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SUBJECT: Kevin Kelly has a great line about humans
and our symbiotic relationship with technology.
He says, "We are the creators, and we are the created."
Now, of course, this echoes this notion of ontological design
in that everything that we design is designing us back,
that we have been in a cybernetic feedback
loop with our technologies since the beginning of early hominids
playing with stone tools and inscribing their interior world
onto clay tablets with little glyphs of meaning.
The minute that we started to extend our mindware out
into the world, we've been turning the mind inside out.
Technology is our second skin, our exoskeleton.
Literally, we are exteriorizing our nervous system,
our "mindware," as McKenna likes to say.
And we've been doing it forever.
This is the most natural thing in the world.
it is what it means to be human.
Right?
Kevin Kelly's beautiful example is-- the moment
we discovered fire-- and thus, cooking-- we
all of a sudden created an external stomach that
could pre-digest our food so that we could absorb
that many more nutrients from every meal
and not waste all this time eating raw food all day long
just to basically stay nourished.
Instead, we're freeing up cognitive real estate,
freeing the mind for other endeavors.
So essentially, externalizing our stomach through fire
turned this technology into a part of us
beyond our skin tissue, in whose feedback
loop and engagement with that technology
opened up a new space for a Cambrian explosion of mind.
Fire and cooking essentially made us human.
But again, the larger metaphor here, the larger message
here is that our symbiotic relationships with these tools
actually is who we are.
Our mind is distributed between brains, tools, technologies,
and environments.
This is who we are.
We are, as Andy Clark, says, the "natural-born cyborg."
We are the creators, but we are the created.
What we create is creating us back.
The "foodback loop" is the symbol of life--
not the DNA molecule.
The feedback loop-- the loop.
That's us.
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