Free Terminator and Philosophy: I'll Be Back, Therefore I Am by William Irwin, Kevin S. Decker, Richard Brown Page B

question. In fact, we’re not fundamentally separable from the machines we make and use in our lives. As the philosopher Andy Clark, the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, and others have argued, human nature is partly defined by the ability to extend thoughts and actions into useful manipulations and transformations of the environment. Recognizing this facet of our nature, we can see that our various technological devices, from utensils and plows to computers and robots, are actually components of ourselves.
     
    To get a handle on this perspective, let’s consider Richard Dawkins’s idea of the “extended phenotype.” A phenotype is the outward expression of a set of genes, like the physical construction of the human body from proteins that we talked about earlier. According to Dawkins, “The phenotypic effects of a gene are the tools by which it levers itself into the next generation, and these tools may ‘extend’ far outside the body in which the gene sits, even reaching deep into the nervous systems of other organisms.” 6 In other words, what you are as a biological organism doesn’t end at your skin but rather extends out into your interaction with your environment, including the various artifacts you make and use. Consider beaver dams and spider webs, two of Dawkins’s favorite examples. The construction of a beaver dam is simply part of what it is to be a beaver. Dams are no less a part of the expression of beaver genes than is the body of a beaver itself. Similarly, weaving webs is a fundamental part of the life of a spider, inseparable from its biological nature. An analogous situation emerges in Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines , with the ability of the TX to remotely control other machines. When it is in control of them, these artifacts are effectively extensions of it.
     
    Along these lines, the various technologies that we humans produce can be understood as natural extensions of our nature. The machines we create, including even any artificial intelligences or robots we may produce, are not simply independent things. Instead, they can be seen as natural extensions of our incredibly broad, adaptive ability to construct and manipulate the environment into functional artifacts. Ultimately, then, Skynet and the various derivative technologies it produces could be seen as Dawkins’s extended phenotypic expressions of human genes. From this perspective, it doesn’t seem clear at all that Skynet would constitute a fundamentally unnatural or antihuman intelligence. Even if Skynet were to produce a kind of malevolent self-aware intelligence that initiates the Judgment Day scenario, this would itself be a product of human nature (admittedly, a dangerous one) rather than an emergent alien force. This would be like a badly constructed beaver dam that collapses and kills its creators, or a dysfunctional spider web that captures its own weaver. It would be a human-initiated tragedy brought on by human nature itself, rather than the entrance of a being antithetical to human life that wages war according to its own independent interests.
     
    The integration of technology and human nature brings us back to the cyborg. Cyborgs are typically understood as futuristic beings produced by the merger of human biology with mechanical technology. The T-101 Terminator is a prime example of this. But there is another way to understand cyborgs. As explained by the philosopher Andy Clark, we humans can be understood as “natural-born cyborgs,” beings whose nature involves at an early stage the incorporation of technology as an integral component of our minds. As he puts it, “We—more than any other creature on the planet—deploy nonbiological elements (instruments, media, notations) to complement our basic biological modes of processing, creating extended cognitive systems whose computational and problem-solving profiles are quite different from those of the naked brain.” 7 In short, the human mind is not