The difference between bodies and machines

There's something that's been bugging me lately in a lot of the reading I've been doing. It started bugging me a while ago - probably even a year ago - but I didn't really think it important then. But this week during my reading I came across the Psymbiote project.

isa gordon, whose body provides the scaffolding for symbiote, is a very young and attractive woman (though it might be more accurate to say her body is being incorporated into Psymbiote, at least according her conceptualization of the project). Which got me thinking.

See, I used to have one of those young, tight, and attractive bodies like hers. Used to. The older I get, the looser things get in general, and of course the older I get, the less my body can be described as young. This is not unusual. It happens to everyone. (Or at least everyone who doesn't go under a plastic surgeon's knife... and even then, there's no way to really turn back the clock.) I'm not saying this out of bitterness, please don't get me wrong there. I'm rather happy with the state of my body... and my mind and my soul come to think of it. I'm really rather satisfied with the state of things. But this satisfaction has only come as a recognition of the inevitability of that loosening that takes place as our bodies age.

But I'm starting to digress from the point.

My point is that the human body changes throughout it's lifecycle. When you think of what a newborn human looks like, their proportions are different than an adult. Any adult that had the head-body proportion of an infant would look freakish. And of course children have to learn how to control the voluntary functions of their bodies.

ASIDE: There's a whole other argument out there regarding human bodies and tools, that envisions the human body as a tool which we gradually learn to use, but that's another issue and would have to be a different post. It also is an issue that I discuss in the dissertation, but so far my thinking about it isn't complete, so if a post is ever forthcoming, it will have to wait.

But the point is that human bodies change. We all know this. Yet whenever I read, or hear discussions about how our bodies and our machines will become more closely integrated with each other, the technophiles who write these things usually ignore that changing body.

They act as if the body they inhabit is the body they always have and always will inhabit.

Now as I said, I didn't really think about it much. I was aware these theorists were ignoring the changes in the body, but didn't really think about why myself. I pretty much chalked it up to the fact that the theorists who I've encountered talking about this are men.

Now, before the word "sexism" can pop into your head, let me try to explain. I will grant that it is sexist of me to expect that men writing about bodies and technology will ignore the body to a greater extent than women might. Yes, I'm guilty of thinking that. BUT. It wasn't so much that these were men writing, but that they were adopting a maculinist point of view.

Several months ago I read N. Katherine Hayles How We Became Posthuman. In it, she talks about the history of cybernetics - I would highly recommend the book if you're looking for a general discussion of cybernetics that incorporates its history with analysis of its emergence in literature e.g. Gibson, Stephenson etc. She recognizes that much cybernetic discussion dismisses the body, and when it does discuss the body, it is a normalized body, which is imagined to be white, adult and male.

If you think about it, she's right. Most of the time, the cyborg is this. Look at Robocop. Look at Terminator. Look at Case, the console cowboy. Look at Hiro Protagonist. Look at Johnny Mnemonic. All men. All white. All adult. Which means that they inhabit bodies that can go for years and years without changing.

For women, change occurs much more easily. For adult women of the same age as these men, there's the possibility that their body will change every month for a few days. There's also the very real possibility that their body will change shape radically if, for example, they become pregnant. And of course the nursing afterwards changes the shape of the body just as its function changes.

Which is why I started tweaking about this idea when I saw Psymbiote. In one of the pictures on her webpage, it shows how she was fitted for a kind of exoskeleton that she'll wear. It looks to be made of fiberglass. Now, fiberglass, when it's unprocessed, is highly malleable. But once you've formed it, it's very solid. (I dated a guy who worked in a fiberglass factory for a while, so I probably know more about it than is really necessary for an adult to know.)

My first thought on seeing this photo?

"What happens if her arm changes shape?"

Well, what does happen?

If Psymbiote is the combination of isa and technology, then what happens when isa changes so that the technology no longer fits comfortably into/onto her body? It will happen. isa's body will change. It may not change for many years. It may not change by much. But it will change.

If the technology attached to her body is indeed symbiotic, as is the project's supposed aim, then what happens when one member of that symbiotic relationship changes? How extensive are the effects?

In nature, if one organism in a symbiotic relationship changes, it can affect the health and even life of the other. Would a symbiotic relationship with a machine be the same? If you think about what would happen if the machine changes, imagines of all those disastrous science fiction scenarios where people are damaged by damaged machines certainly come to mind. Would the reverse be the same? Would a change in the human damage the machine?

And of course, this leads to the question of how much we can really integrate the body with machines, since in order for machines to change, they require an outside agent to effect that change (at least our machines of today - perhaps we'll invent machines that can alter their own structure in the future, the same as how we alter our body structures, intentionally or not). Our bodies can change through outside agency. But they also frequently change without any external intervention.

Of course what got me thinking about this is that Psymbiote's organic component - isa gordon - is clearly female. What if not just her arm changes, but large parts of her body if she chose to be pregnant? How would that affect those static technological pieces? How would it potentially constrain the function of her pregnant body? Can technology/machine adapt to interact in such an intimate manner as Psymbiote is constructed to act if the organic components of it change?

No matter how imaginative I get about it, I keep coming to the same conclusion. The machines that exist today, that are not able to adapt their form to changing circumstances, would be ill equipped to interact intimately with a human body that is capable of changing - often in radical ways - in response to its function a.k.a. its changing physiology.

This is a fundamental difference between humans and machines: our ever changing and changeable bodies. Until machines are capable of such change, there will always exist a gap between us and them that will make intimate mergings of body and machine difficult to say the least.