技术作为人的器官——重建技术进化论

Technology as Human Organs: A Reconstruction of Evolution of Technology

在生物进化与技术发展史之间建立类比的困难在于,生物进化所包含的变异的随机性、基因的实体性和物种的独立性这三个特点,是技术领域并不具备的。主流技术进化论者的策略是回避冲突,而本文引入斯蒂格勒,回归马克思的"器官类比",重新理解自然与技术的冲突。器官类比消弭了技术进化论面临的主要冲突,并把人这一物种的独特性突显出来。技术器物也是一种"遗传物质",学习是技术创造的条件,而技术物的外在化又恰是学习的条件。

The difficulty of the analogy between the biological evolution and the development of technology including the following three conflicts that are contained in the biological evolution but not in the technical field: the randomness of the variation, the substantive of the gene, and the independence of the species. The general strategy is to avoid those conflicts and insist on taking technology as species. But I tried to go back to the analogy of organ and introduced Stigler’s philosophical resources to re-understand the conflict between nature and technology. The organ analogy eliminates the main conflicts and highlights the uniqueness of the human species. Technology as an organ that can be retained outside, makes human evolution different from other species. Technical artifacts are just another kind of genetic material of human being, in addition to the genetic material at the molecular level. Learning is a condition for technological creation, and the externalization of technical artifacts is precisely the condition for learning.