Curing Cyborg Craving:

Buddhism and Cognitive Technologies

Abstract

According to Buddhism’s four noble truths, we are in anguish because we habitually crave for life to be other than it is; and this craving will cease only if we cultivate Buddhist practice. Buddhism is all about curing craving. The cure involves the realization that one has no self as a permanent changeless identity. According to Stephen Batchelor, "I am not a fixed essence but an interactive cluster of processes." He suggests that this cluster includes various social structures.

In this essay I examine the role of technological structures in the cluster of processes that embody us. I will suggest that a cyborg is just such a cluster of processes, that we indeed are cyborgs, and that realizing this might help us to make more sense of what craving is and how to cure it.

I get the idea that we are cyborgs from Andy Clark’s book Natural-Born Cyborgs. Clark maintains that we are cyborgs in the "sense of being human-technology symbionts: thinking and reasoning systems whose minds and selves are spread across biological and nonbiological circuitry" (3). My essay is about how we might usefully re-interpret some key Buddhist doctrines if we take seriously the idea that we are cyborgs.

Curing Cyborg Craving:

Buddhism and Cognitive Technologies

According to Buddhism’s four noble truths, we find our lives filled with anguished suffering because we habitually crave for life to be other than it is; and this habit of craving will cease only if we cultivate in our lives the Buddha’s path of mental discipline, wisdom, and moral conduct. So Buddhism is all about curing craving. One aspect of the cure is the realization that one has no self as a permanent changeless identity: "I am not a fixed essence but an interactive cluster of processes" (Batchelor 69). Stephen Batchelor suggests that this cluster includes various social structures.

In this essay I examine the role of technological structures in the cluster of processes that embody us. I will suggest that a cyborg is just such a cluster of processes, that we indeed are cyborgs, and that realizing this might help us to make more sense of what craving is and how to cure it.

I get the idea that we are cyborgs from Andy Clark’s recent book Natural-Born Cyborgs. Clark maintains that we are cyborgs "not in the merely superficial sense of combining flesh and wires but in the more profound sense of being human-technology symbionts: thinking and reasoning systems whose minds and selves are spread across biological and nonbiological circuitry" (Clark 2003, 3). Although Clark’s book can tell you much about it, my essay is not about the science (or science fiction) of cyborg technology. And although I borrow Clark’s account of the human cyborg as an open-ended system merged with complex cultural and technological environments, my essay is not a postmodern manifesto for deconstructing dualisms and reconstructing boundaries. My essay primarily is about Buddhism, about how we might usefully re-interpret some key Buddhist doctrines if we take seriously the idea that we are cyborgs.

1. Cyborgs-R-Us

Let’s start with the idea that the human mind does not reside solely inside the biological skin-bag. Clark argues that

Similarly, Daniel Dennett, whose work influences and is influenced by Andy Clark’s, suggests that the primary source of human intelligence is "our habit of off-loading as much as possible of our cognitive tasks into the environment itself—extruding our minds (that is, our mental projects and activities) into the surrounding world, where a host of peripheral devices we construct can store, process, and re-represent our meanings, streamlining, enhancing, and protecting the processes of transformation that are our thinking" (Dennett 1996, 134-135). Thus Clark and Dennett depict the self as spread out in its environment because of our tendency towards information-processing mergers (Clark) and the off-loading of cognitive tasks (Dennett). As Clark puts it: "Minds like ours were made for mergers. Tools-R-Us and always have been" (Clark 2003, 7).

They offer various examples of our use of props, devices, tools with which we off-load tasks and merge our activities: landmarks, color-codings, diagrams, photographs, pencil and paper, wristwatches, sketchpads, slide rules, automobiles, bioelectronic implants, cell phones, laptops, internets, global positioning satellites, coevolving software agents, and more, including one of the oldest and most important tools, words. Clark notes that "cognitive hybridization is [not] a modern development. Rather, it is an aspect of our humanity, which is as basic and ancient as the use of speech" (Clark 2003, 4). Associating a word with an idea freezes it into a cognitive building block for further episodes of thought, learning, and search; thus language use, according to Clark, is a cognitive technology that allows us to target our thoughts and learning on a new domain of basic objects that can reveal further patterns (Clark 2001, 144-145). Dennett too claims that word-labels create "a new class of objects that can themselves become the objects of [our] pattern-recognition machinery" (Dennett 1996, 150-151). Thus using the technology of language constitutes "our ability to engage in second-order discourse, to think about, [recognize patterns in,] (and evaluate) our own thoughts" (Clark 2001, 145), and even our own selves. For we represent ourselves to others and to ourselves in language; "words are potent elements of our environment that we readily incorporate, ingesting and extruding them, weaving them like spiderwebs into self-protective strings of narrative. . . . Our fundamental tactic of self-protection, self-control, and self-definition is . . . telling stories [with words] . . . about who we are" (Dennett 1991, 417-418).

And although the ubiquity and intimacy of words makes our merger with this cognitive technology rather transparent for us, Clark urges us to accept a similar analysis of our relationships with pens, watches, phones, computers: our very identity as selves are bound up with these technologies. For, once again, "it is our special character as human beings, to be forever driven to create, co-opt, annex, and exploit nonbiological props and scaffoldings. We have been designed, by Mother Nature, to exploit deep neural plasticity in order to become one with our best and most reliable tools" (Clark 2003, 6-7). That’s what makes us cyborgs: "creatures whose minds are special precisely because they are tailor-made for multiple mergers and coalitions" (Clark 2003, 7).

2. The Cravings of a Cyborg

The cyborg is a dynamically evolving spread-out self. In a sense, the cyborg has no self, at least not as a substantial permanent changeless identity. And of course that is what Buddhism has been telling us about ourselves for over 2500 years: that we have no core self—the self is "empty," and the impermanent identity that we do have is spread out in a matrix of interdependent relations with lots of other empty things. As you read this passage from Stephen Batchelor, add cyborgs to the list of empty things

Just as the empty daffodil is a matrix of interdependent petals and stamen and bees, so the cyborg is an interdependence of arms and brains and words, and pens and pots and chairs and (in some cases) cell phones. Thus the Buddhist doctrines of emptiness and no-self apply to the spread-out identity of the cyborg.

Conditional arising, sometimes called dependent origination, is another related Buddhist teaching that cyborgs might do well to heed. There are various interpretations of this teaching, but the gist of it is this: The confusion of ignorance leads to the illusion of a fixed self, which leads to the obsessive desire of craving, which leads to a cycle of dissatisfaction and anguish. (Incidentally, the Buddha describes this cycle as a round of suffering through numerous deaths and rebirths; whether this should be taken literally or figuratively is not relevant to the views I am here defending.) If in ignorance I regard myself as a fixed essence in need of protection, then this will condition my experience such that things in the world will appear as fixed and alien; I must possess what makes me feel good and get rid of what makes me feel bad; but this is just craving: "the childish and utopian thirst for a situation in which I finally possess everything I desire and have repelled everything I dislike" (Batchelor 1997, 73); and craving conditions the cycle of suffering as each obsession in turn fails to satisfy. Breaking this cycle of suffering is in a sense the aim of Buddhist practice. And we know from the four noble truths that craving is the linchpin in this cycle.

How might craving manifest itself in the experience of us cyborgs? Like the cyborg self, cyborg craving is spread out as an interdependent phenomenon. As in the passage from Batchelor that opened this essay, cravings are embodied in wider structures. So a cyborg’s cravings are not just inner drives; they are embedded in its mergers with cognitive technologies. Struggling mightily to suppress inner drives won’t stop the cravings; we cyborgs must try to understand how our mergers condition craving, for if we are ignorant of the conditional arising that makes craving possible the cycle of suffering cannot be broken.

We should first be aware that we change when we merge with a tool. Technology is adapted to and for us, but we also adapt to the technology. Clark calls this process "cognitive dovetailing" in which "neural resources become structured so as to factor reliable external resources and operations into the very heart of their problem-solving routines" (Clark 2001, 151). Think of a person so skilled with, say, an abacus or a keyboard or even a snowboard, that the tool becomes transparent in the task at hand. "Transparent technologies are those tools that become so well fitted to, and integrated with, our own lives and projects that they are . . . pretty much invisible-in-use" (Clark 2003, 28).^* What is important to notice is that these integrations transform us. No doubt such transformations involve neural reconstructions as Clark suggests, and perhaps as cyborgs this is a useful thing to know about ourselves. But an anguished cyborg struggling to come to grips with obsessive desires might need a different level of description, a level sensitive to shifts in patterns of thought and behavior that might catalyze cravings. It is essential that the cyborg be mindful of these craving patterns and the intricacies of the dovetailing mergers that give rise to them.

For example, email is a useful tool, and for many of us it has become a transparent technology. And clearly it has changed us. Communication patterns with friends, relatives, and especially colleagues are profoundly different from what they were ten to fifteen years ago. In many ways this has been a welcome shift, but we also now recognize the dangers of email: the regret of hurtful words composed in haste, the annoyance of time-consuming polite replies to pointless requests, the fear of file-destroying viruses, the obsession of maintaining an empty inbox. Our relationship to this technology engenders its share of anguish. Consider the empty inbox obsession. I suffer from this malady, but it took a while for this pattern to develop and even longer for me to recognize it. Not only have I found myself emptying the inbox often within seconds of an arrival, but I also have a tendency to write long, careful, thorough--too long, too careful, too thorough--replies. So guess how I too often spend, or should I say waste, my time in the office? Even when I think I have licked the habit, I can be two hours into the perfect memo before it occurs to me that, really, I should wrap this up and get to my other work. It is difficult to stop this habit, even though I can see the warped policies that are driving me: never never let undone work hang over your head, please everyone always, be respected as a preeminent problem-solver and articulator of policy, never lose an argument or a political test of power. But clearly these are cravings, utopian thirsts. And I cannot simply turn them off with an act of will. Since the policies that drive my obsessions are integral to the email activity itself, I must recognize the detailed ways in which the cravings are embedded in my mergers with technologies like email. I hear the email bong and I reach for the keyboard. Three messages in succession instigate a policy debate and my fingers start to fly. How do I stop this?

Or, to list some further examples: How do I get this cell phone out of my ear? When can I put down this gameboy? Why do I eroticize my computer screen?

3. The Cure for Craving

We suffer. The origin of suffering is craving. The third noble truth of Buddhism is to stop the suffering by stopping the craving. As I have already suggested, you cannot stop craving by simply eliminating desire; most Buddhist accounts that I have read recognize this and treat craving as an obsessive "self"-focused desire. Whether desires are healthy or obsessive, they do come from somewhere. According to the doctrine of conditional arising, feelings of pleasantness and unpleasantness give rise to impulses to possess the pleasant and avoid the unpleasant; and the habit of unmindfully acting on impulse becomes a pattern of craving, of obsessive "self"-focused desire. The solution is not to stop desiring altogether, as though we could do this without ceasing to live, either figuratively or literally. Nor is the solution to block all impulses, but rather to be mindfully aware of the patterns by which impulses arise and lead to cravings. Instead of acting on or suppressing an impulse, one recognizes its onset and accepts it for what it is. I observe my sudden urge to let my fingers fly into an electronic policy debate; I am aware of the pleasant flush of pride and superiority, that lusty surge of power as I imagine my brilliant words flashing across so many screens in the morning, and the unpleasant feeling that I might not be praised and respected tomorrow if I am not the first to tap out a response today; and I am mindful of the fact that the urgency with which these feelings are driving the impulse presupposes (falsely) that my self-identity is a permanent core to be cherished and protected at all costs. At this point I might or might not move to the keyboard and enter the policy debate, but I can act without obsession, and I am not likely to waste two hours on the perfect memo. In this way the combination of a mindful awareness of the feelings and impulses bound up with my use of email technology together with an understanding that the "self" is empty can help me to avoid the trap of an ultimately unsatisfying pattern of craving.

The mental discipline of right mindfulness and the wisdom of right understanding are two parts of the eightfold path to the cessation of suffering which is the fourth noble truth of Buddhism. The path of right understanding is the understanding of things as they are, and in particular this includes the understanding that the self is empty. I have suggested that for the cyborg this includes recognizing that his identity is spread out and embedded in cognitive technology mergers. Incidentally, trying to avoid these mergers is like trying to avoid impulses; it cannot be done because we just are the kind of beings that experience impulses and feelings, and we just are the kind of beings that are, in Andy Clark’s words, "tailor-made for multiple mergers." To follow the path of right mindfulness is to be diligently aware of the patterns of feelings, impulses, thoughts, and behaviors that condition cravings. For the cyborg this requires an acute awareness of how its cognitive technology mergers develop, and how patterns of feelings, thoughts, and behaviors are transformed by and embedded in the technologies.

In addition to right understanding and right mindfulness, the other six parts of the eightfold path are the wisdom of right thought, the mental disciplines of right effort and right concentration, and the moral conduct of right speech, right action, and right livelihood. I would like to interpret one more path in terms of a Buddhism for us cyborgs—the path of right speech. As one might expect, the standard exhortation to right speech is to abstain from lies, slander, harsh words, idle chatter, while the broader advice is to speak with care. We all know from experience that lies and harsh words lead to suffering, so prudence alone dictates that we speak with care. But I think for us cyborgs there is a deeper insight here. Recall that Clark characterized our use of speech as a basic and ancient cognitive hybridization, and claimed that the technology of language constitutes our capacity for second-order discourse and self-reflection. This technology enables us, as Dennett suggested, to tell stories of who we are; but since the merger is transparent—that is, since we cyborgs "do not consciously and deliberately figure out what narratives to tell and how to tell them . . . [, o]ur tales are spun, but for the most part we don’t spin them; they spin us" (Dennett 1991, 418).

If this is so, then to speak with the care requisite to follow the path of right speech, cyborgs need to recognize that their very identities have long ago become merged with the technology of words. Words spoken and the brain processes (and other bio-phenomena) that produce them are dovetailed, co-adapted, and continually co-evolving. The cyborg self is not an insulated meaner who first means in the head and then attaches the words. Except for rare occasions, words, like feelings and impulses, just appear on the scene, and cyborg selves are spread out in an almost never-ending stream of these. And as with habituated patterns of feelings and impulses, it is easy to sleep as the skein of words spin and bind us into patterns of confused anguish. The Buddha says to wake up. But since speech habits cannot be altered by brute will power, as there is no inner willer or independent self who might exercise power over words, what’s an anguished cyborg to do—where can she find the words to cure herself? It seems to me that this is just like the email case. Given that speech is a cognitive technology embedded in and transparent to us cyborgs, then right speech, i.e. speech habits not bound up in obsessions and cravings, will not be possible apart from both the wisdom of rightly understanding that cyborg selves are spread out and empty, and the mental discipline of rightly attending to the often difficult to detect patterns of feeling, thought, and behavior engendered by our merger with the technology of words.

David DeMoss

Pacific University

July 2004

demossdj@pacificu.edu

Works Cited

Batchelor, S. (1997), Buddhism Without Beliefs: A Contemporary Guide to

Awakening (New York: Riverhead Books).

Clark, A. (2003), Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future

of Human Intelligence (New York: Oxford University Press).

Clark, A. (2001), Mindware: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Cognitive

Science (New York: Oxford University Press).

Dennett, D. (1991), Consciousness Explained (Boston, MA: Little Brown).

Dennett, D. (1996), Kinds of Minds: Toward an Understanding of Consciousness

(New York: Harper Collins).