An identity is the property of an entity which pertains to its distinguishability from others. A cyborg is an entity (at least partially) consisting of cybernetic organs, that is, organs outside of its initial body.1 From a subjective perspective it is those things which are not necessarily “self”-originating that are nonetheless capable of substantially altering emotion, cognition, or physical manifestation through which the priors express. A human is a living instance of the Homo genus. Rights are the legally (or morally) sanctioned capabilities of an entity in relation to a specific environment. An unsanctioned capability in this sense would be a “wrong.” A machine is an inorganic cyborgan. A person is a legal (or moral) entity constituting responsibility and execution of will of and for its constituent legal components; in modern terms it is generally a single, self-responsible human, though there are notable exceptions (e.g. power of attorney, legal guardians, certain marriage “rights,” corporations, nation-states). This definition includes the legal (or moral) possessions and relations of that entity or sum of entities it represents. 1 Argument: Two people taken in context to their relation are a cyborg. Human relationships are generally conceived as a result of the human components, that is, as a higher formation which can be interacted with in-of-itself (technically, that the relationship is not simply a phenomenal descriptor of two humans interacting but a categorically separate noumenon which results from their continued interactivity). “Cyborging” doesn’t necessarily happen when any two things interact, though it is necessary that the potential cyborg would be harmed or impaired through removal of its cyborgans. Original example of the cyborg
Thomas Nagel argues that a necessary component of mind is the inherently subjective condition of experience. He asserts a resistance to explanation of phenomena by objective analysis. In doing so he associates this resistance with explanation of the mind per se. This forms a compelling argument against a naive acceptance of physicalism. Nagel’s discussion centers on the question of what-it-is-like-to-be which will be referred to as subjective nature. He notes a particular confusion of English in ascribing “like” the meaning of relational similarity where he intends the expression as a reference to the point of view of an individual in a given category. This is an important distinction to him as he perceives it as something that cannot be accessed through mutations of or correlations with our own point of view, but that is unique to the given type of conscious entity. Nonetheless his use of this expression and even his clarification of it provides an antagonist to his position. Intrinsic to his analysis is a placement of the subjective experience into the subjective experience of another being. Without this the provocative question is moot. Even without typal dissimilarity there is the abject flaw that one can never directly invoke the subjective experience of another being. This is not, as he attempts to describe, a Solipsistic perspective but a necessary one in a proper physical analysis. As any two objects that are in the exact same place must be the exact same object, and such a corollary, we must ascertain that any object that is not in the same place as another is an entirely different object. Irrespective to the structural similarity such objects may hold there is an absolute limit on the ability of one to incorporate the experience of the other into its own subjective perspective no matter its intellectual capacities as it cannot simulate the total environmental experience of that separate object without simulating itself (should they share a reality). This is a theoretical flaw or limiter introduced to prevent critique of this position on the grounds of a sufficiently capable computational system, but in common reality the limit is even lower. One is not the other, and thus cannot know the other’s subjectivity as subjectivity is defined. I cannot ever know what it is truly like to be Thomas Nagel, no matter my capacity for sympathetic imagination, not least in regards to my lack of knowledge about his life and personal circumstances. I can imagine that he has a somewhat similar family of dispositional pathways at his disposal due our shared genetic heritage, but even in the sense of mental capacities it is entirely imaginable that the way his brain synthesizes the information provided by his sensory organs at a high level would be entirely different to mine. I am driven to include reference to the overwrought philosophical punching bag that is the ill or disabled. Nagel himself even invokes these in describing the alien experience of those born deafblind in relation to him, violating his assertion of categorical similarity within a species. What would it be like to be a bat without a voicebox? Probably much different than a bat with one, perhaps a more limited sensory experience, but maybe even closer to our own, and in excluding such an example from his rhetorical inquisition into the subjective nature of the bat as a type he rejects much of the necessary complexity which is to be regarded in such an analysis. A particularly crude but accessible example is the autistic patient that incorporates sensory stimulus in a way that is highly strange to the normative individual. For example it is often the case that such people are particularly sensitive to stimuli that most would find unobtrusive in both positive and negative senses. It is impossible for an outsider to capture the subjective experience that that individual takes in when they fulfill their particular sensory drive because the (high-level) sensory apparatus they possess is necessarily different. This, again, is an extreme example. One mustn’t go so far outside the realm of the normative human to find cases where sensory and subsequent behavioral triggers are fundamentally different between individuals. His central example is the subjective nature of the bat due to its genetic proximity to Homo sapiens juxtaposed with its otherwise exotic behavior. He reasons that the bat, because of its primary sensory capacity being echolocation rather than vision, has a terribly different “view” of the world than a human does. Of course! Why wouldn’t it? What is the actual claim, here? To be a bat is to be a bat, but no bat is the bat, only a bat. To be any bat is to only be that bat, and not any other bat. Claiming that knowledge of the rough kind of experience of another type of organism is inaccessible is nearly equivalent to claiming that the same is true for the speaker of another language. Of course I cannot sympathize or inflect within myself the experience of another individual describing to me an experience in a tongue I cannot parse. That does not make them another species, or an automata; I imagine few would argue this. In my reasoning it does not seem at all sensible to claim that the inaccessibility of subjective experience from one to another is a disagreement or counterpoint to physicalist analysis. The essential point of such a model is that it is outside the governance of an individual perspective and that it does not rely on the subjective properties to make effective predictions. How different is it to say that I can understand what it is like to be something than it is to say that I might predict exactly what that thing might do in accordance to some stimulus? If there is anything at all it is like to be something in the first place it is to be found in those relationships between stimuli and actions. Nagel’s argument against the physicalist interpretation hinges on a rejection of physicalist analyses which fail to incorporate a subjective angle. To this I consider the notion that the subjective is tied intrinsically to the objective and must not be made special provisions for. Any sufficiently capable objective analysis of a system is likewise able to provide an accurate model of its subjective character. That is that all objective things have a correlative subjective nature. It is a roughly panpsychic argument, I admit, but one that does not seem particularly reprehensible as it grounds that psychic function in the objective mechanics of the material constituents and does not hand it over to some magical or supernatural force. It is the natural laws and mechanics themselves that make up the subjective nature of a given thing in just the way that they make up the objective, just from the other side of the coin. I argue frankly that physical laws are more accurately described as subjective than objective analyses, in that they attempt to model what it is like to be a given thing in pursuit of understanding its eventual behavior. An interrogation of basic mechanical laws, and conversations with all kinds of natural scientists, tend to lend credence to this notion that they understand the relationships they devise to be a kind of insight into the dispositions of that which they study. What is it different to say that an atom “wants” a balance in its electric shell than it is to say an animal wants to provide for its own metabolism? Want in this sense is clearly a mental state in our discussion of the animal but most would hesitate at describing the same kind of relationship as mental in terms of the atom. Why is this? Nagel himself illustrates this kind of problem well in describing his decision in selecting the bat for his example. For “simple” life forms, bacteria and so on, discussions of their conscious states seem dubious to the average individual. There is a spectrum upon which individuals may find themselves willing to admit that a structure of a given complexity may be described in terms of conscious or subjective states. In this spectrum I see a manifestation of Sorites paradox where the line between what is and is not conscious is most specifically a problem in the application of terminology by the appraiser and not a critical examination of the underlying phenomena. Nagel equivocates the status of the mind-body problem in contemporary discourse to the relation between matter and energy as posed by a pre-Socratic philosopher. Though the problem may be described, even a correct answer given, there is an undeniable void between its posing and formal solution. That is, he claims, we lack the tools necessary to even accurately capture the problem space. I wholeheartedly reject this stance on two separate accounts. Firstly, it is of course reasonable for a philosopher of any time to make certain conjectures about the world for which they lack the mechanical means of deriving such a relationship. Plenty of pre-Socratic (though doubtfully any Greek) philosophers were bound to have made assertions that can conceivably be related to the claims of relativity. Intuition outstrips formalization to an unimaginable degree, and thankfully so as without such a gap things would scarcely be discovered. Secondly I think we do have the tools to make such an analysis, it is only in being trapped into the lens that it must be determined exactly as to which part goes where that a model must be determined. Models can be established without all of their moving parts illustrated. That’s what makes them models and not proper simulations. Especially in the domain of philosophy there is certainly not a need to be restrained by what natural science provides, as if anything philosophy provides the framework in which natural science operates. It is up to the philosopher to determine the relationship between phenomena and mind and not the neurobiologist to whom Nagel appears to be relenting to.
“The ego is first and foremost a bodily ego; it is not merely a surface entity, but is itself the projection of a surface. ” Freud’s surface in relation to the ego is what he terms the Pcpt. (perceptual), into which he asserts the Cs. -Pcpt. complex as the substrate from which the ego (“the I”) emerges. Objects are defined in relation to others by their surfaces, or membranes, which delineate the one from the other(s). By determining where certain sensory feedback occurs in relation to actuated impulses or in the context of other sensory cues the individual can begin to determine a line between the internal and external. This boundary is his Pcpt. complex; it is not the ego itself but the harness through which the ego can maintain itself in its environment. Not necessarily elucdidated by Freud directly but as a consequence of his propositions there is from an information-theoretical perspective a necessity of higher dimensional simulation occuring after the lower dimensional compression of experience into the perceptual (senorial) layer occurs. One imagines a spherical lense which captures the flat image of its surroundings onto its surface. Because even trivially there may be occlusions or cases of misleading orientation such an image would not hold all of the information to effectively simulate the scene from which it draws, even if it projects into itself light from all possible directions. This leaves a substantial problem in how experience might actually happen. The ego provides a shortcut. We can understand it as a kind of highly compressed mnemic residue (sign) from which the rest of one’s environment is elucidated from its relation to it. In just as much the way as a word may trigger a certain cascade of intuitions and relationships, especially in relation to other familiar words, so too does the ego serve the role of providing a familiar starting point from which the creature may expound upon their immediate situation and make decisions in a complex information space, even one that is essentially inaccessible in its entirety. This ego is constructed as a result of continuous perceptual (higher-sensory) input from the environment. Without an environment and sensibility in which one might be immersed it seems quite unlikely that an ego might form (of course, one might ask, in an environment in which there is no sensory awareness how could one test for the presence of an ego?). Freud insists that pain is the primary factor in this kind of model. Pleasurable sensations do nothing to incite a kind of response in the system onto which they are inflicted (much the opposite, he insists) but painful ones, tensions, etc. surely do. They seek relief. Relief seeking behavior is thus the model by which almost all behavior might be understood through. Ego might be only the necessary middle ground by which the id is relieved, or shielded, of the pain inflicted by the super ego (the contiuously present forces of interpretability and a kind of eusocial pressure--in Lacanian terms the Other). Personally I hold a disagreement with Freuds analysis that sensation occurs in internal and external flavors. Indeed it seems more apparent that there is only such a possibility of internal sensation. Rather than occuring as a result of some line within the epidermis, I instead see the sensory surface area as a most nearly fractal structure which curves well within ourselves and is constructed of the myriad cell membranes stitched together to form even the most remote (or central) organs from which sensations can be recalled. Thus the line between inner and outer is continuously vague. Even should some sensation well and truly originate entirely within the failure or dissensitivity of a specific cell it would only occur throughout the rest of the body because of its perception by another. There is only here a minute difference between my consideration and Freud’s, to be fair; to his analysis there is a kind of push and pull that is performed by the egoic membrane by which its body becomes defined. I argue only that the pushing and pulling are identical (indifferentiable) actions. In the way that our muscles are only able to contract, and yet, through clever assemblage of ligaments, tissues, bones, etc. perform what can only be understood externally as a push, so too is the ego only capable of operating in one direction which is simultaneously the internal and external. In evidence of my claim as to the minimality of relevance of a discrimination of internal and external I will call upon the example of skilled labor. It is almost universally appraised that in higher level performance of various trades there is an experience of minor so-caled “ego death” in which some part of one’s tools or even the craft itself become a part of that egoic experience, or even become the center of it. An addage of the knight’s sword become one with their own arm reminds us that the external is only what it is perceived to be. Notably this also adds to consideration the capabilities of the motor system, not only their perceptions, as being a necessary source of constructive energy toward the system in its entirety. That which only feels and does not do would apparently cease to be. To distill: perceptions form the boundary and component outline of the ego, but do not themselves contain ego. “Perceptions may be said to have the same significance for the ego as instincts have for the id. ” There is a congruous relationship between the surface formations of instincts and perceptions and the resultative structural formations of id and ego. That is we can understand the id (or ego) as the noumenological description of phenomenological instincts (or perceptions). An analogy to this kind of relationship is found in the external world which these systems seek to emulate. For example, we can interpret a visible tiger as the perceptional phenomena which indicates the quiddity of an actual tiger in the environment. Necessarily, though, as elucidated previously this kind of perceptual reconstruction that can be done via the trace impacts of a given object on the sensory model can only provide so much information as to the nature of the original object. This tracks with Freud’s understandings of these systems: that though there are parts of the ego that breach into conscious “knowing” there is much more that cannot be accurately grasped at that layer, and so necessarily falls into not only the preconscious word-space but well into the unconscious image-space (though by what Freud means “unconscious” is notoroiously unclear, muddled by a slew of definition he himself presents all of which to some extent contradict eacother). Where the ego becomes unconscious it will begin to blend indiscriminantly with the id. Of course the id itself operates entirely within what is to Freud the (dynamically) unconscious space. Fundamental biological drives, of which there are myriad, are the basis from which id is construed as an independent function of the mind. (I do enjoy Freud’s introduction of the classical concept of the psychoid, which I instantly had an affinity toward. I understand his argument that it would not be especially useful in harping on such a construction for the lay or semi-lay audience in acquiring the kind of analytical or self-referential skills he is proposing, but it is something that I think I will keep coming back to conceptually.) Without our instinctual processes which govern our base biological functions the urge complex that drives our simplest behaviors could not necessarily provide us with the kind of motivation or pressure to do anything at all. One might examine a creature with no instincts, hoping to find an effective rationalist, only to found what essentially amounts to a rock no matter its intricacy. I imagine these, now in purely symbolic terms, less as the heart-like organ Freud describes but a series of interconnected spheres of related activity. He fears such a model of concentricity but I find the image of a eukaryotic cell from which a nucleolus (id) is wrapped within a nucleus (ego) that governs and drives the motivations and actions of the rest of the cell, which is endeavoured to simulate and respond to its external environment (super-ego). Perhaps, though, this is somewhat naïve.