Second Self, "The computer raises questions about where we stand in nature and where we stand in the world of artifact. We search for a link between who we are and what we have made, between who we are and what we might create, between who we are and what, through our intimacy with our own creations, we might become" (12). Advertisers continuously exploit this "intimacy with our own creations", designing ads which exploit the shifting boundary between human and machine by attributing human characteristics to computers and computational characteristics to humans. Every realm of the human, even Madonnas signature realm of sexuality, has been appropriated by the machine. Slide "Should you love a notebook for its body or its mind?" Digital PC asks. The copy informs us that Digital's computer is so slim, lightweight, and positively brainy you're bound to feel a physical attraction to it. Texas

Instruments reminds us that the perfect mate works hard, has lots of energy and never snores, Slide Slide Our perfect mate just happens to be a Travelmate Notebook. Slide Micron Technology is fast, cheap, and available, but will still respect you in the morning. Slide Slide The National Software Testing Laboratories advises us that before making any commitment in the hardware, make sure your compatible. Slide Having found the perfect and compatible mate, StrataCom warns us to StrataCom in Private. Just what is going on beneath that sheet is a question better left unasked. If our computers sometimes seem very human, it is becoming increasingly common to find humans looking more machinelike. Indeed, perhaps two of our most important characteristics are becoming increasingly mechanized, our eyes and our brains. Slide Slide Slide

The eyes were once thought to be the window on the soul. We can tell a person's character by looking into their eyes. In the computer culture, though, the eyes are replaced with screens which reflect back to us not the inner life of the individual, but their computational inner life. Slide Slide Slide The brain itself, that which is responsible for our inner life, is analogized to wetware, a combination of hardware and software. Slide Slide In a pair of fascinating images from NEC's advertising campaign, the human face serves as a substitute for the computer screen. The second ad reads, "Other workstations run Windows NT. This one actually improves it," a deliberately ambiguous phrase. To which workstation is the copy referring? The dominant image is a human face that reflects back the image which is on the small workstation in the upper right hand corner. In these somewhat otherworldly images, human being and computer screen are molded into one being that is neither fully human nor fully machine. Slide Human beings are literally transformed into their creation as in this ad for Nic Components which tells us that they have put people back in capacitors. Now these ads may be humorous and facetious, collectively they implicitly suggest that the computer has completely breached the boundary between human being and machine and underscore the growing encroachment of the computer and computational metaphors in our

understanding of the human being. Indeed, the metaphorical identity of the mind as computer software running on the wetware of the brain has moved beyond mere metaphor and become a literal model of how to understand human mentality. Even in popular discourse, we have grown accustomed to referring to the manner in which we need to reprogram ourselves, the necessity of debugging our personality, the fact of our hardwiring, or the need to get wired. We employ a language that as Turkle notes carries an implicit psychology that equates the processes that take place in people to those that take place in machines. The logical extension of all this is the claim that human beings are not significantly different from their machines. Both belong to the species information processor and both can be accounted for according to the same principles. Beyond our concern with understanding the mind, computational metaphors have extended to the very definition of life. Increasingly there is little to distinguish the science of genetics from the science of information. Evolution is seen as a master programmer and we, or better our genes, are one of its best programs. Indeed, DNA is simply natures way of programming. The biological systems of the human body are merely complex command, communication, and control systems evolved owing to the vast information processing system that is evolution. As Richard Dawkins observes in his recent book River Out of Eden, molecular biology has gone digital. As he writes, The machine code of the genes is uncannily computer-like.Life is just bytes and bytes and bytes of information. Weare survival machines programmed to propagate the digital database that did the programming. Mirroring Dawkins enthusiasm for digital life is the artificial life movement. Steven Levys book Artificial Life, subtitled A Report from the Frontier where Computers Meet Biology, describes a frontier of genetic algorithms and computational DNA where, as he puts it, human beings will see themselves in a different light. We will not be standing at the pinnacle of some self-defined evolutionary hierarchy but will rank as particularly complex representatives of one subset of life among many possible alternatives.

The apotheosis of all this can be found in the official literature of the computer culture, cyberpunk science fiction, especially the work of William Gibson. Bruce Sterling has argued that cyberpunk is an expression of a contemporary zeitgeist and that Gibsons fiction in particular offers a brilliant, self-consistent evocation of a credible future, a future that is recognizably and painstakingly drawn from the modern condition. It was Gibson who gave the world the term cyberspace, coined in his first novel, the widely acclaimed Neuromancer. In this dark, disorienting, dystopia, the future is populated by all manner of beings, none of them distinctively human. With its emphasis on neurosurgery, genetic engineering, prosthetic devices, spare body parts grown in vats, grafts, implants, and artificial intelligences controlling vast corporate data banks, Gibson imagines a future world, perhaps our future world, where any boundary between organic and nonorganic, life and nonlife, human and machine has completely imploded. 2. In the twenty-first century, we must become digital. In Cyberspace and the American Dream: A Magna Carta for the Kowledge Age, Esther Dyson, Alvin Toffler, George Keyworth and George Gilder argue that the central event of the 20th century is the overthrow of matter. As they put it, In technology, economics, and the politics of nations, wealthin the form of physical resourceshas been losing value and significance. The powers of mind are everywhere ascendant over the brute force of things. We are witnessing, they argue, a shift from a massproduction, mass-media, mass-culture civilization to a demassified civilization. Matter no longer matters. Were moving from the world of atoms to the world of bits. The knowledge age is about mind and consciousness and information. While the authors of the Magna Carta couch their prognostications in the language of science, computers, robotics, and artificial intelligence, their future vision actually owes a lot to Disney. The image of an informational paradigm, an electronic civilization, was actually first evoked in Disneys film TRON. Released in 1982, TRON was one of the first movies 8

to take us inside the computer itself, suggesting the underlying computational nature of reality and blurring the distinction between the external material world and the internal, informational world of the computer. In numerous scenes, the movie juxtaposes views of the interior of the computer with exterior reality, presenting them as visually indistinct and interchangeable, providing a visual paradigm for a demassified, informational age. TRON imagined a computational civilization populated by programs that bear the personality of their programmers, creating for the computer an inner life in which intelligent agents battle for control. The evil Master Control Program has assumed dictatorial powers and is slowly taking over all other programs. In one of the films most interesting sequences, hacker and computer game designer Kevin Flynn tries to liberate some of his programs from the Master Control Program and in the process he is digitized, transformed into computer code, and downloaded into the Master Control Programs domain. Video Clip Visually, TRON underscores the contention of the authors of the Magna Carta that we are living in a new age, an age in which to be human is to be digital. And in the digital age, Disney is not the only one interested in downloading. Consider Hans Moravecs book Mind Children. Moravec describes one of his goals in researching artificial intelligence and robotics as finding a process that endows an individual with all the advantages of machines, without a loss of personal identity (109). Moravec describes the several stages in an evolutionary process in the not too distant future in which it should be possible to completely liberate the human mind from its confinement in a body. Moravec calls this process the downloading of a human mind into a machine. The first stage will probably involve transplanting the human brain into a specially designed robot body, a shiny new body of the style, color, and material of your choice (Mind Children 110). The next stage would entail liberating the human mind from its biological substratum, transplanting it, layer by layer, into a computer. 9

Moravec suggests that a person's identity would be preserved in such a process because the essence of a person, their self-identity, is the pattern and the process going on in one's head and body, and not the machinery supporting that process. As he writes, If the process is preserved, I am preserved. The rest is mere jelly (Mind Children 116). It is the pattern rather than the substance that is important. The substance, in this case one's body and brain, is mere jelly. The final stage of this process comes when we move the mind into cyberspace itself, completely freed from any body-image, achieving the ideal of a truly bodiless mind, nothing but pure ego. Such a move, Moravec suggests, would free our minds and their creation, culture, from the limitations of biology. The goal of downloading the human mind is to become pure immortal mind. Moravec imagines a future in which the immensities of cyberspace will be teeming with very unhuman disembodied superminds, engaged in affairs of the future that are to human concerns as ours are to bacteria. Being digital, in Moravecs mind, means being disembodied, becoming pure mind. In a digital culture, the body and everything attended to it is mere noise, repulsive, needing to be repressed. Turkles The Second Self touches frequently on the loathing of the body and the desire to be able to fully control and master oneself that is common to hackers and AI researchers. In Grant Fjermedals The Tommorow Makers: A Brave New World of Living Brain Machines, this theme is regularly returned to. The body is thought to be a source of failure, disgust, limitation that must be overcome in order to become pure mind. Programmer and hacker Charles Lect puts it this way: Youre stuck in the mire of pig shit. All of us are. Youve got to be free of that. Youve got to become pure mind. In Gibsons Neuromancer, the elite cyberspace cowboys live for the bodiless exultation of cyberspace. Here too the body is thought to be mere meat. It is held in contempt; it interferes with ones ability to stay jacked into cyberspace for long periods of time. It is a prison that can only be escaped while ones disembodied consciousness roams the ethereal regions of cyberspace.

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3. In the twenty-first century, were all basically one person. In this future world of cyberspace, where life is digital and were all just information, gender, race, ethnicity are inessential, dont matter because they are matter, associated with body rather than mind. Information is gender free, has no race, and doesnt come with an accent. This aspect of the future is already evident in the wide world of the Internet, where the belief is regularly reinforced that all that matters is mind, the ideas, words, not the person to whom they belong. As Elizabeth Reid notes in her work on muds and Internet Relay Chat, in the silent world of cyberspace, all conversation is typed. To enter it, one forsakes both body and place and becomes a thing of words alone. Howard Rheingold argues that in cyberspace people are treated as thinkers and transmitters of ideas, not carnal vessels with a certain appearance and way of walking and talking. John Coates, one of the founders of the Whole Earth Lectronic Link, an early and influential computer bulletin board, puts it this way: The great equalizing factor is that nobody can see each other online so ideas are what really matter. You cant discern age, race, complexion, hair color, body shape, vocal tone, or any of the other attributes that we all incorporate into our impressions of people. While this feature of computer networks is taken to be a virtue, Wes Cooper, in an essay on virtual communities, points to a subtle subtext present in this feature of cyberspace. He writes, The complete or partial masking of identity in many virtual communities is one reason why members of visible minorities are well-represented in cyberspace: they arent visible. The tolerance and understanding this teaches is a welcome counterpoint to the increasing splintering of North American society into socio-economic, racial, sexual, and religious enclaves. Visible minorities are well represented in cyberspace, Cooper suggests, precisely because they remain invisible, mere ghosts. He implicitly suggests that it is the visibility of minorities in North American society that leads to intolerance and fragmentation. By transforming us all into words, bytes of information, cyberspace insures the invisibility of those minorities that would threaten virtual communities. In cyberspace, age, race, gender, sex are simply the noise which disrupts the

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flow of pure information, the difference which disrupts our seamless communities. To enter cyberspace is to forsake ones specificity in search of a communion of pure mind. The technology of the Internet is a technology that permits us to ignore differences and concentrate on one similarity, we can all type. This erasure of difference is a fundamental feature of the computer culture. It can be seen as well in the claim that global computer and communication networks will lead to a future global culture. Howard Rheingold explores this idea in his The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. Rheingold draws on the work of Japanese scholar Sumpei Kumon who suggests that cultural co-emulation, borrowing the computational term for a computers capacity to simulate the operation of any other machine, could be an effective social metaphor for finding ways to achieve a global culture. Kumon writes, The best way for Japan and other nations of the world to deal with the information age is to co-emulate others civilizational components that each lacks and that seem to cope with the demands of this new phase of modernization. What precisely it would mean for a people or person to emulate another people or person is not specified. In order to understand the Japanese mind perhaps I need merely understand its basic algorithms and then simply run those algorithms on my own hardware, substituting the American algorithms already programmed into my brain with the proper Japanese algorithms. Such a scheme would certainly seem to allow me to understand the worlds diverse cultures. One sees at work here a computational metaphor applied to the complex issue of cross-cultural understanding. Underlying the assumption of cultural coemulation is a view which suggests that we can ignore significant cultural differences and adopt the perspective of any people. Implicitly, these claims in regard to the Internet and Cyberspce suggest that differences only run skin deep. We can move beyond those factors that divide people if we simply concentrate on what really matters: words, consciousness, mind. A variant of this same belief underlies much work in the symbolic information processing area of artificial intelligence which attempts to create computer thought by discovering the rules that 12

underlie all thought, whether in the brain or the machine. Currently, the flagship project of mainstream AI is Doug Lenats CYC project. Lenat is attempting to move beyond the limited and brittle programs of early AI by formalizing and codifying the common sense knowledge that humans possess and that allows them to understand natural language. His goal, as he suggests, is to build a knowledge base of the millions of abstractions, models, facts, rules of thumb, representations, etc., that we all possess and that we assume everyone else does. Lenat refers to this as the common sense knowledge or consensus reality of a twentieth century Westerner and argues that in any knowledge base, and for any intelligent agent, it is essential to make the right distinctions in order to be able to organize and cope with the complexity of the real world. Implicit behind this project is the assumption that one can identify the consensus reality of a twentieth century Westerner. The projects attempt to codify common sense knowledge can only proceed either by assuming that some universal base of common sense can be fashioned out of the multiplicity of perspectives represented by twentieth century Westerners or by taking as a model the particular view of common sense associated with the AI researcher, generally a white, well-educated, middle to upper class male. One wonders what Lenat might make of the O. J. Simpson trial. Is there a consensus reality that we might identify, a universal font of common sense that might help us understand this event? Ultimately being digital means being no one in particular, being no where in particular, and having access to the worlds information banks. Neither embedded nor embodied, cybersapce and virtual reality allow me to occupy any place, to occupy any perspective, to ride the worlds information bands in a search for transcendence of my particularity. In the computer culture the focus is on sameness rather than difference, a universal human nature in which gender, race, ethnicity does not matter and in which difference is erased from the master narrative of western reason. Like the body, these things are ultimately irrelevant, an impediment to the computer culture.

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4. In the twenty-first century, youre whoever or whatever you want to be. The computer culture is premised on a belief in the inherent malleability of human nature and the human self. This message is presented in a fascinating photo spread from Wired magazine. Slide 65 It reads, "No ambition, however extravagant, no fantasy, however outlandish, can any longer be dismissed as crazy or impossible. This is the age when you can finally do it all. Slide 66 Suddenly technology has given us powers with which we can manipulate not only external realitythe physical worldbut also, and much more portentously, ourselves. You can become whatever you want to be". Within the computer culture, the human being becomes a plug and play entity, composed of various parts that can be updated with the simple flip of a switch or the insertion of a new line of code. In a recent article on gene therapy appearing in Newsweek, the process of replacing missing or defective genes with healthy versions is described as an easy process, analogous to a computer jock installing a software patch to correct a bugridden program. Eric Gullichsen, a virtual reality researcher, sees this as the ultimate promise of virtual reality. He writes, As you conduct more of your life and affairs in cyberspace your conditioned notion of a unique and immutable body will give way to a far more liberated notion of body as something quite disposable and, generally, limiting. You will find that some bodies work best in some situations while others work best in others. The ability to radically and compellingly change ones body-image is bound to have a deep psychological effect, calling into question just what you consider

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yourself to be. Gullichsen imagines a future in which trying on new identities becomes an integral part of our lives. Gullichsens future is realized in the present in Fox Televisions short lived series VR5. In the opening episode of the series, Sydney Bloom, a shy, withdrawn, sexually repressed hacker, stumbles upon a way to enter virtual reality. As she first downloads her consciousness into virtual reality, she is literally liberated. She tortures her obnoxious neighbor and landlord and then, seeing herself for the first time as perhaps she wants to be, a sexually provocative sex kitten. Her second encounter involves meeting a man to whom she cannot speak in the real world but with whom she can be intimate within the lush, edenic setting of virtual reality. Video Clip The malleability of the self and the ease with which we might change our nature is nowhere more evident than in discussions of the phenomenon of mudding. Muds are networked, multiparticipant, text-based virtual reality systems found on the Internet. Howard Rheingold characterizes muds as places where identity is fluid. The grammar of CMC media, he writes, involves a syntax of identity play: new identities, false identities, multiple identities, exploratory identities, are available in different manifestations of the medium. In her discussions of muds and internet relay chat, Elizabeth Reid makes a similar point: The boundaries delineated by cultural constructs of beauty, ugliness, fashionableness, etc. can be bypassed on IRC. It is possible to appear to be, quite literally, whoever you wish. Nowhere has this aspect of muds been more noted than in discussions of gender switching. Reid argues that IRC destroys the usually all but insurmountable confines of sex: changing gender is as simple as changing ones nickname to something that suggests the opposite of ones actual gender. We can achieve a kind of liberation from ourselves when we become purely textual beings, freed of the physical, completely entering the realm of the symbol. As Reid notes, This fixity and the common equation of gender with sex, becomes problematic when gender reassignment can be effected

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with a few touches at a keyboard. Similar ideas are expressed by Amy Bruckman, who characterizes muds as identity workshops. Muds can help us to understand the ways in which gender structures human interactions by permitting us to experience what it is like to be another gender. As she puts it, When gender becomes a property that can be reset with a line of code, one bit in a data structure, it becomes an object to think with Such then is human nature in the computer culture. Underlying the computer culture is an account of human nature in which there is no significant difference between us and our machines. Our essential characteristic is mind, consciousness, or rationality, all of which are equivalent to information. Our body, gender, race, age, and ethnicity are inessential to who we really are, merely the noise which distorts the information. And who we are can be changed as easily as rewriting a line of programming code. I began by suggesting that philosophers still have some work to do when it comes to the issue of human nature. Minimally, philosophers need to bring their skills of analysis to bear on contemporary accounts of human nature, whether these accounts be found in music videos or the computer culture. We ought to know what the implications are of accepting the dominant metaphors, models, and myths of our time. Additionally, we need to consider the adequacy of these metaphors, models, and myths. I think this analysis of the computer culture reveals that the dominant image of human nature in the twentyfirst century is an image of human nature from the 17th century. Human nature in the computer culture bears a striking resemblance to human nature in traditional, Western, Enlightenment thought. Behind the hype and the talk revolution and the visionary future, the computer culture is in many respects very traditional, very Cartesian, and very Christian. Ironically, while most of the philosophical movements of this century have been devoted to rooting out the vestiges of Cartesian thought, what we find at the heart of the computer culture is a contemporary form of Cartesianism. Ignoring the issue of human nature risks failing to be aware of this.

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Now of course beyond merely pointing this out, philosophers have traditionally thought it necessary to critique inadequate views of human nature and replace them with more adequate views. Ideally, we would like them to articulate perhaps a competing image of human nature. It would be nice, I imagine, and perhaps you are expecting me to do this tonight, to reveal the correct theory of human nature. Well, I am sorry to say that I cant do that. What I would like to do, however, is suggest some starting points for thinking about human nature, an alternative framework in which to pose some of these questions, and from which to launch some criticisms of inadequate views of human nature. Let me begin by drawing on a distinction Clifford Geertz makes between thick and thin descriptions. Too often, our accounts of human nature are couched in terms of thin descriptions that are ultimately not very revealing. The claim that a human being is a complex machine or an information processor is a thin description that must be thickened if it is to be revealing in regard to human nature. It is in fact the thin nature of these computational metaphors that make them seem on the surface so reasonable. In part what I have tried to do tonight is to take these very thin descriptions of human beings as in some sense a computer and reveal the various structures of signification in the computer culture that undergird this view, lend it some import, and give it some meat, so to speak. Doing so reveals I believe their inadequacy. Our goal in thinking about human nature ought to a be a thick description of human beings that reveals the complexities of what it is to be human. It may be the case that no description could ever be thick enough to account for all the factors we find relevant in thinking about human nature. Owing to the complexity of human nature, we should expect our investigations to be ongoing and open-ended. We should work toward completeness, even as an unattainable ideal. Within contemporary thought, Ive noted the absence of attention to the topic of human nature. Despite that general lack, there have been a few recent attempts to think about human nature that try to present us with a thick description. Three in particular that I have found useful in my own

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work include, first, Geertzs own attempt within the field of anthropology to construct a cultural view of the human animal; secondly, the movement called philosophical anthropology, associated with such representative figures as Max Scheler, Helmuth Plessner, Arnold Gehlen, Ernst Cassirer, and Michael Landmann; and third, the work of socialist feminists who espouse an historical and dialectical view of human nature. Alison Jaggar's Feminist Politics and Human Nature as well as the work of Susan Bordo and Iris Marion Young are especially noteworthy. While there are important differences in these approaches, all of them are in agreement on a number of significant points which establishes a basic framework in which to address the issue of human nature. The convergence of these thinkers from diverse disciplines and backgrounds upon an identical framework is highly suggestive of its fruitfulness. The elements of this framework include: (1) a critique of dualism and an emphasis on the historical and material development of human nature; (2) a dialectical approach to human nature encompassing the biological, cultural, and environmental forces on the development of human nature; (3) an account of the hiatus between instinct and action in human nature; and (4) an emphasis on the local and particular aspects of human nature. Let me develop these points further. Central to each of these approaches to human nature is the belief that we must begin by reflecting on the whole human being with the ultimate goal being a comprehensive account of human nature. As Douglas Browning explains in regard to philosophical anthropology, It is the ultimate task of philosophical anthropology to provide a metaphysical explanation of man which is adequate to his full being (85). An account of human nature should not narrow the human being down to mere consciousness, rationality, or mind but should deal with the whole human being. Nor should such an account result in a view of the human being as composed of parts. Geertz has critiqued what he calls the stratigraphic view which conceives of human nature as being composed of various levels (biological, psychological, social, and cultural), each level superimposed on those beneath it and underlying those above it (37). The difficulty with this view, Geertz argues, is that once

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we break the human being down into these various strata, conceived as separate, complete, and autonomous scientific levels, it is very hard if not impossible to bring them back together again (41). Socialist feminists such as Jaggar have also criticized conceptions of human nature in which our biological or natural component is perceived to be at odds with the cultural and social aspect of human nature. Jaggar has criticized, in particular, the sex/gender distinction in which sex is taken to be biological and so natural while gender is conceived to be the product of social and cultural influences on the biological organism. Jaggar argues that we can neither identify a clear non-social sense of biology nor a clear nonbiological sense of society (111). As this last statement makes clear, common to these attempts to exorcise the demon of dualism is an approach to human nature which emphasizes the complex, interdependent nature of biology, culture, and our environment, as Jaggar makes clear in the following remark.
A historical and dialectical conception of human biology sees human nature and the forms of human social organization as determined not by our biology alone, but rather by a complex interplay between our forms of social organization, between our biological constitution and the physical environment that we inhabit. It is impossible to isolate or quantify the relative influence of any one of these factors, because each is continually affected by as well as affecting the others. In other words, the factors are not only related to each other but are dialectically related. (110-111)

One cannot simply isolate some pure biological substratum independent of mind or culture. Indeed, our very nature as cultural beings is enabled by our biological constitution. Nor is biology a source of limitation to human life, for it is our biological constitution, developed in unison with our cultural evolution that enables the development of culture and civilization. In philosophical anthropology this point is most often made by pointing to the correlative nature of biology and culture in human beings. Michael Landmann, for instance, refers to the simultaneity of mutual interdependence that exists between biology and culture (Philosophical

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Anthropology 261). One can understand the human being as a whole only by coming to see these two mutually interrelated sides. The interdependence of the cultural and biological development of the human being has long been noted in both archaeological and anthropological research. Geertz argues, for instance, that cultural and biological development go hand in hand. Between the cultural pattern, the body, and the brain, a positive feedback system was created in which each shaped the progress of the other (48). The interdependent and overlapping nature of biological and cultural development has had dramatic consequences for the evolution of human beings. It has left the human being unspecialized and unfinished in comparison to animals, open to the world. Unlike animals, human beings have only remnants of instincts from which there result no behavioral patterns. Geertz argues that the human being is incomplete. We livein an information gap. Between what our body tells us and what we have to know in order to function there is a vacuum (50). That vacuum, Geertz argues, is filled by culture, no mere addition to human existence but an essential condition for it. As Geertz remarks, What this means is that culture, rather than being added on, so to speak, to a finished or virtually finished animal, was ingredient, and centrally ingredient, in the production of that animal itself. Lacking the genetic hardwiring of animals, Geertz argues human beings depend on cultural sourcesthe accumulated fund of significant symbolsto direct our behavior and organize our experience (49). This bio-cultural framework leads to a greater awareness of the ways in which abstract theories of human nature can obscure the concrete differences among actual human beings. Because human beings require culture as part of their constitution, to understand human beings is to understand their particular cultural, social, and historical backgrounds, all centrally ingredient to our constitution as human beings. Both Geertz and Jaggar in particular have been led by their work to focus on the particular, concrete, and local forms that human nature takes rather than merely on the universal, abstract, and general. Understanding human nature means

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understanding human beings in their particularity. Geertz has criticized Enlightenment views of human nature for emphasizing the constant, general, and universal in human nature at the expense of the vast variety of differences among human beings, both over time and from place to place (35). Similarly, Jaggar notes that any view of human nature must take into consideration the influence on an individual of that individual's age, sex, socio-economic class, sexual orientation, race, and ethnicity. All are constitutive of our nature as human beings. This reflection on philosophical anthropology, physical and cultural anthropology, and socialist feminism discloses a richly textured, thickly described framework for the study of human nature which seeks to overcome dualism by emphasizing the bio-cultural development of human life. I would suggest that an adequate understanding of the human being must begin from a standpoint that incorporates in a dialectical fashion both our biological and our cultural heritage, central ingredients in the production of the human being. I dont believe that the view of human nature one finds in the computer culture does this. The view of human nature one finds implicit in the theory, literature, movies, and advertising of the computer culture suggests that our bodies, our gender, our race and ethnicity, and countless other factors are irrelevant. It conceives of the body as our prisoner, a limitation, given over to sickness and failure. It emphasizes our rational nature while ignoring so much more of what we as human beings are. The significance of our biological constitution, the important place given to our social and cultural environment, the role that being embodied in a particular body has on human life, are aspects of human nature obscured in the computer culture. In focusing on these aspects of human nature, we are much less likely to see human beings and computers as members of the same kind or species. As we continue our flirtation with the machine, and we will, we must enter into the relationship with our eyes open and our thoughts to the future. There are pitfalls in any relationship and we must anticipate them. The best form of protection in our relationship with the machine is philosophical

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protection, thinking clearly about who we are, what we might become, and what our place in the cosmos is.

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