>> Dean Lanham:
Well, good afternoon.  

And welcome back to the continuation of the symposium on Ancient Greece.  

It's been a delightful morning here with a variety of presentations, and after Dr. Hawkins presentation here, we have other opportunities tomorrow in the evening and then on Wednesday in the afternoon as well as the evening for the closure in the North Gym of the McAfee building, where we will have music, dance, and a presentation.  

So, hope to see you there, and thanks for coming to all.  

I thank you for presenting.  Dr. Wahby.

>> Dr. Wahby:
Thank you.  

Welcome to this session, distinguished session of a Futuristic Look Through Ancient Lenses and we have a distinguished speaker as well. 

First time I met Dr. Hawkins was the first year I came here. 

They had Seven Habits of Successful People, or something like that, and he was one of the speakers, and I appreciated what he had to tell us and benefited from it. 

And over the years our friendship continued and I guess the best way to introduce him is to ask the chair to introduce him.  

So Dr. Deb Woodley, School of Technology.  

>> Dr. Woodley:
I'll just use my School speaking teacher voice, 

>> Dr. Wahby:
This is for taping. 

>> Wes:
I get to record you for posterity. 

>> Dr. Woodley:
I'd like to introduce Thomas Hawkins and he is a perfect person to talk about this particular topic, and this topic is near and dear to school of technology. 

We often have discussions about this, does technology shape society, or does society shape techology?  

Is technology inherently good, is it inherently bad?  

And so he is bringing another perspective to that.  

Does technology shape humans, or do humans shape technology?  

So, welcome.  

>> Dr. Hawkins:
Thank you.  

Go ahead. 

Yes, I have it on. 

As Dr. Woodley said, I teach in the school of technology and I want to start with showing you a clip. 

We are going to start with not the ancient part, but the future part. 

And hopefully this will work.  

If not, I'll just tell you what it says.  

Well, it disappeared.  

Yeah, oh, there it was.  

>> Nia Hawkins:
You may not be flying a plane, but Zach Walters considers himself to be a pilot.  

What is he maneuvering?  

An eight million dollar bionic leg.  

And where is he going? 

He might climb up the stairs of Chicago's Willis Tower, one of the world’s tallest skyscrapers.  

>> Zach:
So, I've been training for a couple months now on and off trying to get out to the gym a couple times a week, I've been training on it’s like a small escalator, it's a stair treadmill. 

>> Nia Hawkins:
The thirty-one amputee is a research subject helping to test a trail-blazing prosthetic leg controlled by his thoughts and maneuvered through the use of electrodes and engineering. 

>> Zach:
It puts energy in when I am walking, it puts energy into that, whereas my normal prosthetic is nominal percent, and doesn’t respond or react to me. 

>> Nia Hawkins:
The bionic leg is the result of the partnership between the Department of Defense and several universities.  

Experts say most prosthetics are glorified wooden legs, but this? 

This is a step beyond state of the art. 

>> Zach:
Now when he just thinks about moving his ankle, his hamstring moves and we are able to tell the prosthesis to move appropriately.  

>> Nia Hawkins:
On Sunday, Walters will participate in the sky rise Chicago climb, a fundraiser for the rehabilitation institute.  

Researcher will be cheering him on while they monitor the prosthetic's performance.  

Safety is a top priority. 

If bionic hand fails, someone drops a glass of water.  

If a bionic leg fails, someone falls down stairs. 

This will be the first test in the public eye, and if it goes well, bionic prosthesis could hit the market within a decade. 

Nia Hawkins AP

>> Dr. Hawkins:
Just a disclaimer, Nia Hawkins is no relation to me. 

What did you notice about the bionic leg?  

Anything?  

What controls it? 

>> Student:
Wires running through it.  

>> Dr. Hawkins:
And it goes directly from his mind, to his leg.  

So, where does the mechanics stop and the person begin? 

Any of you remember the Olympics back in the summer? 

Something that was unusual this year?  

Do you remember who won the Gold Medal for the 400 Meter race, in the 400 Meter relay? 

His name was Oscar Pistorius. 

What was unusual about him?

>> Audience Member:
He ran on blades. 

>> Dr. Hawkins:
Yes, he ran on blades, because he had prosthetic legs.  

So the gold medal in the Olympics goes to someone who has prosthetic legs, because they are wired into him.  

There's a new book, I did not tear this out of the library's books, and I’ve already been asked that.  

But it's a review of a new book by Eric Topol called 'Creative Destruction of Medicine'.  

And then it says "How the Digital Revolution will Create Better Health Care" is the subtitle.  

And the vision of the future of medicine, according to Eric Topol, who works at a research institute in California, the Scripts Transitional Science Institute, is that we will all have implants in us that we will monitor with this, so that if we need to adjust anything, that improves our blood pressure, or corrects our diabetes, or any other number of medical conditions that we might have, we will be continuously monitoring that ourselves, based on implants in us that are sent then to a little monitor that we carry, so we can adjust what we want.  

Which will, in their vision, make doctors irrelevant.  

The review says, "Don't hold your breath."  

But that's the background of what I want to talk about.  

The interface between human beings and technology, or machines. 

And I gave you a couple of examples, but back in 2007 Charles Higgins, who is at the University of Arizona, developed a little robot that was guided by the eyes of a moth.  

So just by looking at things, the moth's eyes could move the robot.  

And he wrote, "By 2017 to 2022 people will be using hybrid computers", in other words we'll have implants in our brain that are a combination of technology and living organic tissue. 
[00:08:12;25]
So where does the person stop, and the technological machine, the wiring begin?  

Or where does the machine stop and where does the organic living being begin?  

Just this year, Feinberg School of Medicine, up in Northwestern, they've developed implants that they've put in the brain that sends signals directly to the muscles that bypass the spinal cord entirely.  

So the device uses signals from the brain to tell the muscles in the hand to move, without that having to go through the spinal, the neurons in the spinal cord, so multi electrode array, it's implanted in a way that picks up the signals from about a hundred neurons in the brain, and using those, it sends those through a computer, that deciphers them, and then instructs the muscles to move.  

And it promises to help people who have had a spinal cord injury recover a lot of the daily functions they use.  

So again, where does the technology stop, where does the human person begin? 

What's the relationship between them?  

Also this year, a professor at Tel Aviv University developed a computerized cerebellum.  	

Anybody know what the cerebellum does?  

It's one of the older parts of our brain.  

It controls a lot of the basic functions.  

The living tissue was taken out and implanted in the brain was a small, computerized cerebellum that mimics all the functions of the brain's cerebellum. 

Again, a technological system that is used to replace the living tissue.  

So, if you think about it again. 

What is human, and what's a machine? 

Also this year, picking up things that are happening, the pace of all of this is accelerated and it will continue to accelerate, because we have so many people coming back from places like Afghanistan and Iraq who have lost limbs of one kind or another, or brain injuries, and the defense department has unlimited resources to put into trying to develop prosthetics.  

But in Parley Cycles, that's in Boston, is working with the Toyota Prius projects, and it's developed a bicycler, bicycle helmet that picks up the neurotransmissions from the brain, sends them to a receiver, a wireless transmitter that is in the seat post, and that is used to automatically change the gears on the bicycle, so you no longer have to do this with your feet, and that with your hand, you just have the helmet on and you think of a different gear you want in the bicycle and that is sent directly from your brain, to the bicycle gears, it changes the gears.  

What's the relationship between being human, and being a machine? 

Who is an extension of whom? 

What's an extension of what? 

Where does one begin, where does the other start?  

Now traditionally, we have thought that you know human beings emerged because we have intelligence, we have conscientiousness, we have these cognitive capacities, and so we develop tools.  

But what if it is the other way around?  

What if it's the tools that cause us to be human?  

And what if the brain isn't the cause for our technology, our use of technique but in fact, it's the technology, the technique that creates the brain?  

One way of thinking about this is to say, perhaps the very essence of being human, is to live by prosthetic supplementation. 

Almost all technology involved essentially externalizing some human capacity of thought or other ability.  

So we are from the very beginning, we have been through technology migrating skills from flesh and blood and mind, into non-living matter.  

And that's what we are doing when we are creating a bionic leg, or a bionic cerebellum, or any of those things we had.  

What increasingly, if you think about this way, we are merging the two, technology and the brain, a way of thinking about that is that humans may have a double origin.  

That the genesis of being human and the genesis of technology are really the same.  

Again, it's not that we became human and then we developed tools, it's the fact that in our evolution, we somehow developed the ability to use tools, and that in fact, is what developed our brain capacity. 

So that maybe there is no human being apart from a technological being.  

You know, we invented ourselves as a species when we invented tools.

And we've continued to do that in an increasingly sophisticated way. 

So much so that we are merging at the point where the computer is actually implanted in us, or our lens can be replaced by them, and operated by them.  

Among some anthropologists, one characteristic of human evolution is that somehow that tools and humanity seem to emerge simultaneously. 

What we find are the flint chips. 

If you think about it, even that, the flint tool is a prosthetic, a moveable organ.  

And somehow the internalization of mind and the externalization of tool may happen in that moment when hard flint and soft brain tissue come together. 

Language is a kind of technological prosthetic if you think about it.  

It's a way of externalizing and you could say fire is the ultimate transformative piece we've invented, which is what brings us to a Greek Myth.

Epimetheus and Prometheus.  

There are two versions of it, one is in Plato and others in Hessiad.   

Both of them are Titans.  

And Epimetheus is charged with giving creatures their qualities.  

Is that more or less correct?  

From Plato, yeah, that's the Plato one.  

I am using the Plato one, because it fits what I want to say better.  

He starts with giving the animals all their qualities.   

So you know, everything is born without any qualities, any essence, really of its own.  

So you know, you give a tiger big teeth, you give the elephant huge size, you give the fox, cunning, you give the bird the ability to fly, you give the horse speed, and so he's taking all of these qualities out of his box and passing them out to various animals all over creation.  

The last being he has to give something to, a quality that gives it its essence are human beings.  

And he looks in his box, and there's nothing in it.  

He has given everything away.  

So what is he going to do? 

This epi means "lacks forethought". 

He's an afterthought.  

You know, he passes everything out and humans still don't have any essential quality, and the box is empty. 

He has nothing left to give.  

He forgets to save back any kind of quality for human beings.  

Essentially we are totally defenseless, nakedless, characterless, beings.  

There is some sort of default then in our origin. 

We have no essence. 

So, what happens?  

Again, according to the Platorus version, Prometheus goes up, we know this don't we, he steals fire.  

He takes it from the chariot of the sun; he hides it in a fennel stalk, the little coal, and brings it down and gives it to humankind. 

Eventually you know the other part of this story is he is punished because he does this, he is chained to the rock, the birds come every day and pick his liver out, and it grows back every night. 

But what does Prometheus give us? 

What is the essence of fire? 

Fire is in part a technological tool. 

Once we discovered fire, we use it to cook, we use it to convert stone into metal, we use it to transform all kinds of things.  

Fire is essentially a technological tool.  

I know years ago, when I took a course on British history, history of the Industrial revolution, this author titled it, Prometheus unbound, Promethean vision is a technological vision. 

Even the legend suggests, or the myth suggests that somehow what makes us human is that we are technological beings.  

That somehow there is a fusion between technique and humanity that they go hand in hand.  

The anthropogenesis and techno genesis are the same thing.  

The Prometheus in giving us technique gives us humanity at the same time. 

It's the quality we are given.  

So there's no human without the technological, and our correct trajectory of merging these more and more are just a working out of something that has been there since the very inception.  

It's just more complicated. 

We've moved to a mechanical cerebellum instead of a flint tool.  

Through the merger of the flesh of our body, with a hard hardness of non-living matter, we've been on that trajectory for a million years, and somehow human evolution and technological evolution are tied together. 

The more our technology evolves; it results in inevitable human evolution.  

You know, and the rest of the myth is who marries, at least in that version, who married Epimetheus is Pandora. 

And Pandora opens a box that contains all the ills of the world. 

So both what his gift, is also punishment, in a complicated way.  

So this merger of the technological and human is both gift, it gives us who we are, but there's a terrible cost to it.  

Now, I want to contrast, I am going beyond Greece here a little bit, contrast this to another myth.  

A Sumerian myth that also is about humans got these qualities, but it does it in a different way.  

It involves the god Enki, who along with An and Enlil are the high gods. 

Enki is a god of wisdom. 

He's absolutely enthroned over Abzu, but also the word for semen. 

That's interesting.  

The inventor of technique. 

And the other character in this Babylonian myth is Ananna, who we are more apt to know as Ishtar.  

And in that myth, Ananna goes from her home city to visit Enki in his, and he is so impressed by her beauty and entranced by her, he throws a great big party for her, and there's lots of beer, and he gets drunk. 

And while he is drunk, he decided to give her all his ME.  

Samarian word that is not very easily transmittable, but it's everything.  

It lists in the myth it lists a hundred of these ME he gives her. 

And some of it is crafts like the ability to smelt copper, or work gold, some of it are human capacities, and responses like deceit, kindness, love, some of it is prostitution, and other of it are political skills, and priesthood, and deceit, and heroism. 

All these are capabilities that Enki, the god of wisdom, while he is drunk gives to Ananna, she puts them in her boat, and starts to go back to her own city. 

Enki sobers up, realizes oh my god, what have I done? 

And he sends one of the other gods to try to tip her boat over, and spill all these, and get them back, but he can't do it.  

She takes all of them back to her home city, and of course, gives them to humankind.  

Now what's interesting about these is, if you think about the story of Enki, and Ananna and you think about Prometheus and Epimetheus, there's also a theme of technique, about how human beings get technology.  

How they, how technique comes to humans.  

And they both share an element of deception.  

You know, in the Prometheus story, Prometheus, you know, there's an element of deception and he steals fire from the goddess, not that he is given, and in this one, there's an element of deception, too.  

You know, Ananna essentially gets Enki drunk and when he is not himself, she gets him to give her all these.  

Both of them are stories about how technological power comes to human beings. 

And both of the involve both of them a transgression of boundaries.  

It's clear in the Prometheus story works one way, the transgression of boundaries is between the gods, and the Samarian myth and violation of hierarchies where things that belong up here are given down here.  

And they seem to suggest that technology involves artifice and cunning and a certain element of deception.  

But, ME is different than fire and what seems to be given in the Prometheus story.  

ME doesn't have a receptacle you put it in.  

And ME is also something that precedes the individual and is articulated in the person, but it doesn’t evolve the way the Greek myth does, this exteriorization of thought and interiorization of machine.  

And it suggests somehow, that our knowledge of sharing and caring and dwelling and meeting both precedes and coexists with our technology in a really ambiguous way.  

It suggests that while we are technological beings, we are more than that.  

There are some other qualities that we are given, you know, in the Prometheus story, we have none, except fire, none, except the technology, but in the story of Enki and Ananna, we are more complex beings.  

We have more that all these other things, that express themselves in our caring, in our ability to meet, and share, and our indwelling with and among one another.

And it is worth thinking about as we hurdle headlong in to this world where you can have an implant that will control how you feel, where we can replace our cerebellum that handles a lot of the basic automatic responses that we have, with a computer, where we can displace the our own thinking process with computerized processes, and enhance our intelligence, or operate our legs, before we completely merge in a way that’s possible, growingly possible for us.  

To ask ourselves, is this the kind of myth that says we have no qualities except the technological, really the most helpful myth for the future. 

Or would be better served by a different kind of myth that suggests, yes, we are technological beings, but we are more than that.  

We have other human capacities that transcend simply that way we define who we are.  

So, I think that's the last slide.  

And I can get us out of here quickly if you want, or you can ask questions.   

[applause]

>> Dr. Wahby:
Thank you very much.  

Any questions?  

Any other questions, I say other because I have some.  

>> Audience member:
What you've been showing us here has to do with what is called "brain", correct?  

>> Dr. Hawkins:
Yeah.

>> Audience Member:
Cerebellum.  

Is this a term that you would, how would you relate this notion of brain to what we call mind in English and what would be the Greek equivalent? 

Is there an equivalent for mind as distinct for brain?  

In other words, what would Plato say?  

>> Dr. Hawkins:
That is actually a good question.  

>> Audience Member:
Secondly, you sound surprised.  

Secondly, whatever word we want to pick up for the Greek idea of mind, which I would suggest is different from the current view of brain, did Greeks also have a word for soul?  

Can you situate the notion of soul in regard to your discussion of technology and human being?

>> Dr. Hawkins:
I don't know, you want to, 

>> 
You go first.  

>> Dr. Hawkins:
Oh I have this.  

No, well, you go first.  

I'd like to clarify the words. 

You'd be a better one to clarify the words.  

>> 
Honestly, I am not so sure about mind.  

We know that they certainly talked about brains, because not to be too graphic here, but Homer does talk about brains being splattered, you know, when hitting their heads in combat, but, you know, the words for soul is Too-Kay, and that is a very, just like most Greek words, it is very, very, ambiguous.  

Some ancient Greeks would say something to the effect that the essence of it, too-kay is the essence of what we are. 

And the more sort of philosophically minded like Plato would probably differentiate that from our physicality, our bodies, you know.  

I don't remember ever reading in Plato about the mind.  

I could be wrong, but I don't think Plato ever talked about the mind, but he did talk about the soul, and he did talk about the soul as something that actually precedes the body and we actually exist before we are born, in the great cosmos, among the forms, and then we come into this body, and some of us are better at remembering the forms than others, and that determines whether [unclear dialogue], and then we die, and Socrates talks about this in the various Platonic dialogues, he's not consistent.  

He seems to suggest that the soul carries on after the body.  

To my knowledge, that's as close as we get to the concept of a non-caporal mentality, right, disconnected from the brain.  

I could be wrong, but I don't [unclear dialogue] and when they talk about dreams and things like that we associate with, that's usually external phenomenon that's coming from the gods or something like that, but again, that's affecting the soul, perhaps, but's there's no concept of the mind that I know of with the Greeks.  

>> Dr. Hawkins:
Clearly, we know a lot more. 

That's the nature of neuroscience, and cognitive science.  

We know in an enormous amount now about how the brain functions and the way it can be mapped, and when we are talking about fitting it with neurotransmitters, or we are talking about the mechanics of the brain. 

Now, if I were of a certain philosophical perspective, I would say that is all there is.  

>> 
Yes, people do say that.  

>> Dr. Hawkins:
And I suspect and it gets harder and harder, you know, the interesting question for me is, in part, if you replace all of, is it easier to say, that's all that is, when you replace the parts of the brain with computer implants, and transmitters, and wires, and gears, is there more? 

And what makes that more, and that actually why that story of, that's why I was in part, contrasting the story of Epimetheus and Prometheus with Enki and Ananna, because I think you can, again, I am pushing, you know you push an analogy or you push things for high privileges have an interesting discussion.  

I think you can read the story of Epimetheus and Prometheus as a way of saying that's all there is.  

We are just technological beings. 

We are created through the implant of fire, as the ultimate technology.  

Or the Ananna and Enki story seems to say is ME is something more, there is something besides the gears and wires of the pure physicality of things that makes our consciousness, you know, are we any different than that tree out there? 

>> 
[Unclear dialogue] analog for ME? 

>> Dr. Hawkins:
I didn't go that far.  

Julie has a question.  

>> Julie:
I'd like to join the conversation that [unclear dialogue] they are mechanical devices so we might also impose mechanical devices [unclear dialogue] 

>> Dr. Hawkins:
Stalemate, yeah. 

>> Julie:
[unclear dialogue] 

>> Dr. Hawkins:
Yeah.  I think it is an important question. 

We don't, a lot is happening in terms of these ways that they human and the machine are merging [00:39:44;23] and these technological prosthetic devices that we have and I don't know that we are really thinking fully about the implications of all of that.  

And what it means for being human.  

And one interesting way to have that conversation, that's essentially all I wanted to open up, is to look at these ancient myths particularly myths of human origin.  

And begin to ask how do they think about these things. 

They may, and is there some resource in those myths that may help us sort our way through how we address the I think really deep ethical issues that this kind of technology raises.  

>> Dr. Wahby:
May I just have a crazy ideas that just came to me, putting prosthesis or I mean, mechanical things and your question of how much is human of this or so, let me take the argument to the other side, meaning even now, with living tissue and so forth, is my hand what makes me human?  

Let me give an example of was it the Dawkins they guy who was reduced to a talking head on the thinker, and everything, 

>> Dr. Hawkins:
Oh Hawkings, Sealy, yes, the astrophysicist, 

>> Dr. Wahby:
He was brilliant, and but he has no body, except his mind, and he can talk and think and so forth, and so does this tell us that even our physical, not mechanical our bodies are not what makes us humans, so we don't need to wait to put in mechanical to ask the question, what part of me now is human, what part of me is not, because even this, which is my body, is not me, in a sense, it doesn't, it's not what makes me human, I want to say. 

>> Dr. Hawkins:
Yeah, that's where I was starting out with that particular way of understanding Epimetheus and Prometheus.  

If you say we have no quality, there is nothing left in the basket for us?  

And the only way we, the only quality that is poured in the receptacle that we are is fire, which is kind of the metaphor, at least how I am using it, for technology.  

Then, that's a very different picture of what it means to be human than say Ananna and Enki where human exists, and the technological is a piece, but it certainly isn't a whole of who we are.  

So I think that is the question.  

You know, if I have implants that operate me, who's me? 

Am I only that, or am I more than that?  

And it's mind, and well you know, this is a philosophical question, you know, Dacarte thought our consciousness was located in our penal gland, I mean where does our consciousness of self really exist?  

You can't locate it in any part of you.  

Right?

>> 
It is within all of this; maybe it is outside of all of this.  

>> Dr. Hawkins:
Yes, it is within it, and it is outside of it.  

>> Dr. Wahby:
Well, something to start the thinking process after we leave.  

These sessions don't end when we end.  

Actually it starts when we end.  

So, thank you very much for coming, and if you have any other questions, I know that Dr. Hawkins would welcome your emails if you like.  

And If he doesn't, I receive them and forward them. 

Let's give him a hand.  Thank you very much.