Bruce Mazlish, who teaches history at MIT, has written The Fourth Discontinuity: The Co-evolution of Humans and Machines (Yale, 1993) surveys thinking (and dreaming) from the 15th century to the present about what we now call "cyborgs." Mazlish argues that Copernicus, Darwin, and Freud each in turn challenged a supposed discontinuity, Copernicus between earth and the rest of the cosmos, Darwin between Man and the rest of the animals, and Freud, who sought to prove (in his own words) that the ego "is not even master in its own house." We still believe in a discontinuity between humans and machines, but Mazlish suggests that assumption is under assault too. That discontinuity is challenged in Walter Truett Anderson's Evolution Isn't What It Used to Be: The Augmented Animal and the Whole Wired World (W. H. Freeman, 1996) and in Kevin Kelly's Out of Control: The Rise of Neo-biological Civilzation (Addison-Wesley, 1994). With such a vast array of books blithely assuming that the role of computers in our culture requires us to redefine what it means to be human, one hopes that Douglas Groothuis's The Soul in Cyberspace (Baker Books) is only the first of many thoughtful responses by Christians to this assault. [Posted October 2001, ALG]
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