These two assumptions underlay, for example, the story about Mattew Nagle in Wired. The author takes the “hardware”—the brain—as a starting point to ponder about consciousness. “Roughly the size of deflated volleyball,” he says, “your brain weighs about 3 pounds. Its 100 billion neurons communicate via minute electrochemical impulses” (Martin 2005). This hardware, according to the author, this network of neurons, then produces a variety of “software,” or thoughts: “From this ceaseless hubbub,” he says, “arose Ode to Joy, thermonuclear weapons, and Dumb and Dumber” (Martin 2005). The article presumes thoughts and consciousness to be by-products of the mechanics (or rather electronics) of the brain and, as such, to be analytically, temporally, and structurally secondary.
They are secondary in another sense as well: while the (“hardware”) brain is universal and value-neutral (an instrumental means; “software”) thoughts are contingent and subject to judgment. The same bundle of neurons, with the same binary operation, is shared by all humans; it is presocial and precultural. It is in this sense that it is hardware: stable, robust, and unchanging. Software, however, is more ephemeral, contingent, fleeting (a thought might “spring to mind” or “slip one’s mind”), and diverse; it is cultural, infinite (one can always come up with new thoughts, new content), and subject to tests (in juxtaposing Ode to Joy and Dumb and Dumber the author of the article clearly exercises here his Kantian critique of judgment). The corrolary is that the brain, the computer-like brain, is the unchanging, ahistorical essence of the human mind and human consciousness. It is this dichotomy, and this hierarchy between brain and mind, neurons and consciousness, that allows the author to suggest that the “the consciousness problem”; that is, the question of how “electricity and meat make a mind,” which has been puzzling scientists for almost a century, has reached at least a partial resolution with scientists now being able to “listen in on—or alter—brain waves” (Martin 2005).
Humans Are Computers<sub>,</sub> Too
In the digital discourse, the unchanging hardware (“brain”)—not the contingent software (“thoughts”)—is seen as the locus of human essence. This comes out very clearly in a story in Wired reporting on the development of a new type of lie detector (Silberman 2006). In this story, the disjuncture and hierarchy between brain and consciousness and the ability of full commensurability between the brain and computers (as two types of binary hardware) reaches an ironic moment where the brain unwittingly colludes with the computer, bypassing human consciousness (and human agency) altogether. The novelty of the new lie detector lies in the ability of the new technology to go “deeper” into the brain to get, as it were, to the “heart” of where lying really takes place.
Network Human
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