Humans Are Natural Cyborgs

But my point is that humans have an ability to modify our internal body map when we pick up a tool. Try to think about how you make movements with a pencil or fork, or how you drive a car. You don’t think “I need to move my fingers this way so it’ll lever the fork that way to pick up the noodles”, you instead just move your fork, just how when you pick up something with your hand you don’t have to think about how you’re using muscles in your arm and shoulder, you just do it. When you’re holding a tool or operating a device, at a certain point it stops being about manipulating the tool/device, because you’ve internalized how it moves. Your body map now contains that tool as part of you, and you move it just as automatically and fluently as you do your biological body parts. It takes a while to get to that point the first time, sure, but it takes humans a long time to just get the hang of walking, too. But once you do, it becomes second nature. So my point is that we’re basically set up to be cyborgs, to be more that human. We’re a tool using species, and one way that manifests is that we’re really good at using tools, because we treat them as part of our body, so we don’t have to think about how we manipulate them. We instead think about how we use them to manipulate external things. So because we can have pencils in our body map, we can write, because we think about making marks on the paper, not about moving fingers. Because we can have knives and chisels and hammers and saws in our body map, we can build and cut and manipulate resources by thinking about the changes we’re making, not about the way we handle the tools.

The image is a dark text screenshot presenting a long explanation of how humans mentally incorporate tools into their body map. It argues that people become effectively cyborg-like because familiar tools are controlled automatically, allowing us to focus on the result rather than the mechanics of using them. The meme is typically shared as an absurdly overlong philosophical or intellectual explanation of ordinary tool use. EN: The image is a dark text screenshot presenting a long explanation of how humans mentally incorporate tools into their body map. It argues that people become effectively cyborg-like because familiar tools are controlled automatically, allowing us to focus on the result rather than the mechanics of using them. The meme is typically shared as an absurdly overlong philosophical or intellectual explanation of ordinary tool use.

• @rzeczyzabawne / 16655 2024-05-22