Cyborg Science: an initial definition

I'm writing a book based on my dissertation. Hey there's a new idea! ;-) I'm currently looking at the genealogy of cyborgs and cybernetics, and reading Philip Mirowski's amazing and at times overwhelming book Machine Dreams: Economics as a Cyborg Science.

He defines Cyborg Science in the early going, and I thought I'd post that definition here. In the book it is acccompanied by a very rich description of how cybernetics was affected by the discourse of thermodynamics and Maxwell's Demon, but this is a handy list for starting to think through the way cybernetics leads to cyborgs and to the later notions of cyborg sciences:

In his book Machine Dreams, Mirowski basically argues, don’t worry that cybernetics never “worked”. Instead he suggests that while cybernetics “never attained the status of a full fledged cyborg science” instead it “constituted the philosophical overture to a whole phalanx of cyborg sciences.” And so “The more correct definition would acknowledge that a cyborg science is a complex set of beliefs, of philosophical dispositions, mathematical preferences, pungent metaphors, research practices, and…paradigmatic things all of which are then applied promiscuously to some more or less discrete preexisting subject matter or area” (12).

He then goes on to suggest 6 main features to specific this definition.

1. Cyborg sciences depend on the computer as a paradigm object for everything from metaphors to assistance in research to embodiment of research products. Part of what makes this interesting: cybernetics early on married the computer. Also computers are themselves straddlers of the divide between the animate and the inanimate…and so cyborg sciences make use of this fact in order to blur those same boundaries in the areas of expertise.

2. Cyborg sciences breach ramparts between Natural and Social, Human and Inhuman. Before ww2: social scientists wanted to reduce the Social to the Natural. This includes neoclassic economics. But they mostly left barriers between the two intact. Nature and its ontology were not affected by reductionism of Social to it. But after WW2 “a cyborg intervention agglomerates a heterogeneous assemblage of humans and machines, living and the dead, active and the inert, meaning and symbol, intention and teleology, and before we know it, Nature has taken on board many of the attributes formerly attributed to Society, just as Humanity has simultaneously been rendered more machinelike.” 13

3. In Cyborg science the sharp distinction between ‘reality’ and simulacra also becomes less taken for granted. Von Neumann at Los Alamos: simulations of hydrodynamics, turbulence, and chain reactions were first uses of the computer. This led to using Monte Carlo simulations which then came to be discussed as on a par with more conventional experiments. Note the idea that the simulation and gaming is an experiment. Here is a key quote: “von Neumann belieed that he was extracting out the logic of systems, be they dynamical systems, automata, or “games”; thus manipulation of the simulation eventually came to be regarded as essentially equivalent to manipulation of the phenomenon.” 14 Thus the computer comes to utterly change and dominate what counts as normative science; a good example is nuclear weapons testing (Gusterson, Edwards). Edwards has a good point: so much of the Cold War military technology was based on simulations (15). Galison is an important source here. Computers go from being simply fast calculators, then an instrument, then a stand-in for nature itself. Turing test is a version of this: a simulation with general assent is good enough.

4. Fourth: heritage of distinctive notions of order and disorder rooted in physical thermodynamics.

5. Cyborg science makes into physical concepts terms like information, memory, and computation. In particular, Katherine Hayles shows that Shannon had to divorce information from any connotations of meaning or semantics, and instead associate it with “choice” from a preexistent menu of symbols. Memory becomes a holding pen for accumulated message symbols. At a certain point the holding pen needs to be “flushed” because of computer processor constraints; Mirowski argues that this is important: we associate this loss of memory with the destruction of “information” and the increase of entropy. This is a set of metaphors which displaced the older energetics tradition. He argues that this isn’t just metaphors and just so stories; it is why cyborg sciences treat information as an entity with ontologically stable properties, which preserves its integrity under various transformations. 16 Notice this: it also suggests that the self is a core pattern of “information” which could survive transition to say a simulated self. This is the key conceit in Greg Egan’s book Permutation City.

6. Key to cyborg sciences; from image of lone inventor to a new breed of science manager, born in crisis of WW2 and fortified by foundation and military sponsorship. “The new cyborg sciences did not simply spontaneously arise; they were consciously made.” 17 What happened? Science managers recruit scientists from physics and math and pair them off with collaborators from the life sciences and/or social sciences [note here the importance of cybernetics as a flag for this kind of collaboration and aggressive assertion of overlap]; give lots of money and hierarchical model; then go out and outline solutions to a problem bothering some patron. “Cyborg science is Big Science par excellence” and the military model is huge: logistics of research, yes, but also the conceptual structures of these sciences, the rationale of C3I (Command, Control, Communication) as generating the questions asked and solutions proposed. Why this blurred ontology of cyborg sciences? The need of the new sciences to “subject heterogeneous agglomerations of actors, machines, messages and…opponents to a hierarchical real-time regime of survellance and control.” 17 (Galison; Pickering; Edwards). Once again the issue of control is a huge one and Wiener is simply the beginning of ways in which control is the shadow of most of this science. It isn't just that the military is a huge patron but that military and WW 2 styles of organization evolve into the modern science lab.

One last note: he doesn't include this in the list, but Mirowski talks a lot about the shift in the status of sciences, so that Physics is king in the 19th Century, but is succeeded by Biology in the 20th. Biology is where the action is (DNA, molecular biology, and so on) but he shows that these sciences take off because of the cyborg science technologies and (just as importantly) gestalts that develop post WW2. And Biology ends up being hugely affected by concerns from physics; lots of physicists move from physics proper to other disciplines, and bring ideas and concepts (like entropy and Maxwell's demon and the notion of negative entropy