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

—Carel

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

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 It is no longer necessary to the existence of the Autoverse; there is a better solution that has superseded it, rendering the processor network literally nonexistent.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

You affect the world by what you browse.

→ Tim Berners-Lee
Inventor or the World Wide Web

“Today, Homo sapiens is faced with a rapid modification of his environment, a transformation for which he is the involuntary collective agent. I am not implying that our species is threatened with extinction or that the “end of the world” is approaching. I am not preaching millenarianism. Rather, I would like to point out an alternative. Either we cross a new threshold, enter a new stage of hominization, by inventing some human attribute that is as essential as language but operates at a much higher level,

or we continue to “communicate” through the media and think within the context of separate institutions, which contribute to the suffocation and division of intelligence.

In the latter case we will no longer be confronted only by the problems of power and survival. But if we are committed to the process of collective intelligence, we will gradually create the technologies, sign systems, forms of social organization and regulation that enable us to think as a group, concentrate our intellectual and spiritual forces, and negotiate practical real-time solutions to the complex problems we must inevitably confront. We will gradually learn ... to collectively invent ourselves as a species.”
→ Michael Gaio quoting Pierre Lévy in The Over-Language

If people know it or not, they are already partaking in a revolution which may be largely invisible but is nevertheless a pivotal world-transforming event.

Just think about it, the Singularity movement came about simply because sci-fi writer/academician Vernor Vinge established the initial concept, which was then embraced by the more practical thinker/inventor Ray Kurzweil and now Intel’s technology director. As a result a broadly recognized idea has taken root in the world built around little more than a catchy word, a succinct definition (the moment when machine intelligence surpasses human intelligence) and Intel's co-founder Gordon E. Moore’s formulation of his now famous law. → Rene Daalder: Living towards the Singularity

In the future, the importance of geography will be matched by the importance of values and ideas.

Nationhood: The future of Nationalism
→ Alan Smith

→ sjef's personal cargo:
“So what has information technology now brought us? I'd like to hope it will turn out to be something along the lines of Wildcat's collex, in which loosely linked networked individuals exchange points of view in an ever expanding upward spiral of knowledge. The thing of course being that the technology lends itself equally well to an ever expanding, outward spiraling network of captioned cat pictures, so I'm not sure where that leaves us in terms of describing this new social form.” More...

Too much consistency is as bad for the mind as it is for the body. Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead.

→ Aldous Huxley

We are called to be architects of the future, not its victims.

→ R. Buckminster Fuller via Wildcat

Your role is quite simple, Timothy — become a cheerleader for evolution.

→ Aldous Huxley to Timothy Leary

From Alan Smith's Nationhood : The future of Nationalism — “As time marches on, we see the weakening of geographical forces on the lives and activities of humans. The borders we used to draw are being replaced with centers and relationships of relevance. People flock to cities, the countryside empties, and the connection to a National identity in a virtual connected world is no longer the most powerful connection an indivudal feels to another group.”

“Here is a list of books I can wholeheartedly recommend you to dive into this summer. They are all completely bonkers and they all start from first principles. The list has only eight titles but each of these books will stay with you for longer than your holiday sweetheart. Only two of them are fiction and this is no coincidence. Non-fiction is often less restrained and therefore more outrageous than the most 'daring' fiction. One can imagine only a few things, one can belief a whole lot more.”

The extension we call the net, the grid, the Infobahn, is more than the sum of its parts, it may perchance lead to an actual organizing principle of reality itself. An organizing principle somewhat akin to an operating system, yet directed, and multidimensional, interactive and intelligent.

—Wildcat: Mind Habitat, the quest for a home