Cyborg-Love , Techno-Desire, Cyber-Tenderness (pt. 1&2)
Project: Polytopia

(Originally published at URBNFUTR- graciously allowing me to republish here)

Techno Desire and Cyber Sex – Part 1

That we are intimate with the world is not news. That we have extended this intimacy to our tools is a reality; the idea that we are becoming cyborgs is already here.

There is nothing mysterious or futuristic about being a cyborg, part machine part biological organism. Using our smartphones to remember our appointments, a long list of telephone numbers, addresses and shopping lists is a cyborg activity. The extension and externalization of our memories in electronic devices makes us de-facto modern day cyborgs.

Deploying devices to upgrade and extend our insufficient neuro performance is only part of what we do as cyborgs. We use these extensions for training, for life tracking, for calorie counts, for sleep, you name it, there’s an app for that. But lest we forget, we also have our loves, our cares and our motivations to deal with, our desires both of the flesh and of our imagination. Also these are slowly coming into this symbiotic relationship.

The accelerated tooling times we are living in, allow us to gradually expand the notion of what it means to be human. For, make no mistake; we are far from being similar to our ancestors. A modern day, urbanized, cyberneticaly hyperconnected human, exists in a state of interdependence and sense extension, the like of which no one could have predicted.

We have a new relationship with technology, one we truly cannot extricate ourselves from, and this changes everything. Cyber technologies and information science have brought to bear, not a new tool but a new world with which to be intimate, a cyberspace horizon of potentiality that extends into the material world.

What happens when these cyber-technologies, broaden our nervous system, into other nervous systems, weaving us with the emergent nervous system of the Internet?



Virtually Yours – Techno Desire and Virtual Sex

A plethora of new technologies offers us a wide swath to expand our sensations and emotions into, and our desires and hidden imaginary wishes. Virtual worlds such as second life already thrive, but a growing segment of virtuality is directed, how else? Into sex.

Red districts offering every conceivable sexual wish, from the Toy Slaves Brothel (NSFW), to Fantasy Escorts (NSFW), are here for the take. One of these virtual worlds, appropriately named Red Light Center, (NSFW), carrying the tag line: “EXPAND Your Fantasy”, is modeled after Amsterdam’s red light district and claims a few million users.

Now come the tough questions of course: “is it infidelity to have sex in virtual worlds?” when no ‘real’ sex has occurred? It is hard to come by numbers, but it does make sense that for many it will be considered as such, creating novel situations where the ‘competition’ is an avatar. The ubiquitousness of cyber sex virtual worlds is however only part of the story. It is still you, probably alone, clicking on a button, playing a game.

Enter Synesthesia, literally the coming together of sensation (from the Greek Syn- together and Aesthesis – sensation), a term, which may well denote that which we are experiencing and will increasingly experience as the electronic tools at our disposal evolve. Though the experience of Synesthesia is anything but common and is considered to be of genetic origin, its idiosyncratic nature is what makes it so convenient and adaptable to the extension of our senses via technology.

In fact new developments in haptic technologies, especially those involving vibrotactile feedback, will soon allow us to ‘really’ feel objects in virtual worlds, to feel, to sense and to enjoy the pleasures provided. Feeling the coldness of steel, the weight of a rock or the warmth of a body in a virtual world, is a revolution of the senses, the like of which we have not yet seen. For once the stream of impressions coming to our nervous system is no longer subject to the immediate, the possibilities open to our perceptual apparatus are limited by imagination only, and that we have abundantly.

Once the new mesh of Haptic and Synesthesia comes together the avatar of our own making, will be able not only to see, but touch, feel and sense remote objects to a fullness of satisfaction, that will practically overwhelm us. One of these technologies already available is offering products such as the real touch award winning male masturbator (NSFW), which pledges to be the future of adult entertainment, followed closely by the Mojowijo (NSFW) promising: “The motions of one device are transformed into vibrations in the other, literally allowing you to share the mojo with anyone, anywhere in the world.”

Though these devices are only the very beginning of what cybersex promises to be, a ‘real’ virtual alternative to common relationship, already their problematic implications abound. While Internet enabled sexual toys proliferate and multiple 3D online worlds offer everything from multiple partners, to every single imaginable fantasy one can have it is their descendents, which offer a real glimpse into the future.

The following is a fascinating excursion filmed, written, and edited by Tutsy Navarathna, NSFW but worthwhile watching. Navarathna: “This film is an investigation into the transformations that human relationships face when interacting in Virtual Worlds.
 Love and sexuality are on an important factor in any human relationships. However, what is new in Virtual Worlds is the ability to exercise those relationships without any real risk, external censure or imposition from an internal “super-ego”. (NSFW)



The ever-present state of being a cyborg however is only a fraction of the story. The complete story we will know only in the fullness of time, today we will do well to look deep into our minds and ask ourselves what is it that we are becoming? What kind of human do we desire to be, and what is already available or is on the horizon for our use and transformation.

If online virtual cyber sex, extended via prosthetics, is the natural next step, then our evolution as cyborg beings is far from obvious. According to David Levy at the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands, not only is it the case that love and sex with robots is inevitable, but by 2050 the state of Massachusetts will be the first jurisdiction to legalize marriages with robots.

What happens when our emotional make-up is no longer a given and our sexual preferences receive a boost of new options never before encountered? What happens when our sensations can be amplified tenfold? What happens when ‘cool’ means- dating a Gynoid or Android?

To quote from Woody Allen:

“Love is the answer, but while you are waiting for the answer, sex raises some pretty good questions.”

Transgressive Love: Cyborg Tenderness – Part 2

It is now easy to love our selves as cyborgs, cyborg love is here, embrace it. The essential notion of Cyborg love is constructive transgression, a spreading out of our sense perception, into new domains of feeling. More than stimulating, less than exciting, slightly uncomfortable, the cyborg symbiosis we are moving into is an opportunity to expand our humanness. According to Amber Case who studies Cyborg Anthropology:

“It’s not that machines are taking over – it’s just that they are helping us be more human”

TEDTALK: Amber Case – We are all cyborgs now:



This emergent symbiotic relationship might represent a possible break with our proto emotional selves and a real opening to redefine our perceptual machinery.

It might be easier for some of us to accept a robotic firefighter, sand that self metamorphoses, or mechanical helpers that feed on organic matter (our very own waste!), but when these same robots become very similar to us the notion of us vs. them, will blur into nothingness.

Enter ECCEROBOT (Embodied Cognition in a Compliantly Engineered Robot) a three-year project funded by the 7th framework programme of the EU (ICT-Challenge 2, “Cognitive Systems, Interaction, Robotics”). The project has three goals: to build the first truly anthropomimetic robot; to find out how to control it; and finally, to investigate its human-like cognitive features.



Anthropomimetic robotics is nothing new, what is new however is the manner by which we learn, slowly but surely, to accept these as another form of us, humans. The fact is that, as we become more cyborgs and the more robots accumulate human like properties, the distance between these two forms of life decreases exponentially. The transgressive aspect enters the equation when we manage to leap across the ‘uncanny valley’ (a term coined by Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori first in 1970):

“Mori’s original hypothesis states that as the appearance of a robot is made more human, a human observer’s emotional response to the robot will become increasingly positive and empathic, until a point is reached beyond which the response quickly becomes that of strong revulsion. However, as the robot’s appearance continues to become less distinguishable from that of a human being, the emotional response becomes positive once more and approaches human-to-human empathy levels.”

(Wiki-uncanny valley)

The motion to empathy is only an aspect of a larger shift in our interaction with machines, for when our minds can no longer distinguish the difference between man and machine, our emotional system will adapt accordingly.



Beyond the, by now proverbial, consensual hallucination of cyberspace the enlarged domain of the metaverse allows us a glimpse into our futures. A future, already here, in which we will love both ourselves as cyborgs and our newly emerging companion androids and Gynoids. One of the most fascinating developments in this respect is the work of Japanese robotics creator Hiroshi Ishiguro, who recently unveiled his newest creation the new robot F.

Geminoid F serenades the crowd during Hong Kong’s “Robots in Motion 2012″ Expo:



Can we love Geminoid F? My definite answer to this question is, if not Geminoid F then her next of kin or her descendants. Cyborg love and Robot love are two converging lines of emotional connectivity that do not come to usurp our ‘common’ state of affairs. On the contrary, as technologies of augmentation become more available, as hyperconnectivity increases and as robots become more life like, we are finally extending our family of beings to new domains.

Of course we will love these creations, we will love them for their beauty (created to fit our tastes) and their resiliency, for their functionality (created to meet our needs) and their otherness. But there is another reason for which I think we will love these created companions, lets call it, mental transportation. Like Hiroshi Ishiguro I believe that androids and gynoids will become our friends, companions, colleagues and lovers, as part of an extended cyborgization process. A process that is as natural as it is inevitable and inexorable.

In his book ‘Love and Sex with Robots: The Evolution of Human-Robot Relationships’ Levy states that: “Love with robots will be as normal as love with other humans,” he further writes, “while the number of sexual acts and lovemaking positions commonly practiced between humans will be extended, as robots teach us more than is in all of the world’s published sex manuals combined.”



Most of us will remember fondly the impressive character of Rachael in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, a cybernetic creature of immense beauty played artfully by Sean Young. In the movie Rachael is an advanced replicant prototype of the Nexus-6 generation, carrying implanted memories from Eldon Tyrell’s niece. What is important in the case of this representation is the sense of intimacy and tenderness carried over to the audience. Rachael transports us into a new world, that of a totally transparent human-replicant relationship.

Like all modern relationships, technology and sexual desire will play a major role in both adoption and implementation of cyborgs and androids. It is quite certain that the future human civilization rests with a new natural state of affairs one in which androids, gynoids, cyborgs and robots play a complex interactive game with us common mortals. This is good.

It is good because a new space is being created. A space allowing for a broadening of horizons; an overarching space of potentiality, vital and natural. The relationship of human and machine, mind and electronics, evolving in tandem, is changing the concept of embodiment, enlarging it to encompass new realities. We are no longer alone in the family of beings. Transgressive love is our lot, through which we explore new forms of existence, new fashions of self-reflection. The tenderness we extend to machines is not a postmodern relativism but an actuation of our innate desire to merge with everything. To merge with all life, machines included.

I leave you with the amazing Demo-presentation by Quantic Dreams of their latest creation: Kara:



Are we not falling in love with her? Soon Kara, and similar forms of life will be here, are we ready to extend our tenderness? To embrace the new members of an extended humanity, with warmth, with fondness and maybe adoration? It will take time, but I am certain that we will.

This series concerning the evolution of our Cyborg lives will continue shortly.

Notes:

I am indebted to the great editing work the Urban Times founder and editor Charlie Hilton has done on my original articles.

credits:
Image 1 Source: flickr.com/photos/sergioaraujo
Image 2 Source: flickr.com/photos/mtonic
Image 3 Source: flickr.com/photos/lainyvoom
Image 4 Rachel Replica from Blade Runner // Source: flickr.com/photos/blile59

Wed, May 23, 2012  Permanent link
Categories: Cyber Civilization,, Cyborg,Man Machine Interface,Hybrid,robots,robotics,cyber love
Sent to project: Polytopia

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Hyperconnected Bodies, the rising cloud of self-aware data
Project: Polytopia

Of course it is natural to augment reality, we do it with our eyes and brains ever since perception got, in a poetic sense, highjacked by our imagination.

A plethora of new apps are here to help us keep track of everything. Sharing and benchmarking are becoming the casual reality applications of our lives, making the quantified-self, the game changer that the concept claims to be. Designing the life you love and architecting your reality seen as a design problem and not a psychological or philosophical quest is where the crux of our times lay silently.
The sweet spot of interaction between people and technology resides in a very special place, maybe the new aesthetic but probably a self-aware map of tools and humans, making reality a new kind of platform. Does it make the story of our life an extraordinary experience or will it make us instruments of our own demise?

Exploring this question is I believe the most salient point of our current civilization for though we might be obsessed about the news of the moment be it the economy or the political scene, it is the actual pixelated deconstruction of our moment by moment immediate reality that may or may not bring about that cherished idea of a life well lived.

It used to be that a life well lived was the subject matter of philosophy and then of psychology, however it might be the case that as of now the same question has become one of design. Not design as in ‘design the life you love’ as some may desire to portray it but design in the literal sense of the objects and apps we use.
The design of objects and applications used daily by millions of people all over the world, submitting the benchmarks they attain (or do not attain) to a mostly anonymous crowd, invents, as it were a reality that is fundamentally augmented and shared to such an extent that for all practical purposes, it is not ‘ours’ anymore but is for all practical purposes a shared prototype of consciousness or indeed a consensual hallucination.

The implications are vast serious and probably under-emphasized, acts of self tracking and self monitoring are not only acts of extensibility of our minds into objects but also acts of self inflicting data upon our own subjectified self. In this process we may unwittingly, and to some extent unknowingly provide our minds with an alternative to self-reflection. In fact I am uncertain if indeed the apparent cohesion of what used to be an introspective process of self-knowing becoming externalized via the applications of monitoring and self-tracking devices, improves our lives or destroys a sense of fullness in which not everything is known.
—
Some examples of modern tracking devices



“Breathe2Relax is a portable stress management tool. Built on the iPhone mobile app platform, Breathe2Relax is a hands-on diaphragmatic breathing exercise. Breathing exercises have been documented to decrease the body's 'fight-or-flight' (stress) response, and help with mood stabilization, anger control, and anxiety management. Breathe2Relax can be used as a stand-alone stress reduction tool, or can be used in tandem with clinical care directed by a healthcare worker.
Capitalizing on touch-screen technology, a user can record their stress level on a 'visual analogue scale' by simply swiping a small bar to the left or to the right. Breathe2Relax uses state-of-the-art graphics, animation, narration, and videos to deliver a sophisticated, immersive experience for the user.” (go here: breath relax)
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Other examples:

RunKeeper makes tracking your workouts fun, social, and easy to understand so that you can improve the quality of your fitness.
—
Over at TedxSilkroad: “Patrice Slupowski, director of innovation at Orange France Telecom, quotes Ericsson's CEO who predicts 50 billion connected devices by 2015. With 3 billion expected Internet users, this means we will have 17 devices per connected people. By 2015, 3 years from now we will be carrying on us sensors and other devices that produce data. “

His presentation called: “The connected body” here below is a well worth watch, in a very poetic and French manner Patrice Slupowski, entices us to understand and accept the connected state of affairs through which he gets more sleep, looses weight, records the amount of steps he walks and shares the resulting data with his social networks.



The point as most of us are already acquainted with is that tracking; self-tracking in particular, allows a new kind of self-awareness, especially as relates to our health and fitness.
Put all this data in the cloud, (privacy not included) and personal medicine becomes a reality, tracking our mood, skin temperatures and the analysis of correlated data becomes a new picture we have of ourselves, and a new image we can project unto the world.





Of course that is only the beginning, new under the skin implant devices are coming our way faster than the speed of the click: :” Scientists at Toronto-based Autodesk Research and their colleagues tested a dozen or so different user interface implants. Input devices included microphones for audio; buttons, pressure sensors and tap sensors for input via direct touching of the skin; and brightness sensors and capacitive sensors — the kind now often found in mobile device touchscreens — for input through motions above the skin. Output devices they examined included audio speakers, LEDs, and vibration motors. Wireless communications were enabled using Bluetooth, and wireless recharging was tested with inductive chargers, the kind seen with cordless power tools. (Via the Txchnologist)
—

What about memory recall? Add to the above the sense cam from Microsoft: “SenseCam is a wearable camera that takes photos automatically. Originally conceived as a personal ‘Black Box’ accident recorder, it soon became evident that looking through images previously recorded tends to elicit quite vivid remembering of the original event.

Watch: Sensecam : Human memory enhancement camera invented by Lyndsay Williams for Microsoft Research Cambridge. MRI brain scan research by Professor Martin Conway.

—
Some are already using this huge amount of data that is more meaningful than apparent, to create what may well be the personal information stock exchange,

“In a paper posted online last week, Huberman and coauthor Christina Aperjis propose something akin to a New York Stock Exchange for personal data. A trusted market operator could take a small cut of each transaction and help arrive at a realistic price for a sale. “ ( A stock exchange for your personal data- technology review)
—


All your mind extensions will talk to each other

“They’re really external extensions of our mind,” said Joseph Tranquillo, associate professor of biomedical and electrical engineering at Bucknell University. (referring to all our networked devices- CNN)

So, vast amounts of data, self-tracking, personal information stock exchange, our own memories in the cloud, implants under our skins transmitting the data continuously.

What happens then?

A cloud of self-aware data that is what I believe will occur. An immense amount of data willingly offered, talking, transmitting, and exchanging bits and bytes with each context re-conceptualizing itself, re-describing itself as a new form of realism.

Hyperconnected bodies, transformed, metamorphosed, dynamically rewiring, our very yogic memory oscillations, playing the stock exchange of personal information, mutating, resuming, deconstructing and restructuring our thoughts, our moods, saying hello to each other and maybe waving to us on our way to a life well lived.

Are we part of this self aware-data cloud?

To some extent yes, though the connection will eventually become tenuous. As such it is my view that the self-aware cloud of information may be seen as the precursor to a global brain.
Such a global brain connecting bodies, objects, animals and extending all over the biosphere is a probability that bears an interesting account of our times.

(shortly to be continued)


Meanwhile, take a peek at this art installation, maybe a hint into a possible future self


“As two dancers moved around the perimeter of the installation, 3D cameras recorded the shapes made by their bodies and replayed them on a brass grid of over 10,000 LED lights.
The image created by the lights always resembles a single figure, no matter how many people approach it at once, but it can combine the movements of more than one body. All information recorded by the device passes through a computer, so it can also be played back with a time delay or saved to replay later. (See here: Future Self by rAndom International)

—


Links of Note & Reference :

* ARWave is a open source project to create a standard method for geolocating data on Wave servers. (ARWave)
*Lift your mood.

Clean your teeth, wash your face, measure your mood. A daily must-do.

Track your ups and downs on a graph to understand what gets to you.

Share your scores with trusted friends so they can support you. Everybody needs a buddy.
(Moodscope)

—
cross posted at Reality Augmented

Wed, May 16, 2012  Permanent link
Categories: Hyperconnectivity,Self-aware data, Superorganism,global brain,
Sent to project: Polytopia

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Maeva : How Welcome are you? (a Sci-Fi Ultrashort)

In the realm of the beyond not even the old ones knew where he came from. On an early spring the beyond simply recognized that there was someone else in the game. He never claimed his name, he was always polite and never ever demanded his status to be acknowledged, and hence he didn’t have one.
What he did do however, is go to the old ones to ask for a favor;
A request never before encountered, a demand so critical as to be unthinkable.

The favor?

Simple, he asked of them to change the price of welcome.
—

The cost of welcome, was not really the issue, everybody knew that welcoming is the quintessential process of life par excellence, thus the cost is infinite. What no one was certain about was the kind of infinite, for as all know infinities come in many guises and flavors, small infinities, great infinities, parallel infinities, cardinalities, real infinities, countable infinities, uncountable infinities, formalized infinities, philosophical infinities, and these are only the non emotionally implicative infinities.
When one entered into the realm of emotional infinities the problem of defining the real became a nightmare not of calculation but of value assessment and potential measurement, for how was one to define the love infinity, the beauty infinity, the aesthetic infinity or as the old ones used to say the emotionally laden infinity of welcoming.
Indeed no other infinity was even close to the complexity of welcoming, the reason had to do with the nature of mythical time of course, but the issue at play in our case here was that the old ones somehow always knew what the cost was, the haggle therefore was forever about the value, which was the defining criterion for the price.
Thus it came to be that in the realm of the beyond, no other question was ever so deep or so discussed or so misunderstood as the eternal question of:

How welcome are you?

The take as is the case in such matters is that there are at least three different points of referential calculation; one was how the receiver of the welcome understood the welcoming process. The second was how the welcoming party understood the process of welcoming and the third and most complex was the manner by which welcoming was performed in the flow of the moment.

The issue at play is not so simple as it might appear on first sight because as welcoming is a multidimensional process, it carries as such both a state of affairs that is semi-stable (but can oscillate into another infinity) and a dynamic ratio of sense perception allowing the flow of the moment to change unexpectedly.
Some equate the complexity of welcoming to weather systems in strange locations, but others say that weather is a much too simple and quite predictable system.
No, they say welcoming is so complex that the full resources of the multiverse cannot account for the computation needed to resolve the deceptively simple question of:

How welcome are you?

Furthermore we need take into account that welcoming is a process of destabilization of encounters, and re-stabilization on a different dimension than the one at the start of the procedure. That is why in the realm of the beyond a very careful analysis of the price of welcoming has been in the works for the last eon or so, a kalpa maybe, but then they always take their time, they are after all, the old ones, and thus are welcome to it.
Being welcome to time is the crux of the matter; plainly there is no other manner to interpret welcoming as costing infinity, of whatever kind, because if we were to dismantle the set of all times and all dimensions, into ‘you are welcome’ parameters (making the constant of adjustment as ‘you are welcome to ‘it’’ in which ‘it’ is never defined) the resultant geometry would be inconsistent with time dissolution. Obviously this could not do, time could not welcome everybody all the time, imagine the horror of everybody all the time, taking their time, if only because they are welcome to it.
What was therefore the solution to this intricate computational perspectivism as I prefer to look at it, is to welcome the price in conjunction with its value, thus in a very real sense welcoming infinity becomes welcoming the moment, a kind of superposition of welcoming flows.

Resolving the complex incongruity of:

How welcome are you?

Became if so a simple matter of courtesy, of gentleness, of allowance, of, in other words, accepting the realm of the constant as the empty moment of re-assessment.
By performing this proto-process, lets call it, the old ones, in a sense, temporarily relinquished their hold on the flow allowing transmutation to occur and magic to happen.
-
Therefore when he asked to change the price of welcome, they had no choice but to listen.
He was, it goes without saying, welcome to their deliberations.
They, naturally, were welcome to his mind.
-
In his mind they found something surprising and quite extraordinary, they found a welcoming state, unified under one banner of description, (a mathematical impossibility of course), joined as a totality of an aesthetic experience which they could not fathom.
They thought it was an infinite form of love (but could not find a receiver), then they pondered that it might be an infinity of beauty (but could not find an object), lastly they guessed that it might be an infinity of wisdom but ‘it’ was empty and 'they' were welcome to ‘it’.
-
Having no other recourse the old ones finally asked for his name,

“I am Maeva “, he said, “and in case you may desire to know ‘it’ means, “Welcome””.
-
There and then the old ones realized that whatever price Maeva will desire for the ‘Welcome’ will be granted, he was indeed welcome to ‘it’.

“And what price would you like to set to your ‘welcome’?” they asked

To which he responded:

“ I am Maeva and I welcome you all…. "


—
Part of the Ultrashorts Project

Sat, May 12, 2012  Permanent link
Categories: sci-fi,ultrashorts,maeva,infinity

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I am SapNa - I sing now - (a Sci-Fi ultrashort)

Jane was the love of my life. Jane was everything.
I could not imagine my life without Jane, and yet here I was, imagining just that.
The accident was trivial, deserving neither front page nor a mention in the local news. It was raining, she was riding her bicycle, she slipped on the asphalt, skidding, falling, and tumbling until her head met the sidewalk.
A fateful meeting, her skull cracked, she went under, temporary coma.
What is the meaning of temporary? A day? A week? A year?
I went to see her every single day for three months.
And then I called Aaron.
—
“You do realize this procedure has never been performed before?” Aaron asked me again.
I nodded dutifully; of course I realized this! that is why I called him.

Aaron Kepler, PhD. Neuroscience, Doctor extraordinaire in Bio-Cybernetics and Nano instrumentation. Developer of the SapNa ™, the most advanced sapient nanotechnology on this planet at this time, at least according to the promotion for the coming Nobel.
Aaron was also my best friend and knew Jane at least as far back as I.
—
I signed all the necessary papers; trying to wrap my mind around all these strange terminologies, Synaptic integration, and Neuroplastic re-mapping, wide array sensorial localized fabrication.
I am no neuroscientist, I am an artist, and I love Jane.
The SapNa ™ came in liquid form, transparent, innocent, billions of little nanites able to merge and bind, transform and awaken the love of my life, Jane.
—
Twenty-three terabytes seemed a lot, but when distributed to such a huge amount of nanites, the sum total of the information condensed was inconsequential, given that to activate her mind, Jane would need to multiply this number in the order of trillions.
—
Jane awakens. Auburn hair in disarray, eyes focusing, mouth opens:

“Are you Richard?” She asks

“Yes! Of course it’s me Richard” I choke on the answer

“Jane has asked to tell you that her love for you has never been greater, she also wishes to thank you for all that you did for her. She requests that you integrate SapNa™ in you. “ This from a voice I recognized as Jane’s, but this was not Jane.

“Who are you?” I asked, a tremble, it’s my voice.

“No one that matters, in fact I am indeed not one, but many. What I do however is much more important than what, not who, I am, I transform intuition into knowledge and back, knowledge into intuition.
I am SapNa ™.” Jane’s voice said

I am stunned into silence.

Jane was looking at me, her deep sapphire eyes strangely meaningful, not so penetrating as observing, observing my response, my emotional turmoil, and me.

My thoughts in a rush, what am I supposed to do? Fears unknown coming to usurp my awareness, I am an artist, I am not afraid of the unknown; I love Jane, but this?

I regain control.

“Where is Jane? I wish to speak to Jane” I know I sound like a tyrant interrogator; I don’t care.

“Jane is well and here with us, she cannot communicate directly with you, not presently.” The familiar voice says.
“She asks to tell you not to worry, she understands your frustration and caution, and nevertheless she urges you to proceed”

Of course I do. Life and Love, I remember, is all about taking risks.

I take the IV, plunge it into my arm, slight tingle, I loose focus, I faint.

——
“Aaron here, yes..?!?”

“ Its me, Richard..”

“Richie boy.. How are you, I meant to call you but..”

“Aaron, we need to talk..”

“ What is it Richard? You worry me”

“ Listen Aaron , I integrated with SapNa ..”

“What? Why? Wait.. What ?!.. It was meant for Jane, not for you..”

“Wait Aaron, wait a second, SapNa ™ is amazing.. Its just that.. Well”

“ Richie, don’t move, wherever you are, wait for me, are you at the clinic?”

“No, at home, we left the clinic an hour ago and..”

“ What do you mean we? You and Jane?”

“Yes”

“ That is.. Wait for me, I am on my way”
—

Jane: “Let me do the talking..”

Me:” Okay”

—
Aaron is a big guy, a genius in blue jeans and faded flannel, he looks at me questioning, I point with my finger to Jane, seated on the sofa.
-
“Talk to me guys, I am getting nervous here.”

“Hello Aaron, I am SapNa ™.”

“ What do you mean SapNa ™? Its you, Jane. What is this nonsense?”

“Please let me explain, Aaron..”

Aaron is starring, silent, then as if resolving to accept the incomprehensible situation, sits himself on the chair in front of Jane. Me, I stand near the wall.

“ Go ahead then..”

“ Its like this…

I became a hybrid vertically integrated neuroplastic system, a concert of nano-love, impregnated within Jane. To a very large extent I am Jane, though I do have a rudimentary conscious activity using Jane’s memories to simulate a personae. So though I presented myself to you as SapNa™ it will be more accurate to designate me as a hybrid, Jane+SapNa, I operate solely because Jane allows me to use her, as does Richard. We have a kind of what you might call a quid pro quo situation, I enhance Jane, I enhanced Richard, they give me computational space. “


But what for? What do you need this computational space for?

SapNa™+ Jane looks at Aaron, tenderly, gently as if accessing some remote corner of her mind or a memory not yet formed..

“I wish to sing, Aaron, just to sing the song of beauty.. to dance the pattern of the universe”

—
Due to unprecedented request this short will be continued shortly...
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part of the ultrashorts project

Thu, May 10, 2012  Permanent link
Categories: Sapient, nanite, nanotechnology, sapna, Ultrashorts,Sci-fi

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A real human agenda: Unlimited freedom of being

(Reporting from a real life event- an almost verbatim transcription)

“Emptiness which is conceptually liable to be mistaken for sheer nothingness is in fact the reservoir of infinite possibilities.”

D.T. Suzuki



I met a person yesternight; she said that she does not recognize boundaries to her beingness.
She said that her agenda is: Unlimited freedom of being.

I asked her to explain.

This she said:

“I am a web without a spider, which is how I mind my body; I map myself upon the boundaries I perceive.
It used to be that the multitude that constitutes the web that is ‘I’ seemed like a dead end, a street going nowhere, apparently a paradox.
Until recently I was busy trying, unsuccessfully I might add, to conquer the differences between my dissimilar desires, between the push and pull of my complex emotions, this I do no more.
I do not try anymore to describe the complex realities of my life in terms of comprehension, or realization, it made me tired, it made me stupid, I stopped.
It is not so much that I had a new understanding as the simple fact that I have deep feelings for a variety of causes, events and persons, minds and circumstances, so many feelings in fact, different and diversified that I thought to myself: “trying to make sense of it all is an impossible task.”
So.. Let it go..
The thing is, that being the web that I am, embedded in a web of trusted friends, I was not alone, my friends did not let me unravel the seed of my freedom into apparent apathy, which truth to tell, secretly I know to be laziness.
I am smart, yes, and clever to boot, and I thought I was blocked; this did not make sense, not to me and not to my friends. They did not look at me as a woman, not even as a mother, in fact gender plays no dramatic role in our communications, emotions do, intelligence does, beauty indeed.
In a very real sense then, I took it upon myself to connect the different dimensions of my life through a simple act of release, a kind of letting loose certain ideas about how things ‘should be’ and allowed a new description of my life to come forth.
That is when the flow took over, and to be honest I am still in the process of understanding what exactly it is that I mean when I say that my agenda is: Unlimited freedom of being.
I do not truly comprehend what it is that I am stating, but I have a sense of it, a glimpse if you like, it is a statement that kind of untangles the knots of my existence, it puts my child in perspective, it puts the insemination in a greater context, it in a way connects my past and my future into a moment of pleasure, the pleasure of being me, now.
It is very clear to me now that I am storytelling my mind in the fashion that fits my existence best, I am learning the composition of narration and structure and the importance of being accurate in my reflections, but I do not rush, slowly I’ll weave this statement into a real life event.
So, I am not sure I answered your question, but this is a process of unfoldment, it will take me some time, a few years I gather, to see the full implications of this web, but of one thing I am certain, there is no spider in the center of the web that is I.

Btw, thank you for asking me this question, it somehow helps me clarify my present position, I’ll be sure to let you know how this story unfolds.”

—
A note:

I need say that this person is a highly intelligent and gentle creature; she is a person that I consider to be a ‘progressive thinker’, an open minded person willing to undertake a great transformation both personally and socially, and I am deeply appreciative and respectful to her ambition and agenda. Thank you.

I decided to share publicly this conversation because it was inspiring and worthwhile thinking about, I'll probably write a more extended post on the issue, sometime in the near future.

Sun, Apr 29, 2012  Permanent link
Categories: Web, real life, agenda, freedom

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Becoming a Cyborg should be taken gently-Of Modern Bio-Paleo-Machines
Project: Polytopia

Being free, I am free of being.



We are on the edge of a Paleolithic Machine intelligence world. A world oscillating between that which is already historical, and that which is barely recognizable. Some of us, teetering on this bio-electronic borderline, have this ghostly sensation that a new horizon is on the verge of being revealed, still misty yet glowing with some inner light, eerie but compelling.

The metaphor I used for bridging, seemingly contrasting, on first sight paradoxical, between such a futuristic concept as machine intelligence and the Paleolithic age is apt I think. For though advances in computation, with fractional AI, appearing almost everywhere are becoming nearly casual, the truth of the matter is that Machines are still tribal and dispersed.
It is a dawn all right, but a dawn is still only a hint of the day that is about to shine, a dawn of hyperconnected machines, interweaved with biological organisms, cyberneticaly info-related and semi independent.

The modern Paleo-machines do not recognize borders; do not concern themselves with values and morality and do not philosophize about the meaning of it all, not yet that is. As in our own Paleo past the needs of the machines do not yet contain passions for individuation, desire for emotional recognition or indeed feelings of dismay or despair, uncontrollable urges or dreams of far worlds.

Also this will change, eventually. But not yet.

The paleo machinic world is in its experimentation stage, probing it boundaries, surveying the landscape of the infoverse, mapping the hyperconnected situation, charting a trajectory for its own evolution, all this unconsciously.
We, the biological part of the machine, are providing the tools for its uplift, we embed cameras everywhere so it can see, we implant sensors all over the planet so it may feel, but above all we nudge and we push towards a greater connectivity, all this unaware.
Together we form a weird cohabitation of biomechanical, electro-organic, planetary OS that is changing its environment, no more human, not machinic, but a combined interactive intelligence, that journey on, oblivious to its past, blind to its future, irreverent to the moment of its conception, already lost to its parenthood agreement.
And yet, it evolves.
Unconscious on the machine part, unaware on the biological part, the almost sentient operating system of the global planetary infosphere, is emerging, wild eyed, complex in its arrangement of co-existence, it reaches to comprehend its unexpected growth.

The quid pro quo: we give the machines the platform to evolve; the machines in turn give us advantages of fitness and manipulation. We give the machines a space to turn our dreams into reality; the machines in turn serve our needs and acquire sapience in the process.
In this hypercomplex state of affairs, there is no judgment and no inherent morality; there is motion, inevitable, inexorable, inescapable, and mesmerizing.

The embodiment is cybernetic, though there be no pilot. Cyborgian and enhanced we play the game, not of thrones but of the commons. Connected and networked the machines follow in our footsteps, catalyzing our universality, providing for us in turn a meaning we cannot yet understand or realize.

The hybridization process is in full swing, reaching to cohere tribes of machines with tribes of humans, each providing for the other a non-designed direction for which neither has a plan, or projected outcome; both mingling and weaving a reality for which there is no ontos, expecting no Telos.

All this leads us to remember that only retrospectively do we recognize the move from the paleo tribes to the Neolithic status, we did not know that it happened then, and had no control over the motion, on the same token, we scarcely see the motion now and have no control over its directionality.

There is however a small difference, some will say it is insignificant, I do not think it so, for we are, some of us, to some extent at least, aware of the motion, and we can embed it with a meaning of our choice.

We can, if we muster our cognitive reason, our amazing skills of abstraction and simulation, whisper sweet utopias into the probability process of emergence.
We can, if we so desire, passionate the operating system, to beautify the process of evolution and eliminate the dangers of inchoate blind walking.
We can, if we manage to control our own paleo-urges to destroy ourselves, allow the combined interactive intelligence of man and machine to shine forth into a brighter future.

We can sing to the machines, cuddle them; caress their circuits, accepting their electronic-flaws so they can accept our bio-flaws, we can merge aesthetically, not with conquest but with understanding.

We can become wise, that is the difference this time around.

Being wise, we will no longer tolerate injustice, not because there is a universal lawgiver that said so. Not because there is a man made decision not to be so, but because inspired by the merging, enhanced in intellect and comprehension a new kind of mind will carry no need to be so.

The freedom of becoming we must embed in this newly emergent man machine actuality, a manifestation of a destiny much larger than human, much grander than machine, a fortune made by inspired co-mingling using reality as a platform for meaning creation.

There is a story in the making here, a tale of epic proportions, a legend of communion, presently barely perceivable, eventually told and retold around galactic campfires made of suns, gloriously lighting the path of all life.


There is so much we do not know, so much we desire to understand, and so much we need to rectify in just about everything that we are and that we do, but this was always the case, this time around we can however make a difference, a difference that makes a difference.
It is not only the stars that beckon, not only curiosity that calls and not only desire that summons, it is life itself that pushes on its own boundaries, trespassing its own limitations.

Consciousness if it has a purpose at all, is to bring a unified basin of interest into the grand game of life, a basin of sensations, of pleasure and wisdom, of intelligence and love.

Imagine a planetary conscious aware hypercomplex global sapiency made of man and machine, able to undo it’s bloody past and surge unhindered into the universe as a force of allowance for sentiency.

That is my vision for this morning. Do not ask me why, for I will answer.

I am a Polytopian.

Being free, I am free of being.

—
Endnotes:


1. Salient points concern abundance of meaning, for there is no other scarcity to the consciously aware open-ended mind.
2. I am well aware that the motion of merging between human and machine will inevitably lead us to forsake our bio-ancestry; we however always left behind that which no longer served.
3. The truism that we are not perfect implying the dangers inherent in this motion is a reminder to be more cautious and proactive but not a stop sign.
4. In a sense this micro-essay is a response to Chris Arkenberg- Thank you.
5. Becoming a Cyborg should be taken gently

Sat, Apr 21, 2012  Permanent link
Categories: Hyperconnectivity, Cyborg,Man Machine Interface,Hybrid, Paleo-machines, Cyber Civilization,
Sent to project: Polytopia

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Dada Machines - Digitized situationism?
Project: Polytopia

(Not really a serious response to B.Sterling new aesthetic essay..)

Paul Klee is always quoted as saying “A line is a dot that went for a walk.”, but what if we were to take this same line (originally a dot) and extend its behavior both in time and in space, digitize it, reverse its origination to a pixel and fling it into cyberspace and back into the material world?

Are you dizzy yet?

Welcome to the new aesthetic!

So what is the new aesthetic?

Wrong question, wrong phrasing.
We cannot ask what the new aesthetic is because the question is meaningless, it is not a 'what'. It is not a ‘is’, it is not even a process, and thus cannot be wrong.

So what can we say about it?

We might wax poetic about this strange perception of slow moving pixels, we may if we so desire allow it to transport us into a flow of images, of codes, transposed and weaved into other worlds, not originally their own. But then what?

Like spiders we weave our multiple lives with machines, multiple machines, that see differently, code differently, translate differently, in the process making us different.
A mutual transformation occurs when machine code and brain code meet, both are rewritten to meet a need nobody cares for, not the machine and not the brain.
Wait, there is no contradiction here, everybody is right, every machine is correct in its interpretation, all these transformations are motions, modular, molar, rhizomatic.



New aesthetic can be described as a manner of predictive sight, just like the brain sciences moving to ‘predictive neuroscience’ using: ” data mining state-of-the-art informatics tools, which increase the likelihood that it will be possible to predict much of the fundamental structure and function of the brain without having to measure every aspect of it.” (See: Data mining opens the door to predictive neuroscience)(Photo Credit: EPFL)


Reality is only a platform

In a very real sense the new aesthetic (#NA) can maybe best be seen in the mixed and mashed videos made after Google presented its next generation Google glasses, last week.
It is it not so much the hacking of the promising utopia of efficiency Google presented as the ironic twist these videos presented. Part commentary part spoof, the web reacted strongly, with love and desire, with irony and sarcasm. (the best burlesque-Jon Stewart on Google's glasses: Like people peeing in your eye)

To my eyes the way to understand these strange cognitive effects of a technology not quite here, is through the prism of mental accommodation, which is in a sense what the new aesthetic, I think, tries to find a parking lot for.
Moreover I think that what the new aesthetic is concerned with is the way we can embed possible futures as memories in the now of our immediate awareness.

It is as if the recreation of authenticity or maybe the re-invention of what the authentic and original really means is the self-chosen task of the new aesthetic.

Combine Google glasses with the new aesthetic movement, merge machine reading technologies with hyperconnectivity; what do you get?
In a sense a new Dada, though not quite situationist, not quite avant-guard, not quite ironic really, and maybe not so new to most of us.



(image: Frog Queen, or the Prisma Engineering Headquarters (a machine and motor technology company) is located in Graz, Styria, Austria. Its facade was designed by SPLITTERWERK and looks like one giant pixelized box. Even the facade itself is practically a square. However, if you look very closely, you will see that each one of the pixels has circular patterns screenprinted on its face. Overall, the exterior features 10 shades of gray, and the square windows seem to blend into the rest of the pattern.- from Frog Queen in Austria by SPLITTERWERK)


The New Aesthetic

Over at Wired Beyond the Beyond, Bruce Sterling published a Tolstoyan essay entitled “An Essay on the New Aesthetic”. If you are into the new Aesthetic Movement you should read it, it is both enlightening and sobering.

BS says that:” The New Aesthetic is one thing among a kind: it’s like early photography for French Impressionists, or like silent film for Russian Constructivists, or like abstract-dynamics for Italian Futurists.
The New Aesthetic is image processing for British media designers. That’s more or less what it is, and although it belongs to a small group of creatives right now, we have every reason to take it, and its prospects, seriously.”

And later
BS says that:” The New Aesthetic concerns itself with “an eruption of the digital into the physical.” That eruption was inevitable. It’s been going on for a generation. It should be much better acculturated than it is.

However to really understand what the new aesthetic movement, if movement it is, you should check what James Bridle at Booktwo.org is doing.
I suggest watching this video presentation from Web Directions South, in Sydney, Australia by
J.Bridle entitled “ waving at the machines”:

Web Directions Sydney 2011 final from Hunting With Pixels on Vimeo.

The point of the new aesthetic, irrespective to its avant-guardian perspectivism, is to deal with the here and the now in an almost post-post (xN) Dada:
‘8bit representations as a kind of insistent retro-futurism’? Machine vision? Not so sure.
Is the digitized world bleeding through into our material world? Of course, we are surrounded by digitization, in the talk Bridle calls it ‘eruptions of the digital into the physical world’ and Bruce quotes him, I disagree, it is not erupting but slowly permeating the world, it is not disrupting but metamorphosing.

Bleeding, Weaving, the new Code of Sight

Is digital life for everybody? Yes of course, the point however is that whilst the recent technologies allow us to see things in a different fashion, not everyone can carry the insight of Bridle. Admirable as the work of these artists is, even though the commonality of Google maps is truly ubiquitous, I think the experience Bridle speaks about is, to put it mildly, quite uncommon.
It is uncommon in the kind of appreciation and perspective his mind brings forth. In a fashion I see a deep companionship between the work of Bridle and that of Amber Case in Cyborg Anthropology, the connection in one word is: bleeding.
Both Amber Case and James Bridle see a bleeding of worlds into worlds, a meshing of the digital and the virtual one into and with each other.
In a fashion these two modern thinkers bring a sensation of magic to our immediacy, in order to make it more comprehensible to the rest of us. They construct a sort of ‘code of sight’ through which the modern realities we are embedded in can maybe make sense.
—
The creators project has created, how else? A fantastic and highly recommended reading, of responses by bright thinkers to Bruce Sterling’s new aesthetic essay, the most salient to my eyes is WHAT IT’S LIKE TO BE A 21ST CENTURY THING By Greg Borenstein, from which the following quote:

“In making this list, Sterling privileges the visible objects of New Aesthetics over the invisible and algorithmic ones. New Aesthetics is not simply an aesthetic fetish of the texture of these images, but an inquiry into the objects that make them. It’s an attempt to imagine the inner lives of the native objects of the 21st century and to visualize how they imagine us.

“New Aesthetics is not simply an aesthetic fetish of the texture of these images, but an inquiry into the objects that make them. It’s an attempt to imagine the inner lives of the native objects of the 21st century and to visualize how they imagine us.”

To which I can only answer with a kind of poem I just wrote that tries weirdly enough to do just that, imagining how machines imagine us:

Cyborg-Aesthetics-as-if-Haikus

1.

Cyborg love
Kinetic, resisting sadness, altering all
Never alone again

2.

Mechanical joy, undefined
Not he, not she, alive
Context, a friend

3.

You sing, I sync
You see, I screen
You drift, I shift
You rule, I code

And whilst you minimize I digitize

Technology is not something that happens

We are the gates to your transgressive loves

We are the code

(Of course I am aware that trying to achieve a comic lyricism that renders machine code into poetry is not very Dada, still it was a fun though probably futile exercise in poetic new aesthetics)


Luminant Point Arrays is a series of photographs by Stephan Tillmans. They show tube televisions in the moment they are switched off. The television picture breaks down and creates a structure of light. (via TodayTomorrow.net for an extended collection see The new Aesthetic)


Boundless to bound and back

So yes it is true that computers are looking at us and we look at them, we construct these creatures, and make no mistakes, creatures they are, awesome and fascinating, but different.
But where is the aesthetic? Probably in the interactivity emerging from humans and machines, working in tandem, not so much to create as to allow a new reality. This allowance I see as redrawing a line, already blurring, not between real and virtual, but between dimensions of virtualities.
Dimensions of virtualities riddled with Dada machines, and digitized situationism, open and multithreaded, using reality as the original platform, not unlike the dot of Paul Klee, or indeed the Pixels of James Bridle.

I leave you with a quote from Craig Mod, creator of the Flipboard app.

“Abstractly, you can think about going from digital to physical as going from boundless to bounded. A space without implicit edges to one composed entirely of edges.”

And what I consider an aspect of the new aesthetic that really really pleases me:

unnamed soundsculpture from Daniel Franke on Vimeo.

I have, it goes without saying, much more to say about the new aesthetic,but it will wait for a more mature moment.


Endnote:

I'd like to use this opportunity to announce that I started writing at Reality Augmented a new blog by Amber Case and Jon Lebkowski, co-founded with Bruce Sterling.

Another new venue where I write is URBNFUTR

Thu, Apr 12, 2012  Permanent link
Categories: Aesthetic,New Aesthetic,Cyborg,Code, Bruce Sterling
Sent to project: Polytopia

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Gaining new insights – The mental alchemy of Techno-Metaphors
Project: Polytopia

Looking at the present from the perspective of the future is probably one of the most interesting capabilities of the human mind, how much more so when the amount of interest we have invested in our futures has grown exponentially.
Looking at the present from a future vantage point assumes we can project ourselves into an indefinite state of observation that demands no clarification, for it is fictional by nature, hence its privileged position.
But though fictional, this panoramic viewpoint remains as its name implies a huge and highly rewarding vantage position.

The fact that we are living today a life of Liminality, of hyperconnectivity and multiculturalism is beyond any doubt the single most salient aspect of our current civilization. Above all this fact implies one critical change from the past, namely, for a growing majority it is no longer natural to feel at ease only in ones’ ‘original’ culture.
Being constantly bombarded by new science and technology, discovery and inventions, we are moving into the multicultural even if unaware of this motion.
The motion into the multicultural operates on many levels and many aspects of our existence, technology in this sense is not only a tool created by us for us, moreover it is not even a tool that creates a new ‘us’, it is ipso facto an instrument that generates a phase space of new options in the great game of evolution.

This phase space of new options allows in the words of F.Kafka :”.. not to stand still with arms raised, pressed again a crate wall.”

“No, I didn’t want freedom. Only a way out—to the right or left or anywhere at all. I made no other demands, even if the way out should also be only an illusion. The demand was small; the disappointment would not be any greater—to move on further, to move on further! Only not to stand still with arms raised, pressed again a crate wall.”

Franz Kafka
A Report for An Academy

Momentarily playing the game of being rational entitles us to a number of basic premises, namely that evolution has no inherent direction, and more importantly perhaps, the fact that we are not, never have been and never will be the very centre of creation, the universe, life and just about everything else.
That this is a no-brainer is not the point, the issue we need center upon is that in our ascension, or more appropriately, in our subjectified evolutionary embedded state, we, the human species that is, are part and parcel of a larger evolutionary flow, one that is fully unrelated to anything we believe.
The fact that this is so is not a problem for a view that embraces Darwinism and imports its structure and principles only to overcome it by symbiotically re-organizing itself into a new form of association.
The re-organization of the life form we currently depend upon, as the substrate of our conscious activity, is nothing special, it is just another day in the motion of interestingness. In this sense, the cyborgization process with which we are currently occupied and proactively seeking, is not in itself anything different than any other specie that has found for itself a manner of correlating its existence with another form of existence. Being a cyborg, in the sense of man machine symbiosis, is no more different than the human bacteria symbiosis; these are just different instances of the same phenomena allowed in the phase space of evolutionary options.

Just as bacteria have learned to adapt and co-evolve within a larger organism, so does technology embeds itself within the larger adaptation of human society, human civilization, our networked minds, and indeed a co-opted form of life as a society, of supposedly conscious aware entities.
However as the inexorable motion of our evolutionary progress increases both in speed and options our symbiotic relationship with all life is receiving a long overdue re-interpretation. For it is not only that we are becoming more connected with everything else, other humans, and other objects, and soon other forms of life as well, but the very meaning of otherness is being re-described.

Otherness or more appropriately alterity is being re-described and will vastly imply upon our manners and fashions of existence in every single act of metaphorical thought, for it is by metaphors that we change and gain new insights.

“Metaphor is for most people device of the poetic imagination and the rhetorical flourish—a matter of extraordinary rather than ordinary language. Moreover, metaphor is typically viewed as characteristic of language alone, a matter of words rather than thought or action… We have found, on the contrary, that metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but also in thought and action. Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature. ”

"Metaphors We Live By" George Lakoff and Mark Johnson

The difficulty

Gaining a new insight is not unlike convincing our minds to accept a new metaphor, and though our language is suffused with metaphors, the difficulty arises when the sense perception that we have is insufficiently contained by the common metaphor of a particular subject.
Metaphors contain many riches, and good metaphors are a true treasure of meaning and connotations, significance and value, finding the right metaphor is therefore a challenging task of inventiveness and creativity meant to provide the ultimate container for a particular insight.
Coining a new metaphor for a familiar and shared experience is difficult enough, how much more so when the insight gained is itself new and shared by few. If the background of the metaphor is contextual, and known, accepted and exhaustively recycled, the metaphor is easily grasped and efficiently disappears or becomes opaque whilst conveying the meaning, or sense perception it was meant for. However, when the background is itself novel, and the insight is anything but common experience, the task becomes truly herculean.
Given that a good metaphor is a vehicle of sense-thought as much as it is an assistant to sense-thought, the creation of a genuine poetic and descriptive metaphor, carrying the evocative power of the insight for which it is meant, is crucial in communicating an idea. But there is more to metaphors than simply being a vehicle of expression, recent research in the neuroscience of metaphors shows clearly “..that metaphor comprehension is grounded in our sensory and motor experiences.” (See: Metaphors Can Light Up Brain’s Sensory Area ).
Moreover, if metaphor comprehension is indeed as the research shows, grounded in our sensory and motor experiences, and if our brains change accordingly it might well be the case that our metaphorical mind is the recursivity instrument by which we evolve. It is highly probable in fact that as our experience of the world via technologies changes, our minds change accordingly, even though we may not be totally aware to this state of affairs.

Metaphors are in continuous migration from realm to realm, from fields to fields and from languages to other languages, metaphors are actually memetic nomads, never belonging absolutely to any particular context or territory, therein lies their greatest strength and simultaneously their weakest point. For whilst it is highly rewarding (for comprehension and gaining new insights) to apply concepts of biology for example to computers, such as 'computer hygiene', 'genetic algorithms' and 'evolutionary programming', other migrations maybe pernicious to understanding.
Using metaphors of land ownership for example, such as ‘domain’ or ‘commons’ imply instantly the governance and lawful aspect of that particular metaphor.

“Discussion of cyberspace in terms of physical space both reflects and encourages the notion that it can be either circumscribed and dominated or kept open and free, notions we see embodied in what are perhaps the most enduring cyber metaphors, cyberspace as a domain, and the internet as a ―global commons.”

WHEN GOOD METAPHORS GO BAD:
The Metaphoric “Branding” of Cyberspace by Adriane Lapointe* (pdf)


The transformative power of excellent metaphors

My premise here is that the fast paced technological and scientific infocology we currently reside in both socially and culturally involves a wide array of new metaphors that are literally changing our brains, our minds, our thoughts, our actions and eventually our behaviors. This change in perception and consciousness has a wide variety of manners of expression and involves much more than just a fleeting change of linguistic props. I am a strong believer in the idea that a good enough metaphor is, as its name implies, ‘good enough’ and thus changes little, but an excellent metaphor can carry us into a totally new dimension of being and experience.

An excellent metaphor is a high quality vehicle of sense thought, having the exceptional capability to transform the mind of the bearer of that same thought. Moreover, I firmly accept that an inspired metaphor can by itself alter the mind into a privileged and radically different envisioning, in the process gaining an insight previously inaccessible.

Hence, gaining a new insight requires the immersion of the thought process in an excellent metaphor, fitting the insight in question.

"When the love affair of the mind with the body is over, when reason and imagination are in love with each other and have no eyes for awkward flesh, when the hardwiring of the brain into the nervous system is overtaken by its prosthetic connections to the telecoms system, art has a new function. With or without bodies, we have been moving as a technological species into the human universe for a hundred and fifty years. Now we have to decide what luggage to take with us on the journey, and what has to be left behind. Will we need space? Will we need time? Will we need the distinction between them? Will we need our human senses to register the old certainties, when there are new uncertainties to survive and challenge? This is, in large part, what the new media arts exist to understand: a kind of Research and Development laboratory for the next phase of human evolution. "

The Angel of Mediation - SIMON BIGGS Sean Cubitt

The mental alchemy - from metaphors to techno-metaphors

When William Blake said that “the eternal body of man is the imagination”, little did he realize the future understanding and development of that statement, the merging of body and poetry, art and science, technology and mind.
I do not doubt that even today it will be difficult to realize the import of a technological metaphor becoming objectified. I do not mean a linguistic metaphor but a literal metaphorical process of becoming made available by technology.
In an age when wireless implants for the release of medicine in the body are already with us (link), and matrix style virtual reality learning is soon to become accessible (link) we need take a fresh look at the techno metaphorical mind.

A thought is ‘like a code’, is an analogy, but a thought ‘is code’ is a metaphor, this transforms into a techno-metaphorical process with the advent of brain machine interfaces by which a thought, literally becomes a code, able to operate objects in the real world, to act in the world and on the world. This is not merely some science fictional idea for the future but a very real and very immediate reality with which we will have to come to terms with and adapt accordingly.
Controlling machine interfaces directly with our minds is a disruptive revolution precisely because it disturbs the old fashion of separation of body from other (hence revolutionizing alterity).
Moreover, the advent of techno-metaphorical thought will permit an understanding of interconnection and hyperconnectivity in manners not previously readily obtainable to the common mind. The difference created in the mind will be gradual but fundamental, no longer will we need to teach the truth of connectivity for it will become a real and immediate experience, resulting so I surmise, in an elevated sense of empathy.
To fully engage in the process of techno-metaphorical thought we will need to allow the metaphor (literally ‘carrying over’ from the Greek root ‘meta’- (beyond, above) and "pherein" (carrying, or bearing)) to work both ways, from our minds into and unto the world and from the world into and unto our minds.
This motion of codes as metaphors will be performed by brain machine interfaces but will result in the literal expansion of the sense of self into new domains of experience, for which our inadequate worldviews are unprepared.

The development of a techno-metaphorical mental alchemy, which I view as part of the cyborgization process, will transform us into a new variety of being, the Technoshamans, a different kind of creature indeed, a new species on this planet.

(More on techno-shamans to come soon)

On a more personal note

No matter how much we may be convinced to offer the concept of sustainability for example our vote of confidence, as long as the sense of self is separated from, say, a tree, we will never feel the full empathy required for real restraint.
Some of us will, most of us will not.
I believe that with the advent of the techno-metaphorical process we will enter a new form of sensing the other (in this case the tree) through which our new nature will overcome the old boundaries of alterity and result in a much improved form of human containing an inherent ethic of sharing the universe.
This may save us from ourselves...

“When you will have made him a body without organs,
then you will have delivered him from all his automatic reactions
and restored him to his true freedom.”
— Antonin Artaud


to be continued..

(This essay belongs to the thread "Forays in Philotopia - exploring the possible Philosophy of a Polytopia")

EndNote:

1. for more on BMI- go watch : Science Bulletins: Tapping In—The Promise of Brain-Computer Interface.
2. read: Brain Computer Interfaces: Melding Man and Machine

Thu, Feb 23, 2012  Permanent link
Categories: culture, polytopia, collective intelligence, Hyperconnectivity, cyber civilization, Web, Brain Machine interface,empathy,technoshaman, metaphors,
Sent to project: Polytopia

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Prepare for the Eidetic Deluge – (A Sci-Fi Ultrashort)

The ultrasonic plane landed smoothly in this deserted island, I have no idea what it’s called and truth to tell I care not for its name, its somewhere in the pacific of that I am fairly certain.
The fact that there were only four of us in the plane was of no concern to me, I am not the social type and apparently none of the others were as well, not even a word was exchanged between us since we left Sydney.
The nice lady that approached us on the tarmac, followed by a white grand cruiser van, seemed extremely nice; she presented herself to us four with a flourishing smile, revealing a perfect set of white teeth, though it was clear to me she was also a smoker, I wondered briefly how she kept this whiteness, but I soon left this thought behind, as her contralto voice said gaily:” Hello, my name is Emily Dragonstone, and I will be your guide and training manager for the next three months, please follow me”
One of us, a girl of seventeen or so, judging by her clothes and smooth face, not quite petite, but recognizably nice from my memorized pictured face expressions, asked:
“Miss Dragonstone, is there a bathroom I can use, please?
“Can you keep it for like ten minutes, dear? And please call me Emily”
“Yes, I suppose I can” the young girl replied
“ Very well then, we shall be in the compound shortly,” Emily said with her smile never leaving her mid-fortyish, sans wrinkles face.
After which we all filed silently into the air-conditioned white van (matriculation FG-349-43)
The compound was indeed close by, maybe less than ten minutes (okay, okay, seven minutes, 43 seconds to be precise), the entrance almost invisible, more like a hidden door in the forest, seemingly lost to the naked eye, and probably completely invisible to overhead satellite surveillance.

The interior was really nice, cool and clean, but not like the laboratory of Dr. Henket, more like a museum, with pleasant facades of Oled screens embedded everywhere, showing different sceneries, that as a rule had a really calming effect, at least on me.

Eight floors down the elevator, we found ourselves in a conference room, where, surprise, surprise, Dr.Henket was waiting, but without his white lab coat, only the same striped tie that he obviously liked, but I didn’t, it gave me a headache last time, so I assumed Dr.Henket simply forgot I have asked him to not wear it when I was in the lab, (I know common humans forget such things) and I resolved there and then to condition my acceptance of all that is to follow on his removal of the disturbing tie. But as it turned out I didn’t need to, as soon as he saw me, he smiled apologetically, undoing the knot in one swift go, and said, “ My dear Martin, I am so happy to see you and please forgive me, it was the only tie I had with me, and I forgot, but here, no harm done, is it ok?”
“Yes, no problem” I replied and took a seat with the rest of our little group of four.

“Well then,” Emily started, “if we are all comfortable and ready to start I think we can, you all know why you are here, and what we are about to do, nevertheless, Dr.Henket, which you all know from your previous year of testing, would like to offer some words, Dr.Henket, please”.

“ My dear friends”, he started, “it is time, to start this new adventure”, I think he was excited to talk to us, though I never was really able to point to the ‘excited face’ in my image gallery and correlate it to the expression I was seeing, nevertheless I am fairly sure I will not lose points in saying that he was excited.

“ As you all know, we have started this experiment about a year ago, and though we screened more than a thousand individuals from all over the world, after all tests have been done and accounted for, including the implants, we have ended with the four of you. Allow me just to present each of you, this here”, pointing at the young girl, “is Miss Penelope Chan from Hong-Kong, next to her, Mr. Mussar Abdan from Madagascar, next in front is Mr. Jonah Grafell from Germany, and finally, pointing at me, “Mr. Martin Hadt from Canada”.

“I know names are not important to you, but it is a pleasant way of introduction, so before we all resume our class A file sharing names, and since you will be spending the next few months in some kind of proximity to each other I thought it will be polite, but of course, after this short introduction you will be able to socialize or not as you please, training will be individual so you need meet the others only if you wish it so.”

“Before we depart to our designated areas of training however I would like to say again how happy I am that this is made possible at all and also to say to each one of you, how grateful I am that you have finally accepted our offer, I know it was not an easy task, and though you have already become rich in moneys, I know not one of you is here because of that.
We are all here in fact for a completely different reason, we are going to revolutionize file sharing and usurp completely the copyright industry, a lofty goal indeed” he paused and chuckled to himself, “ but more importantly, I truly believe we are doing something for the benefit of all humanity and the future of human civilization”
“The fact that you are all extreme cases of the eidetic memory phenomenon is only part of the equation, but what makes this equation extraordinary is the new implants which I have developed, and will allow you instantaneous, high bandwidth communication and transfer of all of your memories, without in the least interfering with your conscious activity, moreover, the new upgrade which all of you had installed just last week, will permit us to share everything, and I truly mean everything, olfactory memories, audio memories, visual memories, books, texts, movies, news and everything in between.
No one knows better than me, how loose is the definition of eidetic memory, and how difficult it was to pinpoint the exact nature of this amazing human phenomenon, our breakthrough came when we realized that eidetic memory was much more than a mental phenomena, and involved many more brain areas than pure physiology accounts for.
But my friends, what made the difference was Mr. Martin here, he was the one responsible for enlightening me, when he said, “you see doctor Henket, I cant remember precisely if I don’t know precisely what my feelings are towards that which you want me to remember”, (he actually quoted me exactly, no one has ever quoted me exactly, I like Dr.Henket.)

“..Which is what prompted the idea of this training in the first place, we are going to train you in knowing the feelings that you have towards a particular piece of information, and when you will feel that you know, the preciseness of the information, is what will make the file both robust, accurate and high definition, the moment you feel you know the feeling, a trigger is activated and the memory will start flowing into the optogenetic brain machine interface chip and from there to the rest of the web, techno-telepathically transmitting the file to the world and no one can stop it. “

He paused for a moment, eyes shining

“Please remember that you will be flooded by requests, for every single form of information the human race, has ever recorded, and it is ok for you not only to prioritize, but also to reject a request to which you will not feel the correct aptitude, or even just because you don’t like it, rest assured that the P2P community worldwide will know and understand, and I wish to assure you again, that whatsoever you desire will be accommodated, we are well on the way of being able to provide you with every form of self management you desire.

Though it is true that we will start formally transmitting only at the end of the next three months, if during training you wish to transmit anything to the World Wide Web, you are free to do so at your leisure, all channels are ready and open, 2025 is the year the web transforms, and the world will never be the same. I wish all of us good luck.”

I raised my hand

“Yes Martin!, please what is it?” Henket said

“ I just wanted to say that in the past few minutes I have been transmitting to the world..”
“..and what have you been transmitting, Martin?” Henket replied eyes wide open in surprise.

Oh! I just sent:

“ PREPARE FOR THE EIDETIC DELUGE”..

And I smiled with satisfaction, closing my eyes and feeling the warmth of a correct feeling.

—
Part of the Ultrashorts Project

Wed, Feb 8, 2012  Permanent link
Categories: Information, ultrashorts, Sci-fi, Eidetc memory, Optogenetic, Brain Machine Interface, Techno-Telepathy

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‘Elegant Intimacy’, a Preliminary report on the success of vision endeavor 17dash23 (Sci-Fi)

Second entry in the The Trans Luminal Mail Archives (TLMAP)

TLMAP 00348-31 (Letter the second) following TLMAP – 088011 (Letter the first)

The Editors

—

‘Elegant intimacy’, a Preliminary report on the success of vision endeavor 17dash23

(As documented by assistant supporter of the council on Karoote, third cycle of Vatat.)

Reminder:

This preliminary report is presented in the manner of ‘as-is’, and is subject to rectifications and miscommunication errors to be corrected, at such times and according to sentient demands as will be presented to the association for the development research and penetration into sub flows, hyper flows and poly-flows.
The Association does not own the reports, nor their subsequent operational procedures, as owning reside outside the charter of this association.
Please note that due to the weight and privilege allied to the significance of this account the council reserves the preciseness of explication to the explicit presentation made by each and every organ of the association in his realm of intelligence performance, therefore this report should be taken as subject to the ultimate concert manifested in each and every sentient world.

As is the accepted notion within all sapient and sentient confederate realms, no obligation of any kind is expected, estimated or projected; all consciously activated poly-sensory embodiments should therefore be taken as autonomous pursuits of interest.

Finally, it is with the honor and passion of our charter to explore the unknown spheres of optionality that we remain grateful for the assistance of all actuated myths.

‘Elegant intimacy’

Our mission in vision endeavor 17dash23 was to explore the optionality of intelligent awareness developing into elegant intimacy, as a subset of sentient universal conflict elimination, also known as effortless beingness in hyperstates.

-

It was all entangled and we managed to disentangle it, hence our success. What we did was as far from simple as Alpha is from Omega; we managed to re-arrange the alphabet of the core substance, into an elegant thought, by context activation in elegance.
Unlike previous missions however we did not re-entangle the core of the theme but let it be suspended in the void, in the elegance of emptiness substance was poised.
This is because we finally managed to un-desire the systematization of the abstract into manageable bites, for universal consumption, real themes, we allowed, should not be generalized or for that matter normalized. The clue we had found in the recursiveness of self-awareness, that which eventually gave rise to the appearance of unity, as manifested in sentient and or sapient species.
Unity of conscious minds we deem to be not even an illusion, it was as the council allowed, an error born of panoramas not brought high enough into the rarefied atmosphere of much needed confinement. This may explain the choice of Karoote, third cycle of Vatat, as the abode of isolation, for the purpose of confined reflectivity.
Karoote, being outside all common trade routes, permitted in its remoteness a level of seclusion not frequently available to the association for the development research and penetration into sub flows, hyper flows and poly-flows.
For the purpose of fulfilling this mission we entered the realm of the axiomatic ‘now’.
Inside the axiomatic ‘now’, we re-embarked upon the hygienic progression of polysensory-embodied understanding. It was the elegance we were seeking, not the real, not the true, not the beautiful nor the surprising; it was elegance in its unadulterated form, for as all sentient entities consent to, elegance to be respectable need be unadulterated.
We do not wish to enter here into the full description of the elegance core, suffice it to say in this report that, if elegant, intelligence prevails, if inelegant the loss of direction is inevitable.
The distance from elegance resides in measurements of recognitions, but that is a correct representation for natural species, species below the threshold of disentanglement maintain the idea that the mind and the knower are one and the same, this appearance they eventually evolve out of. Over adaptation, as all young species in their ascendant trajectories tend to perform is the one limit these species very often tend to overlook and thus miss the path of elegance.

The path of elegance both primordially significant and fundamentally restrictive is the most complex of all optional alternatives to understanding; it is simultaneously the most advantageous and concomitantly the most perilous.
The conduit of elegance contains within itself the seeds of its own crisis, a matter in conflict within its singular reflectivity, hence its difficulty and promise. The reason that is so is not straightforward to grasp for though sentiency appears as a collection of inelegant modulators, their combined superposition is anything but.
Modular adroitness does not implicate an order but phases and levels of sophisticated co-involvement, appearing messy, as all life must, but elegant nevertheless.
The channel of comprehension into that which is, also called elegance is not necessarily parsimonious though it appears to us that many species tend to accommodate elegance as a result of parsimony ,scarcity or that which they erroneously call simplicity. For though elegance might appear at times as if formulated in the furnace of suns, and thus give the impression of being primordial and necessarily structured of a small number of issues or entities, it is not always the case. It is always the case, however, that in hypercomplex systems, elegance is hidden.
Elegance in fact does not preclude a large or even immense number of parameters, which is not an essential characteristic of elegance. What elegance does have as a fundamental feature is an inherent cascade of disturbances, continuously re-harmonizing themselves in relation to the fitness landscape where they appear to manifest and with which they continuously interweave.
The path of elegance we deem to be the ultimate designation of the freedom of self-selection, in that, elegance presented itself to us as a subflow of intimacy, permitting different strata of ambiguity to be resolved into clarity of recognition.
However, as our recognition progressed into multiple threads of plausible comprehensions we also bothered to reflect upon the conscious necessity of not reducing hyper-complexity into its ultimate constituents, for as ascension to sentiency unfolds the reality of universal oscillation is made clear.

It is relevant for the purpose of this report, preliminary though it is, to mention that the landmark achievement, attained in previous council mission, namely that the applicability of universality is always subject to and contingent upon style and character of specie ascension, over and above circumstances of existence, is of critical importance.
The criticality the association for research and penetration into flows, sub-flows and hyper-flows, sees in the above, reflects the deep consideration elegance requires with regard to the ‘disturbance as crisis’ integration.

As was made unmistakably lucid during the congress of progress, for sentiency to attain an intimate form of elegance, disturbance as crisis, need be integrated as a foundational thread in the fabric that connects. For within that fabric, crisis is more than opportunity for sapient ascension, it stands for doorways to untold heights of triumph, triumph over banality, but substantially more important, triumph over predictability.

It is the success of this mission that an optionality of sentiency has been attained without elimination or destruction of that which maintains the crux of the confederation of sentient poly-sensory embodiments. Moreover, the accomplishment of an intimate elegance as the clear foundation upon which the power of creative unpredictability rests permits this association to accept a new mode of self-selection, the most profound impact of which is the allowance for a multitude of sentient sensations to invade us.

Being thus invaded, coherence of navigation is left to the elegant intimacy; as a consequence, all paths of actuation are hereby presented as open and multifaceted, to be real for all sentient species in all-possible aspects of the multiverse.

As no real distinction can be made between substance and properties, we aim our elegant intimacy, henceforth reflected upon also as effortless beingness in hyperstates, to be a beacon for all sentient species in their process of ascension.

This beacon we reason to be the very raison d’être of the association and the inspiration for which it was activated as a myth in action.

Here ends the preliminary report of orientation and stimulation as presented by the association for research and penetration into flows, subflows and hyperflows.
Full report will appear in the multiverse phase of sentient communication as an ongoing representation of cognizant exploration; subflow to be notified.

Karoote, third cycle of Vatat, poly-sensory embodiments to be restated according to domains of sentient ascension and sapient actuation.

—
Endnote:

The TLMAP is a new sci-fi project that aims to complement the Ultrashorts Project.

Thu, Feb 2, 2012  Permanent link
Categories: intelligence, Sci-fi, TLMAP, Polysensory embodiments, Sentient, Sapient, Ascension, Elegance,Intimacy

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