IEP 426: Contested Natures

AWAYMAVE - The Distance Mode of MA in Values and the Environment at Lancaster University

Week 7. MASTERY OR MIMICRY

Introduction

The most potent image of technology is of human mastery over nature. The aim of technical innovation is to improve upon nature and better human capacities. However, the dominance of this philosophy of mastery obscures the existence of parallel philosophies of technological mimicry. Rather than master nature, such technologies seek to model and imitate complex natural systems. Mimetic notions of technology have become particularly important in biomimetic nanotechnology and complexity theory. As a different model of technical innovation such technologies offer a set of alternative relations with the natural world.

Mastery vs. mimicry

In last week’s lecture we saw that from its etymological roots in the classics technology becomes thoroughly modern in the notion of technological mastery of nature. As we saw for Bernard Stiegler‘s this mastery is both an expression of the condition of modernity and a metaphysical project of mastery:

Technology becomes modern when metaphysics expresses and completes itself as the project of calculative reason with a view to the mastery and possession of nature. (p. 10)

In this weeks lecture we are going to rethink the notion of mastery by examining a counter traditional within science and engineering – mimicry. In broad terms, whilst notion of mastery assumes that the project of technology is to ‘improve’ upon natural systems, mimicry starts from the premise that the natural systems are already more complex, and more elegant than human creations and hence goal is mimic ‘natural’ machines. So rather than view nature as a ‘calculable coherence of forces’ sees nature as a set of evolving complex dynamics through which to make new types of machines.

Exercise 7.1 Watch the two videos, available on the discussion site, entitled ‘Eva’ and ‘Kismet’. In both cases researchers are attempting to model the perceptual abilities and learning capacities of existing organisms in creating robotic systems that hove a degree of cognition. Both cases the aim is for the robotic system to ‘evolve’ as it ‘learns’ from its surroundings and external stimuli. In what ways are these two examples, consistent with the technical drive toward mastery, and in what ways do they exhibit a more mimetic approach? Are these approaches in tension or complementary?

Please read chapters 1 & 8 of Janine Benyus’ Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature available on the course discussion site.

Benyus presents a vision of bio-mimicry in which technological innovation is infused with insights from biology in order to create more environmentally sensitive technologies:

Now that we can synthesize what we need and re-arrange the genetic alphabet to our liking, we have gained what we think of as autonomy. Strapped to our juggernaut of technology, we fancy ourselves as gods, very far from home indeed. … In reality, we haven’t escaped the gravity of life at all. We are still beholden to ecological laws, the same as any other life-form. … When we stare into nature’s eyes, it takes our breath away, and in a good way, it bursts our bubble. We realise that all our inventions have already appeared in nature in more elegant form and at a lot less cost to the planet. (Benyus, 1997, 5)

Benyus’ introduction to bio-mimicry is interesting both because of the way it outlines the possibilities of integrating engineering and biology, but also for the ambiguities of her vision. At some points her vision is consistent with the overall project of western technology toward mastery of nature, whilst at other points she seems to point to a new, more humble, vision of technology ‘working with nature’. It is clear that she is inspired by nature, and by a sense of the need to transform modern technological society to be more sensitive to the environment. Yet she also seems to advocate deeply technocratic solutions to these problems. Similarly her vision of biomimeticism encompasses technologies that on the one hand simply take their inspiration from natural systems, to more advanced modelling and synthetic recreation of natural systems.

Exercise 7.2: Use the online encyclopaedia ‘Wikipedia’ (http://en.wikipedia.org/) to explore the breadth of current biomimetic thought. Search terms such as ‘bionics’, ‘evolutionary computation’, ‘synthetic biology’, ‘Evolutionary algorithm’ and ‘self organisation’. In what ways do these new fields challenge the assumptions inherent in modern technological endeavour?

In one sense the ambiguity in Benyus between ‘inspiration’ and ‘recreation’ is instructive. The NASA website dedicated to ‘Biomimetics: Biologically-Inspired Technologies’ (http://ndeaa.jpl.nasa.gov/nasa-nde/biomimetics/bm-hub.htm) positions biomimicry as a ‘natural’ extension of general human inspiration in natural species. The site states:

"Humans have always looked at nature for inspiration to making our life more comfortable. The use of tweezers was probably one of the first such tools where human adapted the shape and performance of birds’ beak. Evolution of biologically inspired technologies (having the moniker Biomimetics) led to the emergence of such fields as artificial intelligence, muscles, vision and others. These fields are making it possible to consider developing prosthetics that feel and operate like the "real thing" as well as engineering robots that look and behave as human and animals."

For NASA, biomimeticism is nothing new, indeed new prosthetics and forms of artificial intelligence are simply another example of humans taking ‘inspiration’ from nature in building new technologies. The site gives the example of the tweezer which is modelled on the shape of the bird’s beak. Indeed, mimicry, it is claimed, is integral to the survival of species, particularly the ability to adopt to environments and develop protection from danger (e.g. camouflage). In this sense taking inspiration from nature is positioned as necessary to human survival, and thoroughly natural. This vision of biomimeticism is consistent both with technological determinism and mastery we discussed last week.

There is, however something, revolutionary in Benyus’ account. For the doctrine of mastery nature is imperfect, simple and basic. The goal of technology is to build upon nature and to extend it in order to improve the human condition and to enhance human performance. Benyus, however, reverses this dualism. She says, that ‘all our inventions have already appeared in nature in more elegant form’. For Benyus, the goal of technology should not be to supersede nature but rather to mimic it. For Benyus, natural systems are the most advanced and most elegant and most advanced technologies, and hence serve as models for technical innovation. It is here that her ambiguity between inspiration and recreation becomes clear. Her vision of technology is more than simple inspiration – but rather forms of technology that seek to model, imitate and recreate natural systems.

Illustration 1. shows a non-poisonous snake in the centre mimicking the colouring of a two poisonous snakes.

Two examples help here:

DNA-Nanotechnology

A key property of biological nanostructures is molecular recognition, leading to self-assembly and the templating of atomic and molecular structures. For example, it is well known that two complementary strands of DNA will pair to form a double helix. DNA illustrates two features of self-assembly. The molecules have a strong affinity for each other and they form a predictable structure when they associate. Those who wish to create defined nanostructures would like to develop systems that emulate this behaviour. Thus, rather than milling down from the macroscopic level, using tools of greater and greater precision (and probably cost), they would like to build nanoconstructs from the bottom up, starting with chemical systems. (Seeman & Belcher, 2002, 6451)

Spintronics

A multidisciplinary field whose central theme is the active manipulation of spin degrees of freedom in solid-state systems. The term spin stands for either the spin of a single electron s, which can be detected by its magnetic moment 2g mBs ( mB is the Bohr magneton and g is the electron g factor, in a solid generally different from the free-electron value of g052.0023), or the average spin of an ensemble of electrons, manifested by magnetization. The control of spin is then a control of either the population and the phase of the spin of an ensemble of particles, or a coherent spin manipulation of a single or a few-spin system. The goal of spintronics is to understand the interaction between the particle spin and its solid-state environments and to make useful devices using the acquired knowledge. Fundamental studies of spintronics include investigations of spin transport in electronic materials, as well as of spin dynamics and spin relaxation. (Zutic et al, 2004, 323)

In both DNA-nanotechnology and spintronics the goal is not only to take inspiration from nature but to capitalise on existing natural systems, and to emulate biological processes, in building machines. Thus in DNA-nanotechnology the goal is to use the existing functionality of DNA to build new types of nano-machines. Similarly in spintronics the goal is to utilise the spin of electrons to create new kinds of electrical devices. In both cases the relationship between technology and nature is changed. Rather than aim to master nature, such technology aim to either capitalise on existing biological examples or to direct natural systems in certain ways. There is huge uncertainty here. The attempt to build machines using the functionality of DNA is countered by the complexity of DNA’s existing functionality. Similarly the goal of spintronics necessitates working with the massive complexities inherent in the movement of electrons. In both cases then, the goal is not to master these systems, but to work with them and direct them in certain ways.

In both a key concept is self-organisation, which ‘refers to a process in which the internal organization of a system, normally an open system, increases automatically without being guided or managed by an outside source. Self-organizing systems typically (though not always) display emergent properties’. It is this attempt to direct self-organisation, and to both predict and capitalise on such emergent properties that presents such a challenge to conventional philosophies of technology. Robert Laughlin (2005), expresses the challenges posed by this advanced science to traditional concepts of mastery and control:

What we’re actually experiencing, of course, is a scientific paradigm shift – a large-scale reorganisation in how we think forced upon us by events. It is plain to anyone that [self-organising systems] represents something new in the history of human interactions with nature, and that turning point will require an invention. (p. 139)

Please read chapters 18 & 19 of Tim Ingold’s The Perception of the Environment. In what ways does Ingold rethink technological design?

In a sense then, we need new philosophical resources in thinking through the philosophical implications of such technology and composing a philosophy of technology adequate to these challenges.

Vitalism

The Routledge Encyclopaedia entry on vitalism is:

Vitalists hold that living organisms are fundamentally different from non-living entities because they contain some non-physical element or are governed by different principles than are inanimate things. In its simplest form, vitalism holds that living entities contain some fluid, or a distinctive ‘spirit’. In more sophisticated forms, the vital spirit becomes a substance infusing bodies and giving life to them; or vitalism becomes the view that there is a distinctive organization among living things. Vitalist positions can be traced back to antiquity. Aristotle’s explanations of biological phenomena are sometimes thought of as vitalistic, though this is problematic. In the third century BC, the Greek anatomist Galen held that vital spirits are necessary for life. Vitalism is best understood, however, in the context of the emergence of modern science during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Mechanistic explanations of natural phenomena were extended to biological systems by Descartes and his successors. Descartes maintained that animals, and the human body, are ‘automata’, mechanical devices differing from artificial devices only in their degree of complexity. Vitalism developed as a contrast to this mechanistic view. Over the next three centuries, numerous figures opposed the extension of Cartesian mechanism to biology, arguing that matter could not explain movement, perception, development or life. Vitalism has fallen out of favour, though it had advocates even into the twentieth century. The most notable is Hans Driesch (1867–1941), an eminent embryologist, who explained the life of an organism in terms of the presence of an entelechy, a substantial entity controlling organic processes. Likewise, the French philosopher Henri Bergson (1874–1948) posited an élan vital to overcome the resistance of inert matter in the formation of living bodies

Bergson is the most significant modern vitalist thinker. Whilst vitalism has been long discredited scientifically as an explanation of the formation of biological things, Bergson revives the spirit of vitalism in his thinking about the intersection between the subject and the object. In Matter and Memory Bergson is interested in understanding the relationship between the material world and the world of image, perception and memory. He sets out to prove that ‘… memory … is just the intersection of mind and matter.’ (p. 13) and constructs a conception of the image as an aggregate of the mental and the material. His philosophy is a philosophy of mixtures in which things, images, perceptions, and ideas are fundamental mixtures of mental and material substances. His interest in memory is an interest in a materially composed past. To have a memory of a thing is to have a physical remembrance of it.

There is a degree of communication between Bergson’s notion of memory and the phenomenological notion of perception. Traditional histories of philosophy often class Bergson’s conception of perception alongside Merleau-Ponty’s as a search for a Kantian intuition or primordial experience. It also appears that Merleau-Ponty was well schooled in Bergson’s understanding of perception, and cites his work approvingly as an important Discovery of the pre-human. Whilst both Bergson and Merleau-Ponty deal in the realm of perception, only Bergson’s notion of materiality troubles the Kantian universalism of phenomenology. Compare, for example Merleau-Ponty’s, notion of matter’s self presentation to the subject:

‘We see the things themselves, the world is what we see,’ begins Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s The Visible and the Invisible. The opening line expresses the fundamental starting point for phenomenology, namely, that the world gives itself to us, even if only with pretensions of completeness, and that we open onto the things or matters themselves with a basic perceptual faith that amounts to our immediate acceptance of the being of things. This point of departure for phenomenology is, in short, experience. (Steinbock, 1997, 127)

with Bergson’s conception of the material play:

Our daily life is spent among objects whose very presence invites us to play a part… (Bergson, 1911b [1988], 95)

What is important here is that Bergson fundamentally decentres perception. For phenomenologists, such as Merleau-Ponty, perception is the process through which the human subject views and experiences an external world. Whereas for Bergson the act of perception is double action undertaken by both the subject and the object. In perception both the ‘subject’ and the ‘object’ move toward each other, and are changed in the experience. Perception is formed not simply through a subjective apprehension of the material world. Instead, the object ‘invites us’ to perceive. The object has a certain capacity or agency for invitation. It is with this notion of invitation that Bergson radically redefines the quality of perceptive knowledge. Subjective knowledge is not simply a cognitive organisation of perceptive impression. Rather, knowledge is a fundamental mixture of both the mental and the material as the object invites us to ‘play a part’. He states:

More generally, does not the fiction of an isolated object imply a kind of absurdity, since the object borrows its physical properties from the relations which it maintains with all others, and owes each of its determinations, and consequently, its very existence to the place which it occupies in the universe as a whole? Let us no longer say, then, that our perceptions depend upon the molecular movements of the cerebral mass. We must say rather that they vary with them, but that these movements remain inseparably bound up with the rest of the material world. (p. 25)

Bergson notion of matter is a vitalist one. Matter is not a fundamental and essential outside, but rather an active constituent of the object. To perceive is thus to engage in the same active vitalism as matter itself. It is ‘to vary with’ the object. In a sense what Bergson is doing is to take the Aristotelian notion of vitalism – that there exists an internal life force with biology to explain the creation and appearance of different species – to apply to the non-organic. Though perhaps, for Bergson, vitalism has lost it spirituality and magic, he uses vitalism to make an ontological claim about the nature of matter. His concept of the élan vital or ‘vital impetus’ is a complex reaction against the notion that the trajectory of evolution is already laid out. Rather the élan vital is a kind of vital force which drives evolution ever onwards in the perpetual creation of new species and individuals.

Therefore the importance of a vitalist conception of matter for a philosophy of technology is in the way in alters the ontological basis upon which technical production is achieved. In as much as Ingold suggests that weaving a basket involves a sensuous and muscular negotiation of forces between the wicker and the weaver vitalists, and particularly Bergson, would suggest that in some senses this material negotiation is on the basis of the animate capacities of material. To be sure, Bergson does not suggest that matter is imbued with the same vital force as ‘life itself’, but rather that matter is somehow caught up in the ongoing and undetermined evolution of life and material forms. For Bergson material forms and different forms of life are simply momentary stabilisations of this vital force. Applied biologically, Bergson suggests that the human species, though unique, is simply a temporary stabilisation of this vital force. Similarly applied to the non-organic world, Bergson would claim that in geological time the great features of the earth are perpetually evolving and changing. In a sense then goal of technology, for Bergson, is to work with this fundamental evolution in creating momentary stabilisations.

Think:

how does a Bergsonian conception of evolution relate to bio-mimetic technologies? How does this help (or not?) to think through what is at stake in the attempt to direct self-organisation or self-replication in the creation of new technologies? How does would Bergson view the notion of artificial evolution?

Radical Constructivism

In the same way that Bergsonian vitalism is directed against a mechanistic interpretation of evolution the ‘essential claim [of Radical Constructivism] is that organisms interpret their environment and are not merely passive objects of natural selection, as emphasised by contemporary Darwinian evolutionary biology’ (Bains, 2001, 141). Von Glasersfeld defines the key tenants of radical constructivism as:

• Knowledge is not passively received either through the senses or by way of communication;
• Knowledge is actively built up by the cognizing subject.
• The function of cognition is adaptive, in the biological sense of the term, tending towards fit or viability;
• Cognition serves the subject’s organization of the experiential world, not the discovery of an objective ontological reality. (von Glasersfeld, 1995, p. 51)

Please read Jakob von Uexküll’s Stroll Through the Worlds of Animals and Men (1934) available on the MAVE discussion site.

Jakob von Uexküll’s seminal work Stroll Through the Worlds of Animals and Men is a key starting point in the development of Radical Constructivism. Von Uexküll’s notion of the Umwelt or perceptual self-world of the animal, bird and organism has also been developed in cybernetics, bio-semiotics and artificial intelligence. In his (1934) Stroll Through the Worlds of Animals and Men he develops a notion of the Umwelt, how the world appears to the animal. For von Uexküll the body, both human and nonhuman, is enfolded by the senses, and thus each being operates within an ontologically unique perceptual world, or Umwelt. For example:

Perhaps [the Umwelt] should be called a stroll into unfamiliar worlds; worlds strange to us but known to other creatures, manifold and varied as the animals themselves. The best time to set out on such an adventure is on a sunny day. The place, a flower-strewn meadow, humming with insects, fluttering with butterflies. Here we may glimpse the worlds of the lowly dwellers of the meadow. … A new world comes into being … the world as it appears to animals themselves, not as it appears to us. This we may call the phenomenal world or the self-world of the animal. (p. 5)

The importance of Umwelt is that is signals an attention to the way that animals, birds and organisms interpret their world, almost in composing a phenomenology of animal experience. Importantly Von Uexküll develops his notion of the Umwelt for all manner of living creatures – mammals, fish, birds and simpler single beings such as larvae and cell organisms, sketching depictions of the Umwelt of, for example, the scallop and the pea-weevil larvae.

It is clear that there is a certain romanticism of the animal at work here. This is the romanticism of the naturalist, and the sunny day with butterflies over the meadow. Though Deleuze and Guattari (1987) regard von Uexküll, positively, as the grandfather of ethology, there is also a deep Kantianism to his perceptual schema. However, this is tempered by the fact that his notion of the Umwelt is a combination of both active and perceptive capacities of the being. It is perpetually changing with the being, as it perceives and acts upon its world.
The significance of von Uexküll’s work is that his proposition that animals and other creatures operate as interpretive agents of the world, both perceiving and interpreting their own worlds, signals the autonomy of even very simple creatures such as larvae and bacteria.

Von Uexküll’s ethological theory of meaning has, therefore been developed as a theory of proto-semiosis or bio-semiosis – a consideration of the very basic ‘proto-sign-processes’ at play in the interaction between, for example, bacteria and its world. Similarly von Uexküll’s notion of the Umwelt has become an important tool in the development of artificial life and robotic systems, in the analysis of the perceptual capacities of such systems. For example:
AI has come (or returned) to an Uexküllian view of meaning in which signs/representations are viewed not as referring to specific external objects, but embedded in functional circles along which the interaction of agent and environment is organised/structures. (Ziemke, 2001, 197)
Such a theory or meaning, radically transforms the presumed goal of mechanical and cognitive autonomy of such AI research. Rather than conceive such intelligent systems as autonomous, robotic agents, an Uexküllian conception of the Umwelt of the robot, suggests that intelligent systems are enwrapped in their own environment. Von Uexküll, therefore presents a complex picture of the perceptive autonomy of biological systems – a kind of relational autonomy, in which the being is sensually entwined in an autonomous Umwelt.
Indeed, for von Uexküll this notion of ‘autonomy’ is critical to his definition of ‘life’. In opposition to Darwinian mechanism, which would suggest that organisms are ‘passive objects of natural selection’ von Uexküll develops a notion of ‘relational autonomy’, in which the organism is inexorably located within it environment, and yet autonomous. Von Uexküll maintains a strong distinction between organisms and mechanisms on the basis of their relative autonomy. For von Uexküll, machines lack the autonomy necessary to qualify as living organisms, acting according to external plans. Similarly, mechanisms, for von Uexküll, are without any ability to self-regenerate in the same manner as a living or natural systems. Therefore, though informational exchange is key to ‘intelligent’ mechanical systems, such exchange does not qualify, according to von Uexküll, as full semiosis, nor the formation of a robot self-world.
Von Uexküll’s distinction, between organisms and mechanisms, is, however, challenged by current research in biomimeticism, artificial intelligence and synthetic biology. Research in artificial intelligence systems is concerned with the creation of suitably complex algorithms which would bring to ‘life’ mechanical and robotic systems. Alternatively the bio-mimetic vision is to harness the very intelligence and perceptive world of existing biological systems. Bio-mimeticsm aims to design biological machines that both autonomous in an Uexküllian sense and able to organise, replicate and regenerate themselves.

Think: How does von Uexküll’s notion of Umwelt and relational autonomy relate to current developments in biomimeticsm and artificial intelligence? Similarly how does von Uexküll help in unpacking whether the products of such research are real or artificial, alive or dead, animate or inanimate? A resource to help in this is Tom Ziemke’s useful summary available on the discussion site.

References

Bains, P., 2001: Umwelten. Semiotica, 134(1/4), 137-167.
Bechtel, W & Robert C. R., 1998: Vitalism. In E. Craig (Ed.), Routledge Encyclopaedia of Philosophy. London: Routledge.
Bergson, H., 1911 [1988]: Creative Evolution. Dover Publications, New York.
Bergson, H., 1908 [1991] Matter and Memory. Zone Books, New York.
Laughlin, R. B., 2005: A Different Universe: Reinventing Physics from the Bottom Down. Basic Books, New York.
Merleau-Ponty, M., 1962: The Phenomenology of Perception. Routledge, London.
Seeman, N. C. & Belcher, A. M., 2002: Emulating biology: building nanostructures from the bottom up. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 99(2), 6451-6455.
von Glasersfeld, E., 1995: Radical Constructivism – A Way of Knowing and Learning. London: Falmer Press.
Zutic, I., Fabian, J. & Das Sarma, S., 2004: Spintronics: Fundamentals and Applications. Reviews of Modern Physics, 76(2), 323-410.