Chapter 63: Learning by Being: Thirty Years of Cyborg Existemology

Since my childhood, a personal hobby of mine has been the functional modification of my own body, through technology. This modification often took the form of creating new sensory capabilities, as well as (what were to become eventually successful) attempts at correcting learning disabilities, such as visual memory impairment. I have had very particular experiences that speak to what it means to live within a virtual, and more importantly, a mediated (i.e., computationally modified) learning environment. I did not just experience virtual reality, mediated reality, etc., I became a cyborg, invented the technologies I needed to become a cyborg and then have spent 30 years learning and teaching about what it means to exist in a cyborg state. Originally I did this in private, but around 20 years ago I started, wearing a full computer system more openly, which resulted in my being referred to as a “cyborg” (although I do not particularly like the term because it is such a “loaded” term so heavily co-opted by science fiction). I came to best understand the term “cyborg” through a variety of discussions I had with Manfred Clynes, who coined the term. Thus I prefer to limit use the term to the Clynes sense, i.e., a synergy between human and machine that happens without conscious thought or effort (Clynes would often tell me that a person riding a bicycle was a cyborg because he or she would, after a while, forget that they were technologically modified). As a “cyborg” (Mann, 2001) in the sense of long-term adaptation to the modified body, one encounters a new kind of existential self-determination and mastery over one’s own environs (and to some degree, one’s own destiny). Presently, in addition to having the internet and massive databases and video at my beck and call most of the time, I am also connected to others. While I am grocery shopping, my wife—who may be at home or in her office—sees exactly what I see and helps me pick out vegetables. She can imprint images onto my retina while she is seeing what I see. I call this collaborative mediated reality. I hope to add to the population of similarly equipped people; in the Fall of 1998, at the University of Toronto, I taught what I believe to be the world’s first existemology course. Existemology pertains to not just body modification, through technology (“cyborg primitives”) but also to mind modification through long-term