Syed Mustafa Ali

Computing Department

The Open University

Milton Keynes, UK

s.m.ali@open.ac.uk

According to Latour (1993), nature-culture (or nature-artifice) dualism is existentially grounded in hybrid network pluralism. Furthermore, Haraway (1991) maintains that the ontological foundation of hybrid networks is the ‘informatics of domination’, that is, neo-cybernetic materialism. Thus, the ultimate metaphysical truth is neither dualism nor pluralism; rather, it is monism. According to Haraway, "all epistemologies and ontologies - including their negations – ‘erase’ or ‘police’ difference" (p.158); her own seminal ‘manifesto for cyborgs’ argues for the ‘erasure’ (or deconstruction) of the ontological nature-artifice dualism. However, like the sci-fi film icon, Robocop, Haraway’s cyborgs are simultaneously both erasers of difference (since nature-artifice hybrids) and also beings that police difference (in this case, the metaphysical difference between neo-cybernetic materialism and other monisms).

In this paper, we extend the above trope, hybridising the -cop or policing function of Robocop with the cop- of the copula ‘is’ interpreted on a perspective informed by Heideggerian onto-phenomenology and Whiteheadian process metaphysics - thereby engendering what might be referred to as the ‘Robocop(ular)’ - in order to determine whether there are any intrinsic ontological limits to nature-artifice hybridisation. First, we show that the intractability of the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness (Chalmer 1996), that is, the problem of explaining how ontological subjectivity (or first-person experience) can emerge from an ontologically objective (or non-experiential) substrate, necessitates reconsidering the ontology of the natural (or given) and the artefactual (or made). We argue that metaphysical materialism, neo-cybernetic or otherwise, must be supplanted by a panexperientialist metaphysics in which the ultimate ontological constituents of nature are experiential events and higher-order relational complexes can assume one of two forms, non-experiential aggregates and experiential compound individuals. We then show how natural and artefactual systems can be distinguished using a conceptual framework which augments conventional Whiteheadian panexperientialism with an onto-phenomenological account of artefact construction that is grounded in the metaphysical thought of Heidegger (1977), Ladrière (1998), Lee (1999), and others (Ali Forthcoming).

Ali, S.M. (Forthcoming) The Nature of The Artificial: Augmenting Negrottian Artificiality with Neo-Whiteheadian Naturality. In The First Yearbook of The Artificial. Edited by M. Negrotti. Peter Lang Academic Publishers.

Haraway, D. (1991) Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York, Routledge.

Heidegger, M. (1977) The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Translated by W. Lovitt. New York, Harper & Row.

Latour, B. (1993) We Have Never Been Modern. London, Longman.

Ladrière, J. (1998) The Technical Universe in an Ontological Perspective. Philosophy and Technology 4 (1), 66-91.

Lee, K. (1999) The Natural and the Artefactual: The Implications of Deep Science and Deep Technology for Environmental Philosophy. Oxford, Lexington.