Freedom is a strange creature...
Project: Polytopia

It started as a comment to Starwalker’s post but in the course of writing it gained the volume of a post. So here it is…

Though there are so many good examples (more than we commonly imagine) of intelligence which is collective, there are many counterexamples as well. When more than just a few individuals congregate (say above 10) the combined intelligence tends, more often than not, to decrease relative to the sum of individual intelligences. It seems that somewhere between 2 to 5 persons coordinating their mental and emotional states is a kind of an optimum and a limit for a full scale continuous integration. Beyond that limit, unless people are a-priori organized, the combined intelligence swiftly drops into redundant flock intelligence.

The kind of emergent collective intelligence we see in institutions, governments, corporations and armies is a result of strict hierarchy and/or imposed mechanical order made to channel and restrict the full spectrum of human intelligence and creativity at the individual level. Such order that allows the coordinated behavior of organizations and groups is either consensual or enforced by physical, psychological or economical means. Usually, the acceptance of order is a combination of consensus and submission. Indeed the web seem to represent some new options that lean towards the consensual but most of the really interesting kinds of collective intelligence emerging on the web are actually based on very (very!) simple rules of local agent behavior and communication. It is no coincidence that the most popular metaphor to these emergent patterns is flocking (coordinated movement of sardines...?). The principle common to this type of collective intelligence is that the higher levels of organization, whether designed or emergent, are based on limiting the spectrum of behaviors allowed to the lower participating levels. Beyond collectives organized according to this principle, we meet the limit mentioned above.

But why should we accept this limit? The way I envision collective intelligence it must allow, at least by potential, the full spectrum of the mental and emotional intelligent capacities of the participants; the participating agents allowed a free space of creative expression and interaction. In the light of this, I believe we haven't yet tapped into the profound potential of what one would call a many agent full blown collective intelligence as it is possible to sentient agents (human and other). At best, we have a glimpse of what it could be like when we occasionally make it work with very few participants. The kind of collective intelligence we have achieved to this day is nothing special. In fact it is ubiquitous among many social and flocking species from bacteria and other single celled agents (the cells in our body and other multi-cellular organisms), fungi, corals, plants, insects, fish, birds, primates etc. In all these cases the emergent collective patterns are grounded on very simple local procedures/behaviors. Yet even simple rules can bring forth emergent complexity which accounts for the levels of symbiosis and coordinated intelligence achieved by very primitive organisms. It seems this kind of collective intelligence is as ancient almost as life itself

Slime mold

Thu, Jul 22, 2010  Permanent link
Categories: collective intelligence, freedom, Individuality
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The RobinHood Tax

A friend sent me this video, an idea worth spreading...
One question though, who is going to control the money? Trust is of the essence.




Also go here for more details.

Thu, Jul 15, 2010  Permanent link

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Nomads, Knowmads, Noumads
Project: Polytopia

The idea for this post came up while reflecting on Wildcat’s latest posts on the Knowmad and from an excellent piece I came by lately in G. Deleuze’s book – Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. To be more precise, it was inspired by a character from a science fiction book I am reading called Galileo’s Dream. A decrepit time traveler marooned in Galileo’s time who goes by the name Cartophilus – the lover of maps, brought everything together.



Cartophilus never liked maps, but he is certainly the exception rather than the rule because we all love maps, to draw maps and to play with maps. Making maps is an essential aspect of how we extend into spaces. With maps we represent spaces, describe them, qualify them and create the infinite diversity of distances distinctions and differences. With maps we territorialize and confine spaces and assign to them meaning and values. While our bodies (which are in themselves spaces) extend into space, mapping is the actual complicating relation emerging between our consciousness and space. In ‘complicating’ I mean to expose or at least hint at the sense of infinite complexity arising from the meeting of two ultimate simplicities – space and consciousness.

Nomads have very special relations with space. They go from location to location but never make a location their own. Something is missing from their maps. We may call this missing element a concept of territory, or, a sense of belonging, or, constancy, stability, perhaps conformity? There is a profound difference in how nomads conceive of distances. This difference does not apply only to physical distances, because of the complicating relations between space and consciousness. Nomadism, therefore, is not merely a life style. It is rather a style of mapping, a singular system of complicating relations between space and consciousness that brings about the dynamic expression of one’s freedom. For freedom is the primary and only vocation of real nomads.

In this light, Wildcat’s knowmad is an experiment in mapping, groping for those complex yet embryonic relations between consciousness and information space that will eventually emerge as a dynamic expression of freedom. Information space is not merely a straight forward analogy derived from physical space. There are perhaps some simple similarities but as much as it might seem strange information space though thriving with information is largely unknown and unexplored. Information space is much less constrained than physical space. In information space there are no a priori metrics and no a priori dimensional configurations like the ones that characterize physical space. In some deep sense, information space is more primitive than physical space, more nuclear and therefore more difficult to map. For example: physical space contains only singular instances (no point in space is replaceable with any other point) while in information space every singular instance may have infinite number of copies: identical yet distinct versions (which already causes serious problems when we try to apply conventional mapping methods such as the concepts of original and copy to information space). The promise of the knowmad as a style of mapping that generates expressions of freedom in information space is therefore much more complex to actualize but also embodies a much greater potential of interest and creativity.


Antique maps in 2nd life Creative Commons License photo credit: Ka Rasmuson

While thinking about how nomads and knowmads are related through their style of mapping, that is, their manifest special kind of meeting between space and consciousness, I came across the following paragraph in Deleze’s book:

“In short, if we are Spinozists we will not define a thing by its form, nor by its organs and its functions, nor as a substance or a subject. Borrowing terms from the Middle Ages, or from geography, we will define it by longitude and latitude. A body can be anything; it can be an animal, a body of sounds, a mind or an idea; it can be a linguistic corpus, a social body, a collectivity. We call longitude of a body the set of relations of speed and slowness, of motion and rest, between particles that compose it from this point of view, that is, between unformed elements. We call latitude the set of affects that occupy a body at each moment that is the intensive states of an anonymous force (force for existing, capacity for being affected). In this way we construct the map of a body. The longitudes and latitudes together constitute Nature, the plane of immanence or consistency, which is always variable and is constantly being altered, composed and recomposed, by individuals and collectivities.”

Delezue’s reading of Spinoza here renders a rather profound idea which is no other than devising an extremely abstract cartographic apparatus, a special method of mapping, and along with it, he brings forth a kind of space (plane) that goes far beyond both physical and information spaces: the space of Mind. In a post quite a while ago, I described mind as a relation generation system. According to this, a mind, any mind in any configuration at any instance and any mode of actuation beautifully assimilates (while being assimilated into) this cartographic apparatus which already hints at the self generative nature of the space mind is.


Magic Forest (part of installation) Andrew Carnie

Mind space is a pure relation space. Mind space is a kind of space that emerges from the very activity of mapping or rather from its very intensification by consciousness. Or rather it is the other way around: it is consciousness that emerges from its very extension into space. Or, perhaps this is how the co-emergence of space and consciousness becomes the ultimate embodiment – an expression independent of specific content or modality yet pervading all contents and modalities – Nous (the Greek word for Mind).

Enters the noumad: the one who roams Nous – the space of Mind, being both the activity and the subject of that special style of mapping that brings forth an ever fresh expression of freedom in the meeting of mind with… itself; be it in gesture or sign, a body in touch with another, a word or an idea; be it in an emotion, sensation, a story, an image, a poetic metaphor; be it in an information stream, within a connected web, a mesh of semantic tokens , a program, an agent, a state machine, a sentience… (artificial of course)

As the nomad is evolving into the knowmad and as the knowmad will be evolving eventually into the noumad, we are witnessing the inevitable ephemeralization of spaces, of mappings and their corresponding expressions. In all spaces we are witnessing the eternal return of the nomad, of the knowmad of the noumad, a repetition of the singular element of freedom, a necessary sameness which is profoundly and positively different.

Sat, Apr 24, 2010  Permanent link

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A perspective of ~absolute ~nothingness

Wed, Dec 9, 2009  Permanent link

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Thoughts on the future of human evolution
Project: Polytopia

Here is the text and slide share of a lecture I gave at ECCO research group seminar at the free university of Brussels on Nov 4th 2009. Thoughts and comments are welcome.

Abstract

The Noetic perspective (from Greek: noetikos- mental; nous- mind) identifies the [human] mind as the nexus of the future evolution of humanity. At present, human evolution is a mental process rather than biological or technological process.

The Noetic model describes mind as a relation generating complex system arising as a product of biological evolution and manifesting certain defining characteristics such as systemic closure, self reference, plasticity, etc. This model aims to integrate a systemic view with the mental constructs of the subjective plane. According to the Noetic model, human identity is a dynamic constructive process that brings forth the human observer as the subject of its perceptive and mental states. This process is identified as mind. Images and narratives are the elements encompassing the experiential and mental aspects of the identity process as they appear to the human observer.

The idea of mind as the theater of evolutionary processes is further explored: Mind as a complex system can essentially be disassociated from the historical conditions of its emergence; therefore it is virtually unbound in its evolutionary potential. This has deep implications on the understanding of human nature and the human condition. Finally, the ideas of openness and freedom beyond utility are proposed as futuristic directives of consciously guided evolution of mind.

The full text can be found here: Thoughts on the future of human evolution.pdf

Thoughts On The Future Of Human EvolutionView more presentations from Weaver R. Weinbaum.

Sat, Dec 5, 2009  Permanent link

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Changing our minds
Project: Polytopia

The first decade of the 21st century is about to end in just a few weeks. Among many things, I find most impacting the explosion of knowledge in the field of brain sciences and human behavior in this decade. Though the great riddles of consciousness and the emergence of minds from brains are still open and far from any solution, many connections and bridges are already there in our understanding.

Quite a few important and perhaps critical observations regarding human nature and the state of affairs of humanity are emerging from this explosion of knowledge and I will try to (very) briefly summarize them here below:

1. Our brains and our minds are initially products of biological evolution. Human behavior to this day is largely shaped by its biological origins.

2. In the course of just a few millennia, the human evolved language and culture. Culture has become the actual ecology where humans exist and where humans evolve. Human evolution as of today is not shaped by biological forces anymore but rather by cultural and mental forces.

3. Cultural evolution is much faster than biological evolution. Yet, individually, our bodies and brains are still constrained by their biology. Moreover, our social behavior is still shaped, to a large extent, by imperatives that ensured human survival in pre-cultural and proto-cultural eras.

4. As a consequence, humanity exists today within a rapidly growing adaptive gap. We have managed to create a fast evolving complex culture and this culture is certainly reshaping us individually and collectively. But this co-evolution is seriously constrained by the biological substrata of our minds.

5. It seems that we are not intelligent enough to cope with growing complexity of our social organization. This is already apparent in the dysfunction of governance systems, economic systems and the general coordinated addressing of large (planetary) scale problems.

6. It seems that human social behavior that was optimized to the way humans existed thousands of years ago is dangerously unfit to the complex demands of modern civilization. More specifically, certain necessary aspects of our collective intelligence such as emotional intelligence, extended empathy, sophisticated ethical reasoning, the capacity to communicate and cooperate within complex situations, augmented theories about other minds and more, evolve very slowly if at all.

7. (From here are some good news…) The human brain is found to be extremely plastic and adaptable in a very broad spectrum of capacities. It seems plausible that our brains and our mental capacities can be radically augmented.

8. Our understanding of the human brain and human general biology already allows people to be made smarter, perhaps much smarter. Brain enhancers that effectively augment human general intelligence are already available and will become much more effective and more available in the coming decades.

9. Even moderate increase of intelligence in the overall human population may have radical beneficial impact on the well being of humanity at large (see for an impressive example the micro nutrient initiative and its possible effects).

10. More controversially, human individual and social behavior can be altered to better fit the complex fast changing cultural ecology we are all part of. Specifically, human traits such as peacefulness, cooperation, empathy and trust can be reinforced by changing the chemical balance of the brain. Traits such as aggression, territoriality and other sociopathic dispositions can similarly be attenuated.

11. A bit further in the future, interventions at the genetic level can increase the general level of intelligence and shape the social behavior of new born children with the effect that whole populations will achieve better fitness and well being in our fast evolving circumstances.

In the light of these observations a very profound question becomes clear: Should we take the reins of our future evolution? Should we engage in a coordinated, large scale, project of augmenting our brains (and eventually our biology) and by that to radically change our minds and our very human nature? What are the values and the ethical precepts that can guide us in addressing such question?

At the end of the first decade of the 21st century, it is clear that there is a need for a change. It is also becoming clear that we are rapidly gaining the effective means to introduce it. Nevertheless, this is a very complex issue. The brief background I tried to bring here is only the tip of an iceberg. There are, I know, many views that will question the validity of part or all of the observations above, or the way that they are presented. My point however is to say enough to start a discussion here.

Lately I have watched an hour long lecture titled “Genetically enhance humanity or face extinction” given by Oxford professor of philosophy and bioethics Julian Suvalescu. Though he presents the issue of human enhancement in a much bolder fashion, the arguments he presents are interesting and certainly provocative. I recommend watching it if only for one reason: to gain a very real sense of how dangerous this idea is and how unavoidable is the need for every forward thinking individual to seriously think about, it discuss it and consolidate an informed view.

Genetically Enhance Humanity or Face Extinction Part 1

Genetically Enhance Humanity or Face Extinction Part 2


I would appreciate your thoughts and comments and hope this introduction will start an ongoing (and much needed, I believe) exchange on the subject in the SC.

Sat, Nov 21, 2009  Permanent link

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Antonio Damasio: This Time With Feeling

A fascinating talk about emotions and feelings by Antonio Damasio, one of the most renowned neuroscientists of our time.

Fri, Aug 21, 2009  Permanent link

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Contemplating Singularity
Project: Polytopia

Recently I came across a very interesting article by Timothy Lenoir, bringing a fresh perspective on the concept Singularity and posthumanist future.

In the introductory note Lenoir writes:

Most researchers agree that there is no reason in principle why we will not eventually develop conscious machines that rival or surpass human intelligence. If we are crossing to a new era of the posthuman, how have we gotten here? And how should we understand the process?

Cultural theorists have addressed the topic of the posthuman singularity and how, if at all, humanity will cross that divide. Most scholars have focused on the rhetorical and discursive practices, the metaphors and narratives, the intermediation of scientific texts, science fiction, electronic texts, film, and other elements of the discursive field enabling the posthuman imaginary. While recognizing that posthumans, cyborgs and other tropes are technological objects as well as discursive formations, the focus has been directed less toward analyzing the material systems and processes of the technologies and more toward the narratives and ideological discourses that empower them. We speak about machines and discourses “co-constituting” one another, but in practice, we tend to favor discursive formations as preceding and to a certain extent breathing life into our machines. The most far-reaching and sustained analysis of the problems has been offered by N. Katherine Hayles in her two recent books, How We Became Posthuman and My Mother Was a Computer. Hayles considers it possible that machines and humans may someday interpenetrate. But she rejects as highly problematic, and in any case not yet proven, that the universe is fundamentally digital, the notion that a Universal Computer generates reality, a claim that is important to the positions staked out by proponents of the posthuman singularity such as Morowitz, Kurzweil, Wolfram and Moravec. For the time being, Hayles argues, human consciousness and perception are essentially analog, and indeed, she argues, currently even the world of digital computation is sandwiched between analog inputs and outputs for human interpreters. How we will become posthuman, Hayles argues, will be through interoperational feedback loops between our current mixed analog-digital reality and widening areas of digital processing. Metaphors, narratives and other interpretive linguistic modes we use for human sense-making of the world around us do the work of conditioning us to behave as if we and the world were digital.

I propose to circumvent the issue of an apocalyptic end of the human and our replacement by a new form of Robo Sapiens by drawing upon the work of anthropologists, philosophers, language theorists, and more recently cognitive scientists shaping the results of their researches into a new argument for the co-evolution of humans and technics, specifically the technics of language and the material media of inscription practices. The general thrust of this line of thinking may best be captured in Andy Clark’s phrase, “We have always been cyborgs.” From the first “human singularity” to our present incarnation, human being has been shaped through a complicated co-evolutionary entanglement with language, technics and communicational media.

In the article, Lenoir argues that in some very relevant and real sense, the Singularity has already taken place a few millennia in our past when the human brain evolved the capacity for abstract symbolic representation. This capacity has enabled culture, complex social organizations, technology, and open ended concept formation (evolution of knowledge). Though he is not explicit about it, this argument leads to the proposition that what we witness as acceleration towards a future Singularity and transition into a posthuman era is only a consequence of this capacity.

Following Lenoir's line of thought, to achieve Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) we need to find a way to endow our computing machines with an autonomous capacity for abstract symbolic representation. In autonomous I mean that this capacity will become independent from human symbolic interpretation. As formidable as our computing systems are becoming, they possess very rudimentary capacity for autonomous symbolic representation. This is why we need to design and program them instead of letting them to learn and evolve autonomously. Most successful AI systems existing today are based on domain specific symbolic representation that allows such systems to learn within a specific and narrow domain of knowledge. Once we manage to endow machines with general abstract (domain independent) symbolic representation, machines will become intelligent and possibly sentient (capable of at least some level of self representation and self reflectivity). Such machines will be capable to evolve independently and probably much faster than their biological ancestors/creators. This seems a very plausible scenario though far from being trivial, as we still do not understand how exactly such capacity evolved in the first place. This is still one of evolution's most kept secrets.

Indeed it seems that autonomous abstract symbolic representation is a necessary capacity of a general intelligence, biological or artificial. It is not clear however if it is a sufficient capacity. It is entirely not clear if such capacity is sufficient, for example, to achieve sentience or even consciousness. I will try to address these riddles in my following posts on a new model of mind.

It is interesting to note that from this perspective, the concept of Singularity as associated with the emergence of Artificial Intelligent machines with capacities that exceed the human, is a developmental phase transition rather than an evolutionary transition in the sense that the fundamental enabling capacity discussed above has been achieved by biological systems quite long ago. What we may witness in the future Singularity is if so only the full blown fruition of what basically made us distinctively human at the dawn of history.

Read the rest of the interesting article here: Contemplating Singularity

Mon, Aug 10, 2009  Permanent link
Categories: posthumanism, Artificial Intelligence
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Mind – The need for a new model (part 4)
Project: Polytopia

All the ways about here belong to me! The Red Queen in ‘Through the Looking Glass’ by Lewis Carroll

Detours

Back, here, at square one… In the course of thousands of years of human thought, almost everything that could have been said about the mind, had already been said and in more than one way. With the guidance of the red queen (she wished me to mention her other famous quote...) which hides in its utter simplicity a quite profound reflection on the power of narratives, I found that it will be impossible to even start to sketch a framework for a new model without making some far reaching detours which might seem, at first, sidetracking the subject. We need to find some ways that do not belong...

Let us start with the question about the kind of relations that can be described between mind and embodiment. How does the mind arise? Or, a different way to ask this question: what are the processes and interactions by which mind takes form as sensations ideas, emotions, memories etc, or, mind is being made into form as sense impressions, experiences, insights etc. A somewhat simplified version of this same question (is it is the same question?) might be the well known mind-body problem: how do phenomenal states i.e. experiential states and mental states in general arise from the neural activity of our organic brains? Making the brain and the nervous system the context of asking the question, is indeed a great simplification compared to a wider, more abstract, and less presuming context. Yet, it is an unwarranted one considering that it is the thinking organ itself which is under investigation here.

It seems fair to assume that minds are necessarily embodied. This, however, does not automatically come to mean that minds are physically embodied. Embodiment and physicality are not synonymous. Physical embodiment is only one option and not necessarily the most aesthetic one as I will try to show further ahead. The issue of embodiment is in fact very abstract and it strongly resonates with another deep question regarding the nature of reality. Hence our first detour, which we will soon see is only the first in a sequence.


Fred Tomaselli, Untitled, 2002

Why do we need to address the nature of reality? When we try to better understand embodiment, we have relate to a certain ontological background. We use words and linguistic gestures to form descriptions that represent certain states of affairs. But as I wrote in a previous post, the manner by which we relate to mind cannot possibly be separated from the manner of minding the nature of reality at large. We must attend to what is the case (after L. Wittgenstein), we must somehow ground our conceptions (ground=embodiment). Moreover, without subscribing to at least a provisional belief about the nature of reality we cannot even start to figure (figure=embodiment) what embodies what: is the mind embodied in a wider reality which is basically independent of it? Or is it the other way around: it is the mind that embodies reality. This is difficult and even confusing because mind and embodiment do not seem anymore as distinct as one usually might think about them.

To make things just a bit simpler but not really, let us briefly explore such provisional beliefs. Here are two options: the first option is a belief that forms have an independent existence, and the content present in our minds (or as our minds) is basically impressions, or representations, or shadows of those forms. In this option a mind is a kind of a screen or a mirror (or even a clay-like malleable stuff) on which forms are being rendered.

It is interesting to note that both idealism and materialism that seem to be so widely removed from each other in the virtual atlas of human thought, are merely particular flavors of this option. The difference between materialism and idealism is in the particular kind of substance intrinsic to reality. While materialism is the belief that the substance intrinsic to reality is physical, i.e. matter, energy, space and time, etc, idealism is the belief that the substance intrinsic to reality is rooted in the realm of (platonic) abstract concepts. In a particular and very popular version of this same belief, it is the mind of a god, or its presence, or its emanation which is the substance intrinsic to reality that by divine intent is shaped into all forms. In all the different versions of this belief, however, there exists a kind of primal substance intrinsic to reality that embodies (yes, same concept again) all forms.

The second option is that forms do not have an independent existence (in Mahayana Buddhist tradition this option is referred as conditioned arisal or conditioned origination). One might already have asked even earlier: independent of what? Plainly speaking, it is independent (or not) from the subject of experience, the observer, me, or the mind that experiences, perceives, relates, represents, describes etc [another detour invites itself here: is it justified at all to describe ‘mind’ and ‘me’ as distinct, and if so how do we describe a mind(s) which is ‘other’? We will get to it ahead]. This option boils down to the belief that the intrinsic nature of reality arises as relations and necessarily depends on the mind. In other words which I find clearer: reality (all forms) arises in the course of minding, or reflecting, the dynamic relation of a universal mind with itself. Or, in other words that might make this idea more accessible: there is no observer independent reality. No forms exist independently and there is no substance intrinsic to them. Forms are (merely?) relations, empty, dreamlike. They arise as the undulations of an undifferentiated nothingness, not unlike the Taoist concept of the Tao. Out of Tao forms and order arise, pulled out, so to speak, as minding, the on going process that brings forth an insubstantial instance of a dream-reality, our dynamic remembered present, the universe we know to be real.


Andrew Carnie, Things Happen (part of), 2005

These options (understandably there is much more to them than said here), are in fact highly accomplished and sophisticated thought systems, or more precisely, species of thought systems which, figuratively speaking, embody major branches in the evolutionary tree of human thought.
In as much as they are different, there is one thing fundamentally common to both species: it is an underlying concept of truth. The primacy of the concept of truth deserves of course a detour in itself. We might get to it further along our investigation. Meanwhile, I would propose to provisionally relate to truth as a kind of an overarching selective principle. Unlike the relatively simple and ad-hoc way it is used in qualifying facts and logical reasoning, truth, when applied to fundamental beliefs in one’s worldview, carries an emotional value and therefore is intimately involved in the shaping of motives and initiation of action. Again, without digging too deep into the issue, truth is a belief’s instrument to effectively assert its own distinctiveness. While we usually imagine truth as embodied by this or that belief, like a flag on the top of a castle (castle topples, flag is taken… Protect! Protect!), truth is actually a kind of funny stuff found between beliefs and drives them apart to become distinct from each other. It is a repulsive kind of force (like dark energy), localizing and excluding. This kind of truth is nothing but a carefully refined brand of good old Neolithic territorialism brought to the heights of abstract thought.


The face of Truth as captured recently by the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP)
a spacecraft which measures differences in the temperature of the Big Bang's remnant radiant heat - the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation - across the full sky.

Regaining our temporary theme after this swift detour towards the truth, let us turn back to our original detour. I hope that in the course of reading the last few paragraphs you gained at least a preliminary sense of what embodiment is (incarnation, realization, manifestation, expression, representation, actualization, symbol, model, quintessence, exemplification, example, exemplar, ideal, instance...). Embodiment is necessary for meaning. Without embodiment of any kind (very hard to imagine such state of affairs), nothing would make sense to us. The very expression ‘makes sense’ is about embodiment, about bringing something into a tangible form, understanding and experiencing something which is intangible in terms of other things which are tangible. The mind is continuously busy in embodying its intangible aspects into tangible ones. This is an ongoing dynamic and evolving process of our metaphor machine. It is a fundamental activity of our minds – a continuous process of embodying. Again, the relation mind-embodiment seem to gain even a deeper intimacy as if minding and embodiment are less and less distinct. As we look closer, it is difficult to see where one ends and the other begins.

In their landmark work “Metaphors we live by”. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson introduce a novel and expanded approach to the concept metaphor:

The most important claim we have made so far is that metaphor is not just a matter of language, that is, of mere words. We shall argue on the contrary, human thought processes are largely metaphorical. This is what we mean when we say that the human conceptual system is metaphorically structured and defined.

The metaphorical machine that progressively makes the contents of our mental states tangible is anchored in a yet deeper level of processes which are not accessible to us. When we feel excited, or angry, or interested, when we see a flower, or bump into a (transparent) wall, when we suddenly remember a vivid dream that we had, or think a thought that just came up (up from where?), the underlying cognitive processes that produce all these are transparent (unseen) to us. This transparency is perhaps one of the most paradoxical aspects of minding. It makes a world appear to us as ultimately unmediated, while, simultaneously, our mental space seems to be enclosed within itself and entirely disassociated from any world whatsoever. It is as if we sit at a restaurant table and these experiences are served to us as elaborately prepared dishes. How the food is cooked and how the dishes are prepared is entirely out of sight. Being creatures of theories and explanations that we are, we vaguely (and somewhat reflexively) guess that these dishes come from somewhere, that there is a kitchen (entirely hidden from us), where the food is being prepared. But in this case, the kitchen is so hidden that it becomes a true mystery and we start to suspect whether it exists at all. Or, alternatively, we start to believe that there is only a kitchen and us, eating, is just an elaborate illusion.


Jericho Santander, Own World, Illustration made for Depthcore.com

For modern neuroscience the kitchen is the brain but the embarrassing riddle is still with us: The ingredients the kitchen works with and the dishes we are served are made of entirely different kinds of stuff. In the brain we have biochemical reactions and electrochemical signaling. In our minds we have voices, colors, words, shapes, emotions, choices, desires etc. We know that these are somehow connected, at least correlated, for every dish which is served, the kitchen is producing something quite distinct and for every preparation of the kitchen there is a dish being served. Yet, the kitchen and the eating hall, our minds and our brains, seem to inhabit entirely different realms. We seem to be creatures of multiple worlds… How could this be? This riddle does not seem to be a riddle of neuroscience. It does not seem to be a scientific riddle at all. It is a riddle that touches the very foundations of how our minds operate and how minds arise in the first place. It is a riddle sitting at the very core of our model; a place where all our stories originate from, yet itself still untold. It is so mysterious that we fail even to ask the proper questions about it or come up with really useful (digestible) metaphors.

When we realize that our metaphor machine fails us, we know that we have reached a reality limit and we are in need for a new narrative. Even this wouldn’t be good enough because what we really need is a new kind of narrative, a new kind of knowing, of telling our stories. We must return and re-examine the origin of forms and the very nature of reality. In search of a new model I will write next about abstract self organizing forms, meta-evolution and emergent universes and of course about minds being multiply embodied and yet at one.

To be continued…

Sat, Jul 25, 2009  Permanent link

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Mind – The need for a new model (part 3)
Project: Polytopia

Yet another augmented prologue

It took me a while to figure how to continue from here. There are many potential threads waiting to be unfolded and many ideas to weave. I thought however to dedicate another short post to reiterate what is it all about. The goal of writing about the mind, in itself being the subject of an intensive, quasi chaotic, process of iterative clarification, is not a philosophical investigation per se. It is not even a goal but rather a response to an inner call of sorts; an emerging yet not entirely formed imperative, private in nature and of intimate, unmediated, clarity.

Mind is a great puzzle but it also may become a key. We, the conscious reflecting animals that we are - we are born, we live and we die in our minds. The mind is certainly the nexus of our humanity, and still in an almost mystical way it encompasses much more than our humanity; as if it enwombs the vastness of our potential humanity and not only the humanity that is.

In this very sense, being quite removed (but not alien) from the noble endeavor to merely understand, mind is perhaps to be appreciated as a very potent metaphorical vehicle - a metaphor for an open-ended humanism. To know the mind becomes synonymous to knowledge that evolves, to image that transforms, to concept as a process of ever extracting its own context while bringing forth its transitory (persistent momentary) instances. You might sense the vacuum’s throbbing pulse underneath the words – a remote echo not entirely unfamiliar.


Birth of a Thought 2- Susan Aldworth (2007)

In modern philosophical discourse, post-humanism comes to explore what possibly might come after the human. But the human is but an image in its own mind and this mind is but an image within an image… There is no way to dodge this inevitable circularity so we have to look into it and surf it without falling into the vortex of infinite recurs. That is why I prefer open-ended humanism upon post humanism.

Open-ended humanism carries no implicit trace of temporality (it is not ‘post’ to something else). More importantly, open-ended humanism involves no covert act of (so called) semantic aggression in delimiting the concept ‘human’ in hope of conquering a new conceptual territory. Open-ended humanism can be considered as a conceptual sibling to Wildcat’s Polytopia. Both are conceived with the same understanding of non-aggressive open-endedness. Yet, I do not want to see any of them reach the status of fully developed mature concepts (an elaborate invention anyway). Why? Because both explore a novel kind of distinctiveness which is inherently a-territorial and incomplete.

Therefore I will not make open-ended humanism the subject of a discourse or investigation here; at least not explicitly. I would rather explore the unknown shores of a worthy metaphor, an archipelago of emergent meaning. In doing so, the ‘humanity’ in ‘open ended humanity’ will never take too deep roots in this or that image, this or that idea, this or that sentiment or emotional disposition; not even in what we might realize emotions, ideas and images to be at any given stage of our evolution. After all, realization in itself is an open ended process. Eventually, this h word (or h+ or h++) will fade out, leaving us, whatever we might become, open-ended _, incomplete, yet with absolutely no sense of loss.

We will become free from our humanity, which paradoxically is the deepest sense of fulfilling it.

To be continued...

Sat, Jul 18, 2009  Permanent link
Categories: Open-ended humanism
Sent to project: Polytopia

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