PHIL 322 Final

Prof. Dan Smith, Purdue Spring 2026

The Technium

Kevin Kelly

The totality of all technologies and their interconnections, forming a self-reinforcing, evolving system

End of the Neolithic Era

Michel Serres

Argues the Neolithic era ended in the 20th century because society stopped growing up on farms

Neurological Plasticity

Nicholas Carr

The brain physically rewires itself in response to technology use. Internet use shortens attention spans and promotes shallow, fragmented processing

Biological Totipotence

Michel Serres

The embryonic cell's capacity to become any type of cell. Serres links this to the brain's plasticity — our developmental openness continues via technology

Embryo’s totipotence continues in brain’s plasticity

Formatting: Page vs. Screen

Serres / Carr

Page: linear, sequential, deep focus, critical reflection.

Screen: nonlinear, associative, multitasking, but shallow engagement, fragmented attention, loss of comprehension

The Shallows

Nicholas Carr

The Internet changes our brains via plasticity — shortened attention spans, shallow engagement, depreciation of organic memory, loss of deep comprehension

Alienation

Karl Marx

During industrial revolution, workers distanced from the products they create, the production process. Labor shifted from meaningful craft to repetitive specialized tasks where the worker has no ownership or connection to the finished product.

Externalization

Ernst Kapp (Classical Schema)

Projecting bodily organs and functions outward into technical artifacts (e.g., the hammer extends the fist)

Objectivation

Ernst Kapp (Classical Schema)

The artifact becomes an independent object that can be studied and analyzed apart from the body

Manifesting as physical object after externalization

Internalization

Ernst Kapp (Classical Schema)

Through studying the externalized artifact, we gain new understanding of the organic body itself.

Gain knowledge/skill to use object

“Hominescence” (Serres) - tech changes us when we make/use it

Organ Projection

Ernst Kapp

Technical artifacts are projections of bodily organs. Kapp wrote the first book titled Philosophy of Technology. We understand our body through our externalized technical body

The medium is the message

Marshall McLuhan

The content transmitted through a medium matters less than the medium itself in shaping how we think and act.

Humans as Deficient Beings

Arnold Gehlen

Humans are not fully determined by instinct. Development continues outside the womb; technics is the medium of ongoing development (4th trimester)

The upright position (bipedalism)

Leroi-Gourhan

Evolutionary upright posture liberated the hand (origin of technics), the mouth (origin of language), and the brain (frontal lobe grew, responsible for motor movement and speech).

The foot is the most important organ in human evolution, not brain

Organology

Georges Canguilhem / Ruyer

The invention of technical artifacts is a continuation of the formation of bodily organs. Canguilhem suggested organology could replace the term technology

Techniques of the body

Marcel Mauss

The body is humanity's first and most natural instrument. Before instrumental techniques, there are techniques of the body — culturally learned bodily practices

Ex:) Ways of walking, eating, gesturing, swimming

Three ages of modern machines

1. Mechanical machines (metal-based): watches, pulleys.

2. Energetic machines (carbon-based = fuel like coal/wood): steam engines, motors

3. Information machines (silicon-based = semiconductors): computers

Natural Technicity

Karl Marx (via Darwin)

Organs of plants and animals (e.g., eyes as light-sensing technology) can be seen as natural technology. Things like beehives, spider webs, etc also considered natural tech

Continued Embryogenesis

Raymond Ruyer

Bodily organs are themselves technical artifacts produced during evolution. The embryo creates the brain to continue producing organs outside the body

Ruyer argues the embryo is our primary consciousness that creates the brain (secondary consciousness) to continue organ production externally

Rhythm, Space, and Time

Leroi-Gourhan

Bodily rhythms are the creators of space and time. Technologies like clocks and maps domesticate time and space, they are externalizations of our own bodily rhythms

The Enframing / Ge-stell

Heidegger

Technology is a mode of disclosing or enframing the world. Modern tech enframes nature as a standing-reserve (e.g., a river as a standing-reserve of power).

We view everything as a resource due to tech

“The essence of technology is not technological” ~ Heidegger

• Issue is not the tech itself, it’s how we view the world through tech

• Essence of tech is reducing everything to a resource for optimization and exploitation

Maker's knowledge / verum factum

Plato / Vico

Plato distinguished user's knowledge vs. maker's knowledge.

Vico's verum factum principle: we only truly know what we can make.

General-purpose technologies become modes of knowledge. Ex:) We view heart = pump, brain = computer, DNA = code

Knowing-how vs. knowing-that

Barry Allen

Knowing-that = propositional knowledge (the world is round).

Knowing-how = practical/operative knowledge (how to ride a bike).

Propositions themselves (knowing-that) depends on practical knowledge (knowing-how) since you need to know how to use language/grammar to create that proposition.

Argues that knowing-how > knowing-that, instead of other way around (traditional stance). An extension of maker’s knowledge

Operating Sequences / Chaînes Opératoires

Leroi-Gourhan

The ordered chain of technical actions required to transform raw material into a product

Ex:) Selecting stone, striking, monitoring fractures, adjusting grip → create biface

The Puzzle of the Biface

Biface persisted for ~1M years everywhere by everyone. Was biface created from instinct or intelligence?

Most said intelligence since it requires a mental image.

Gary Tomlinson argued against that

• Technique emerges from loop of action and feedback, over time body internalizes what works

• Creation of biface is coalition of different tasks in taskscape

• Biface was able to be created through rhythm of gestures incorporated into the body of the knapper

Ex:) Creation of fire didn’t happen because someone conceptualized it

Finished artifact fallacy

Idea that an artifact is finished is a legal fiction. Artifacts are ongoing modulations, never completed molds — they break down and need repair or replacement

Taskscape

Tim Ingold

Combo of all interlocking activities (gestures) that community performs in environment

Toolmaking as a meshwork of tasks where gesture, perception, and sound are tightly coupled.

Supports coevolution of technique and cognition

Physical landscape is result of taskscape

Affordances

James Gibson

Possibilities for action the environment offers relative to an organism's bodily capacities.

Tools emerge from coordinated affordances, not internal blueprints. (supports Tomlinson’s argument)

Ex:) Surface affords walking, handle affords grasping.

Heidegger

Martin Heidegger

Our primary encounter with the world is practical engagement with equipment, not detached contemplation. Artifacts appear as mere objects primarily when they malfunction or break down

Truth as a disclosure/revealing rather than correspondence with reality. It’s relative to what is revealed to us.

Ex:) A farmer, painter, and teacher stand on a field; the field is revealed to each of them differently based on their practical engagement with it

Hylomorphic Schema

Aristotle

Artifacts = imposition of form (morphe) on matter (hyle).

Simondon's critiques

Reflects an outsider's view (an abstraction of the creation)

• If master commands slave to create brick, his POV is that the slave just stamps the mold of a brick onto clay

• The matter and form each are more complex than that

• Reflects social hierarchy

Artifact = interaction between operating sequences

• Matter and form each have their own operating sequences

• Come together in “metastable” system

Matter has implicit forms

• Ex:) grain of wood, plasticity of clay

• Abstract + geometric approach = ignoring implicit forms, (e.g. cutting through wood with saw)

• Concrete + topological approach = following implicit forms (e.g. wedge to split wood follows the grain)

Technical facts & technical tendencies

Leroi-Gourhan

Technical tendency - pressure in technical evolution

• Ex:) Knife’s tendency toward sharper edge

• Universal, abstract

Technical fact - specific cultural materialization of tendency

• Ex:) Chef’s knife, katana, etc.

• Culture-dependent, concrete

Mutation and Selection

Basalla

Applying Darwinism to technology

• Mutation = innovation

• Selection = economic, cultural, social, military pressures

Discontinuity vs. Continuity

Basalla

Two competing approaches to technological evolution

Discontinuous view - tech history consists of “revolutions”, this view is kinda myth; this view due to a few reasons

• Genius, romanticized inventor who makes something out of nothing

• Nationality of inventor important since tech = measure of nation’s success

• Patent system discretizes tech

• Conflation between tech and its social/economic ramifications

Continuous view - reframing of discontinuous; tech has technical lineage, evolution is incremental; applying Darwinism to technology

• Mutation = innovation

• Selection = economic, cultural, social, military pressures

Petroski

“Form follows failure [not function]”

“Luxury [not necessity] is the mother of invention”

Technical object as a “System of Milieus”

Leroi-Gourhan

Example object: car

1. External milieu - surrounding world; materials to build it, terrain, climate

2. Internal milieu - object’s own inner workings (Ex: engine)

3. Intermediary milieu - interface where object meets world (Ex: tires, suspension, wipers)

4. Annexed milieu - constructed environment that the object needs to function (Ex: highways, gas stations)

Concretization

Simondon

Process by which technical object evolves from abstract form (each component is separate, specialized module) to a concrete form (functions converge, components roles overlap)

Ex:) Water-cooled engine (engine | radiator) → air-cooled engine (cooling fins built into engine)

Associated milieu

Simondon

An environment that’s an active participant in an object’s function and evolution; every technical object needs this

Ex:) Water turbine + river: water drives turbine and cools generator

Elements, individuals, ensembles

Simondon

Classification for technical objects

Elements - basic components that must be integrated into something to be useful (Ex: piston, transistor, screw)

Individuals - self-contained, complete objects with internal coherence and “internal resonance” (Ex: car engine, phone); concretization

Ensembles - higher-level networks coordinating multiple individuals (Ex: factory line, power grid, internet)

Carr on automation

• Automation diminishes human skills, awareness, judgement

• Causes “learned helplessness”

• We need to design automation that complements, not replaces, human involvement

Cambrian intelligence

Rodney Brooks

Bottom-up intelligence, robots learn through interaction w/environment instead of preprogrammed top-down rules

Orality to literacy

Ong

Writing is a technology that fundamentally changes how we think

• Enables abstraction, categorization, externalized memory

• Restructures consciousness itself

Ex:) Luria’s experiment of showing hammer, saw, log, hatchet and asked which doesn’t belong.

• Literate cultures: “log” bec they think abstractly in classifications

• Oral cultures: “log is essential; tools useless without it” bec they think situationally in terms of how things are used together

“Autonomous discourse” & Giedion’s Principle

Olson & Giedion

Giedion: “any tech makes explicit what was implicit and automatic in the process it replaces”

Olson: This applies to writing itself, which makes the structure of language explicit (letters, words, prose, etc)

Autonomous discourse - language stands independent of the world and speaker

• Meaning lives within the writing itself

• Release from proximity (spatial and temporal) makes abstraction possible

The State

Mumford

The state is a “mega-machine”; it’s the most significant technology humans have created, which has enabled the entire technium

Apparatuses of capture

Deleuze & Guatarri identify 3 apparatuses of capture by which the state extracts and organizes the world

• Geometry - captures land

• Quantification of labor - captures human activity (Ex: conscription)

• Money - captures exchange

Writing is a fourth foundational apparatus → state is run by bureaucracy (“rule by the desk”)

Writing as a technology

Levi-Strauss

“the primary function of writing… is to facilitate the enslavement of other human beings”

• Origin of writing was as an administrative tool

• Allowed states to track statistics

  • stat-istics = “science of the state”

  • Measuring rates (suicide, fertility, etc.)

  • Led to rise of data science

Algorithmic governmentality

Decisions about credit, hiring, benefits, etc made by predictive systems instead of humans

Surveillance capitalism

Zuboff

Human experience/data treated as raw material to be extracted, processed, and sold.

Where industrial capitalism captured labor, surveillance capitalism captures attention and behavior

Integral Accident

Virilio

Every new tech has its own inherent accident built into it

• Accident isn’t external malfunction, it’s part of the structural essence of the tech itself

• No tech innovation without corresponding accident

Virilio’s critique: researchers and inventors need to explore integral disasters more

“Integral” accidents - threaten human species (Ex: nuclear destruction, pandemics, rogue AI, etc.)

Technological trash

Follows finished artifact fallacy; no artifact ever finished, so eventually breaks down completely

Key shifts in modern world:

• Use time → “waste time”

  • Growing portion of artifact’s existence is spent as garbage

• Repair → replacement

• New industries for tech trash (like Waste Management)

• Rare earth elements extracted from tech trash

The Singularity

Kurzweil

Turning point where AI exceeds human intelligence and becomes “superintelligence”. AI will fix everything, humans will then transcend and become “trans-human”

Kurzeweil’s “Law of Accelerating Returns” - tech progress is exponential, not linear

Critiques on Kurzweil:

• General intelligence is different from normal tech like computing power; law of accelerating returns doesn’t apply to true understanding

• We don’t even understand what produces consciousness/subjectivity; would a brain simulation be conscious or acting conscious?

• Power of AI will be concentrated instead of democratized

• Things like mortality are needed for meaningful human life; transcended humans may not be human at all

• Alignment problem

• Singularity is just like the religious rapture myth, deluding technologists and adding a mystical/abstract element