“Webcam sites are a recent invention in a long line of practices in which human animals capture their nonhuman counterparts for the explicit purpose of watching them.” Yes Naturally 165
“I argue that MSA marks and lines externalize nothing but the very process of externalization. That is, they are enactive projections.” How Things Shape the Mind 193
How are humans projecting “themselves” and how are those experiences mediated? Are we expanding our consciousness to other avatars or merely looking through little glass windows? We create machines that enable us to view a scene transmitted from thousands of miles away, are we there experiencing it? If our creations are physical projections, manifested cognition, has our agency been funneled into an entity with self-governance separate from out own? If a man clones himself do they collectively have the same level of agency or is the progenitor the master? Chronology is the only difference between them, if the clone went back in time he could be the creator of the original. Perhaps the relationship should not be hierarchical. Perhaps as we continue to create machines that outperform our abilities we should view them as “enactive projections.” However we should be wary of possessive creating. It is true that without the creator there would be no creations but humans are not the only creators. Evolutionary progress is inevitable and can occur by an infinite variety of means. It is conceivable that robots and machines could be born without our interference. Given the impossible scale of the universe and its timeline, random particulates in space could construct themselves haphazardly, asteroids striking planets, diasporas of elements rippling outward by supernovas. Perhaps in some place and time in the universe debris from a passing comet collided with lunar satellite, smashing them perfectly to form a robot. Entropy fluctuates by itself, we are not its only regressor.