Neuropragmatic Tools for Neurotechnological Culture: Toward a Creatively Democratic Cybernetics of Care

What is it about?

I address the mental and physical health crises (what Emma Dowling calls the care crisis) through cybernetics, neuropragmatism, and Larry Hickman's philosophy of technology. I update the evolutionary and ecological conception of John Dewey's creative democracy as a moral ideal that is achievable given our biocultural nature. I also challenge the current neoliberal attitude and value system (what Tschaepe calls dopamine democracy) as a significant contribution to the crises of mental and physical health. By proposing a cybernetics of care with the goal of generating creative democracy as a genuine possibility for more people, I argue with Johnson and Tucker that a genuine cybernetic revolution is possible, and that doing so will make human life (itself dependent on non-human life) more viable (where viability is understood, following Schulkin, as the creative adaptation via the tension of the stable amid the precarious). In relating Dewey's view of minding-as-caring with his concept of body-mind, I propose a cybernetics of care is reachable through extending body-mind to body-mind-world.

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