Amidst the attention given to the sciences as how they can lead to the cure of all diseases and daily problems of mankind, I believe that the biggest breakthrough will be the realization that the arts, which are conventionally considered ‘useless,’ will be recognized as the whole reason why we ever try to live longer or live more prosperously.

—John Maeda via The universe will fly like a bird

The amazing thing about the singularity, the Story of the singularity that is, is the way it affects us. When projecting it on the line of our event horizon, the singularity is a story that brings us into deconstruction and moves us into composing ourselves anew. —Xaos

The Personal Genome Project (P.G.P.) has created a public database that will contain the genomes and traits of 100,000 people. Tapping the magic of crowd sourcing that gave us Wikipedia and Google rankings, the project seeks to engage geneticists in a worldwide effort to sift through the genetic and environmental predictors of medical, physical and behavioral traits.

Pin-Yin Shi Shi Zao Ying Xiong!

To rid ourselves from ignorance we need of necessity understand our minds, our brains and the neurological strata that underlie all that we perceive, know, think, feel, emote and so on. We need to understand how our brains and consequently our minds have been shaped by the blind forces of evolution that are both guiding and limiting human intelligence and its manifests. As the understanding of our own minds expands, the doors to self guided conscious evolution open. A profound human transformation becomes viable. From Pin-Yin Shi Shi Zao Ying Xiong! (part 3)

Only on condition of a radical widening of definition will it be possible for art and activities related to art to provide evidence that art is now the only evolutionary-revolutionary power...to dismantle in order to build a social organism as a work of art.

→ Joseph Beuys via meganmay’s A Mutant Manifesto

All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.

→ Arthur Schopenhauer

As our minds will attain the non-linear associative powers that will do away with the static mold of analog information we will finally break through the speed barrier of thought.

— rene: Beyond the speed of thought

The pattern of our event of self-reflection as humans — the core approximating itself within continuous metamorphosis — is a vision in itself. And it is always navigating in search of an activating story, the one that connects the dots... Read more

To add a physical element, the researchers have each person squeeze the other’s hand, as if in a handshake. Now the subject can see and “feel” the new body. In a matter of seconds, the illusion is complete. In a series of studies, using mannequins and stroking both bodies’ bellies simultaneously, the Karolinska researchers have found that men and women say they not only feel they have taken on the new body, but also unconsciously cringe when it is poked or threatened. Read more

From Montevideo (part 2) from Xaos:

I live on Earth at present, and I don't know what I am.
I know that I am not
a category. I am not
a thing — a noun.
I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process — an
integral function of
the universe.

— R. Buckminster Fuller

...the dualistic mindset that something is either good or bad... is a Neolithic invention

—Carel

From Rene’s SC (the emergence of):
Nobody on this site understands the mandate to articulate the Humanities of the Future better than Spaceweaver, who weighs in on Connor’s post with one of his finely calibrated arguments, offering that “the future of human civilization is embedded in an ever increasing complexity,” and therefore our best bet may be “to figure out how to bring about a collective consciousness that will become an open-ended platform for growth and transformation.” Read more...

The truth is that one
is a futurist at one’s own peril ...

In a comment from Rene: ... no matter how often we refer to the accelerated evolution inferred by phenomena like the Singularity etc, the amount of lag time even the most critically important ideas are faced with in this society never ceases to amaze. More

To the citizens’ alarm, Permutation City and eventually the entire processor-network begins to collapse into nothingness. It is no longer necessary to the existence of the Autoverse; there is a better solution that has superseded it, rendering the processor network literally nonexistent. This is a kind of reverse ontological argument: rather than the subjective, conscious necessity of God virtually creating him, his non-necessity destroys him.

...how exactly can we imminently actualize this very deep and all-encompassing conceptual transformation before the snowball effect towards total hell becomes too strong for us to do anything at all?

From dmitridb

The Singularity Indeed Has Already Happened

From Montevideo by Xaos:
The amazing thing about the singularity, the Story of the singularity that is, is the way it affects us. When projecting it on the line of our event horizon, the singularity is a story that brings us into deconstruction and moves us into composing ourselves anew. The human today lives in a radical time, actually an extremely radical time; the future is rushing at us, proposing for the first time the idea and reality of a better platform, distinctively different from the imperfect outcome of natural selection. Read more

Comment from Rene, in Xárene's Social Networking Tools and our Future Society:
... the typical sci-fi interpretation that technology is out to annihilate the flesh is just another paranoid expression of Western culture’s obsessive preoccupation with the mind-body split. What we really seem to be after is the opening up of additional channels for a heightened sensory perception that will allow us to explore the full bandwidth of our evolutionary potential.

“I want to assassinate painting,” Joan Miró is reported to have said, in 1927. Four years later, the Catalan modern master elaborated, in an interview: “I intend to destroy, destroy everything that exists in painting. I have utter contempt for painting.” (He is quoted, along similar lines, as having put the Cubists on notice: “I will break their guitar.”) More...

Kasparov vs R13 — computer drawing

From Art from Code

Dataisnature: "The relationship between textiles and computers is explicit – the punched paper cards used to program early computers are direct descendents of similar cards used to program Jacquard looms during the height of the industrial revolution, More so terms like ‘interlaced’ (among other synonyms) which describe the way pixels are weaved onto the screen, only tighten this relationship." more...

Brainforest — Gerda Steiner & Jörg Lenzlinger

Says Moonriver: "Developed by Dr. Harold Edgerton in the 1940s, the Rapatronic photographic technique allowed very early times in a nuclear explosion’s fireball growth to be recorded on film. The exposures were often as short as 10 nanoseconds, and each Rapatronic camera would take exactly one photograph.

Fischer, Maus — Sound sculpture, inspired by and derived from a musical piece by Frans de Waard. It is characterized by 12 musical motives, which appear in an almost linear succession.

“Plot of 1 second of human brain (EEG) activity. this work is part of a project called Sounds Of Complexity.” (Moonriver, Dataisnature)

How Technology "Reveals" the World
“For man, as Julian Huxley observes, unlike merely biological creatures, possesses an apparatus of transmission and transformation based on his power to store experience. And his power to store, as in language itself, is also a means of transformation of experience.”
Marshall Mcluhan, Understanding Media

Polytopia → The human species is rapidly and indisputably moving towards the technological singularity. The cadence of the flow of information and innovation in the infoverse demands a response. As hyperconnectivity increases, our minds are becoming progressively more coupled and cybernetically joined. Go to project →

We need a collective intelligence of a kind that may not have characterized the human species in the past; but we see no reason to believe that...a whole population cannot reach a stage of mature self-consciousness much as an individual does.

—Paul Hawken, James Ogilvy, Peter Schwartz, Seven Tomorrows, 1982

Vernor Vinge via Claire Evans' The Grid:
————
In his writings, the computer scientist — and fabulist, although aren't they all, the good ones — Vernor Vinge, no uncertain proponent of the ever-developing Technological Singularity theory, noted that “every time our ability to access information and to communicate it to others is improved, in some sense we have achieved an increase over natural intelligence.” What he meant was that the end of the human era (which he argued would occur "[not before] 2005 or after 2030") would come with a whimper, not a bang — “even the largest avalanches are triggered by small things,” he added.

“Within thirty years,
we will have the technological means to create super- human intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended.”

→ Vernor Vinge

"Low-Cost-house", Pneumatische Container, Gernot Nalbach, 1962

“It seems that truth is progressive approximation in which the relative fraction of our spontaneously tolerated residual error constantly diminishes.”

We are now routinely transporting our simulated “bodies” to alternate online worlds, where, besides social activities, we are doing most of our mind work in an inter-connective space shared by 1.5 billion internet users.

→ Rene Daalder: The Age of Optimization

Now playing:

We are the Web


Future of the Species