Response to Anthropomorphism and Anthropodenial
Yufei Zhang
There was a time in my childhood when I was fascinated by the fact that humans and other primates had the same ancestor. During that time I often observed the details of my hands for a long time or observed other people who had passed by my eyes. At that time, I had a strange feeling. I felt that I was not observing the surrounding human beings from the perspective of normal human life. Instead, I jumped out of the human race and wanted to observe other species to observe the so-called human species.
Of course, I was naive and ignorant at the time, don’t have any primate knowledge or any biology knowledge to that case. At that time, I did not get any useful information and conclusions from observation. But I can still think of the idea at that time. For the first time, I realized that I could look around human beings or other creatures around me from a human perspective. But if I analyzed the behavior at the time, although I realized that I tried to jump out of the human perspective, I still fall into anthropomorphism. When I was observing the movements of people around me, what I saw was not the action of their rational logic, but the meaning of the behavior they made.
When choosing the theme of the Major Studio 1 final project of the last semester, I chose to design a system that let people understand how the difference of physiological structure between human and other kinds of animals had an effect in our progress building a civilized society. Coincidentally, during the design process, I encountered the same problems as Nagle: What is it like to be a bat? I want to simulate the bat’s feelings when bat echo is positioned through Arduino and related originals. I hope that by letting people understand how certain animal physiological structures will affect our feelings about living in the city. In the beginning, I wanted to simply copy the principle structure of the bat echolocation system, showing the distance between the user and other items through the ultrasonic sensor and display. But then I changed the way I design the system. I tried to think about the impact and significance of echolocation systems on bats from the perspective of bats. Then I tried to think about how the changes would have the same impact on humans from a human perspective and designed the system to bring about corresponding changes. The end result is that the system is designed so that when humans make a sound, the eye mask that blocks the eye opens to provide information about the surrounding environment so that when the sound is not emitted, the eye mask will close and lose the surrounding environment information. The big mistake I made in here is that this kind of thinking is anthropocentric anthropomorphism. I bring human feelings and experiences into the behavior of animals and try to understand the meaning of these behaviors to animals from a human perspective. This is also why this design was questioned by the teacher during the final presentation. Rational and rigorous use of technology to restore the operational mechanism of bat echolocation as much as possible should be a more scientific and persuasive solution. But I can’t really pass the feeling of being a bat to the user accurately and sensibly. As the article says:we will never know.
I am still interested in this topic now. I have some basic understanding of anthropomorphism through reading Anthropomorphism and Anthropodenial, but I think I need further analysis and thinking. Think about what role anthropomorphism should play in this topic and find the corresponding workplace in the future.