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Conclusion. My Life as a Robot
- Johns Hopkins University Press
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conclusion My Life as a Robot From environmentalism to consciousness”? This book has attempted to explain the connection. My awareness of the effects of the environment on body and consciousness came about as I began to understand how toxic substances, pollution, the quality of soil in which food is grown, living near highways, chlordane, PCBs, DDT, global warming, lead in paint and dishes, and so forth are more than casually related to one’s physical and mental condition. Did the fact that my mother smoked when I was gestated (and that we daily breathed the sooty particulates of New York City life) play a role in my frailty as a child, my great susceptibility to serious childhood diseases, my rheumatic fever and heart disease (although I eventually overcame the worst consequences)? What effect does childhood infirmity have, not only on one’s body but on one’s psychological persona for the rest of one’s life? It can’t be negligible. Ecological awareness, when informed by an understanding of evolutionary biology, can only serve to further constrict any fantasies one might have about human “freedom.” After all, what can “freedom” mean? Having five fingers on each hand rather than three, having toes and not webbed feet, walking upright, etc., etc.—each and every physical characteristic genetically amassed over millennia into an illusory, transient “normality ” known as Homo sapiens results in a certain limited bodily construction and range of activity. (If everyone were color-blind, inability to distinguish red from green would be “normal.”) With this small and limited set of “normal” characteristics all other possibilities for existing in the world are, at least temporarily, ruled out. “Normality” is not an essence or a transcendent fact but (from the point of view of “freedom”) a constricting happenstance of the environment, natural selection, and genetics. Had the environment of the planet been slightly different at a certain moment of the past, a different range of survivors would have evolved to produce us with a different normality. Human nature or “nor271 mality” are pure contingency, but these contingencies rule the range of what is possible for us. Darwinian evolution and behavioral ecology teach powerful lessons about “free choice” and selfhood well beyond the physical construction of our bodies. They carry the message of environmentalism into more complex territory. But neuro and cognitive sciences go far beyond hearts, kidneys, feet, and endocrine systems: in the late twentieth century these sciences have led to the shocking awareness that a network of billions of neurons and millions of billions of synapses are a self-directing system that produces us as already-mapped-out but seemingly flexible psychological beings bemused by the sometimes tragic-comic illusion of autonomy . At this very moment, as I sit at the computer and write, I am unable to locate the very same “I” that David Hume failed to locate several hundred years ago. “For my part [to quote once again one of the most marvelous passages in British philosophy], when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception.” A stream of thoughts races through my head and I dutifully write down these unchosen ideas. Indeed, since early this morning, as I arose from bed, I have been hearing Bach’s motet Der Geist hilft unser Schwachheit auf (“The Spirit doth our weakness help”) in my head. It is not as though I have been playing this music from a compact disk—the music has been playing me. The last time I placed disk in player to hear it was months ago when I was working on a project about Bach in the twenty-first century. During that period , I had listened more than twice over to all of Bach’s 215 or so surviving cantatas and all the major choral works (which I could probably sing in my sleep—and doubtless do). Why is this particular composition playing me today, seemingly out of nowhere, just like the thoughts I am transcribing from my internal teleprompter, though without any real consciousness of choosing to do so as a me? Is there any activity or state of consciousness during the entire day or night that such a me has chosen? The essential difference between dreaming at night and thinking during...