by Robert Doede, Professor of Philosophy, Trinity Western University
This post is one in a series of reflections on the 2018 conference held in Vancouver at Green College on the University of British Columbia campus. The entire set of posts can be found here.
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As far back as the genus Homo goes, millions of years before Homo sapiens appeared on the scene, we find Homo with tools in hand, and not just found objects to be used as tools in a one-off fashion and then left behind (like other primates), but artifacts, i.e., tools made to be used.[1] Clearly it is not the case that Homo sapiens first evolved and then, deploying its sapience, got involved with tool-making. Rather, our species, Homo sapiens, arose out of the evolutionary entanglement of hominin bodies and artifacts. By making bits of its environment into tools for extending its intentional reach into ever more sophisticated worldly possibilities, our species bootstrapped itself into the higher dimensions of transcendence. Using tools to modify their environment, early hominins were themselves modified by their tool use. Moreover, the altered environments they produced with their tools, in turn, enabled them to further develop their tools, and on and on this mutual amplification continued. This is the back-story of Homo sapiens 200,000+ year romance with technology right up to our current cyborgic trajectory: our way of being-in-the-world is the offspring of a primordial coupling of flesh and tools. Our behaviors, thought, reason, and way of being sapient in the world emerged from eons of looping interactions between material brains, material bodies, material tools, and the complex cultural and technological environments they created.