Living With Your Own Ideas - Reflection Piece¶
Prosthesis (noun): an artificial device to replace or augment a missing or impaired part of the body. - Merriam-Webster
Living with Your Own Ideas was a fascinating course. It completely shattered my previously held notion of what prostheses are. Before this course, I had never given deep thought to prostheses. I thought of them in terms of the definition above: devices that replaced missing or impaired body parts. The word “prosthesis” conjured images of hearing aids, prosthetic legs, and corrective lenses; archetypal prostheses that have restored function to hundreds of millions of people. Coming from a medical-adjacent background, I was excited to expand on these and dive into a biomedical discussion of prosthetics.
As you can imagine, I was surprised when we began on the first day and skipped the biomedical discussion altogether. The first examples we were given were prostheses to avoid surveillance: ways to trick facial recognition softwares, prostheses that allow you to use Apple Face ID without showing your face, and small coverings for your tongue, ears, fingers, etc. Even though they weren’t biomedical applications, they were close enough that I was able to follow along without feeling any conceptual whiplash. But then we got to hairstyles, and that’s when everything started to shatter.
I had never thought about hairstyles as a type of prosthesis, more of a type of personal expression. Choosing a hairstyle felt closer to choosing what color to paint your room than choosing a cochlear implant to restore hearing. But as the conversation progressed, I started to change my mind. It’s true that hairstyles aren’t purely aesthetic. Different hairstyles have different physical functions: short hair can keep you cool in the summer, long hair can keep you warm in the winter. But hairstyles also serve non-physical functions. Different styles can signal in-group or out-group membership, age, trade, even religion. A shaved head on a soldier means something completely different than on a cancer patient. Dreadlocks can carry cultural, spiritual, or ancestral meaning. Even subtle choices like gray hair left natural, or brown hair dyed blonde send signals about belonging and self-expression. Hairstyles tell people who you are, or at least who you want to be seen as. There’s weird this overlap between function and aesthetic in which hairstyles both do something for you and socially signal something about you.
At first, I thought that this might have been the most concept-shifting moment of the week, but it turned out to be only the beginning. As the conversation progressed we started to argue about what else could count as a prosthesis. Are clothes prostheses? Shoes? Earrings? I had never heard them described that way before, but it started to make sense for the same reasons that hair made sense. They might not serve medical functions, but they perform physical, psychological, and social ones. They make you feel different, act different, and influence how people interact with you.
Right as I thought my brain had finally adapted to accept this new concept, the conversation became even more confusing. Some people started to argue that depending on the situation, prostheses could include objects like phones, cars, tables, chairs, even hammers. I loudly objected “Not everything can be a prosthesis!” I had to draw the line somewhere.
But unfortunately for me, the conversation continued, and my concept of prostheses continued to change along with it. Even though phones and cars are completely different from any of my bodily parts, they do enhance and change how I function in the world. My phone completely changes how I exist in the world. It extends my memory, my communication, even my sense of direction. I don’t have to remember phone numbers anymore; my phone does it for me. When I’m lost, it becomes my compass. When I’m lonely, it becomes a portal to connection. I even catch myself reaching for it in my pocket when it isn’t there, like some weird type of phantom limb. In that sense my phone is a cognitive prosthesis, extending not my limbs but my memory, orientation, and social reach. The same goes for cars. When I’m driving I feel the car’s edges; I move as if its body is mine. Every time I drive a car for the first time there is a weird calibration limbo where my body schema needs to expand to properly fit its edges. What’s important to note is that the car only becomes an extension of me when I’m the one driving. As a passenger that connection disappears.
Chairs and hammers are trickier. I wasn’t fully convinced that they are prostheses. Most of the time they feel like pure tools, but it’s true that there are moments where they melt into me. When I’m working at a desk for hours, my body and the chair I’m using start to form one continuous system. I stop noticing where one ends and the other begins. It feels as if I am touching the ground, even though it’s the chair, not me. With a hammer, it’s even more dynamic. The first few swings tend to feel awkward, like there’s a delay between my intention and the nail’s response. But after a while, my arm and the hammer sync up and I start to “feel” the nail through the metal. I could be convinced that at that moment the hammer shifts from tool to prosthesis.
I started to feel like there are different kinds of prostheses: functional, aesthetic, a blend of the two, and prosthetic tools: tools that are sometimes tools and sometimes prostheses. Glasses, hearing aids, phones, earrings, and clothing are all some mixture of functional and aesthetic. Hammers, cars, chairs, and maybe even laptops feel more tool-like. At the end of the first day the real question for me became: what is the line between tool and prosthesis? That question is still with me now two weeks later.
We never defined exactly what a prosthesis is or isn’t, but I want to take a stab at it, mostly because I think it leads to interesting conversation and debate.
Prosthesis (noun): anything that merges with your body or identity in a way that changes how you perceive, behave, or are perceived. - Ayal
I like this definition because it explains why something can shift from being a tool to being a prosthesis. It’s not just about what the object is, but about how you relate to it in a given moment. It depends on the degree to which your body or mind has folded it into your sense of self. The same object can sit on a table one moment and live inside your perception the next. That weird capacity for a thing to become part of you one moment, then stop being part of you the next moment, led me to start thinking about what I’m calling the prosthetic state.
A prosthetic state is a temporary and dynamic condition in which an object becomes integrated into your bodily or cognitive system so fully that it shapes how you sense, think, or act. The prosthesis and the self merge for a moment, then separate again when your attention, context, or environment shifts.
My bike, for example, isn’t a prosthesis when it’s just leaning against the wall. It’s an inert aluminum frame with two wheels and some grease on the chain. But the moment I climb onto it, something changes. I start to feel the road through the tires, to sense tiny shifts in balance or traction as if they were happening inside my own body. I can tell when the air pressure is low or when the brakes are too tight, not because I’m thinking about it, but because my body and the bike have synced. That moment is a prosthetic state: a temporary fusion where the bike isn’t just a tool, it’s a part of me… and it’s also the closest I’ll ever get to being a satyr.