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Member 1096 43 entries 136507 views
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Immortal since Dec 19, 2007 Uplinks: 0, Generation 2 |



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From Wildcat Disembodied Juxtapositions... |
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From Olena 100 Incredible Lectures |
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From N8 Terence McKenna: Dreaming... |
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From rene Tinkering till the end of... |
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From Xaos Montevideo (part 7) |
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From Gabriel Shalom Augmented Reality vs. Aura... |
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From meganmay The Future Needs a Face |
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From Wildcat A Cyber Soaring Humanity |
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From meganmay The Utopia Hypothesis |
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From Spaceweaver Changing our minds |
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.
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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.


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standing for a smiling face, which, depending on context, stands for a particular state of mind, an expressed emotion, or a behavioral response etc. A model is generally a simplified approximate representation of a complex object, a phenomenon, a process and so on. At the basis of creating a model is an act of discrimination. We discriminate and extract those features and properties of the modeled entity which are significant and therefore need to be included in the model from those features and properties that can be discarded. A good model captures everything which is remarkable and interesting about the phenomenon being modeled and yet is significantly more simple and accessible. A good model is fit to replace the object or phenomenon being modeled within a designated context. A good model highlights that which is interesting and leaves everything else hidden.

Theories of mind held by individuals arise at a very early age as a consequence of interactions with the environment. They can be fairly simple or incredibly complex depending on factors such as the individual’s mental and emotional capacity, upbringing, education, life experience and cultural background. At a higher level, a theory of mind operates as cohering glue that guides human interactions and integrates human individuals into complex cultural organisms. With very few exceptions, diverse theories of mind operated by individuals are instances of the theory of mind sustained by the larger cultural organism they belong to. In this sense, both the dynamics of an individual mind and the collective dynamics of cultural organisms derive from the same theory of mind.If you put God outside and set him vis-à-vis his creation and if you have the idea that you are created in his image, you will logically and naturally see yourself as outside and against the things around you. And as you arrogate all mind to yourself, you will see the world around you as mindless and therefore not entitled to moral or ethical consideration. The environment will seem to be yours to exploit. Your survival unit will be you and your folks or con-specifics against the environment of other social units, other races and the brutes and vegetables. If this is your estimate of your relation to nature and you have an advanced technology, your likelihood of survival will be that of a snowball in hell. You will die either of the toxic by-products of your own hate, or, simply, of over-population and over grazing.