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The great enhancement debate
What happened to nature?
Polytopia
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(F, 24) Los Angeles, US Immortal since Jan 18, 2007 Uplinks: 0, Generation 1 Proofs Of Concept
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Polytopia
The human species is rapidly and indisputably moving towards the technological singularity. The cadence of the flow of information and innovation in...
Epiphanies
A series of rambles by SpaceCollective members sharing sudden insights and moments of clarity. Rambling is a time-proven way of thinking out loud,...
The Total Library
Text that redefines...
Emergence and Navigating...
Develop a generative, emergent process to fill space (2D or 3D) using only black lines. Modify a known process or invent your own. Implement your...
The Voyager update project
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What happened to nature?
How to stay in touch with our biological origins in a world devoid of nature? The majestic nature that once inspired poets, painters and...
The great enhancement debate
What will happen when for the first time in ages different human species will inhabit the earth at the same time? The day may be upon us when people... Now playing
SpaceCollective
Where forward thinking terrestrials share ideas and information about the state of the species, their planet and the universe, living the lives of science fiction. Introduction
Featuring Powers of Ten by Charles and Ray Eames, based on an idea by Kees Boeke.
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As the aging populations of Europe and Japan come to represent the local majority, it would seem the elderly are posed to reclaim some of the cultural territory they lost to the decades long bias towards youth. And as the search for immortality continues, the extremely old, reverently referred to as supercentenarians, are in the position to become icons as celebrated and admired as the most flawless of pop stars. Edna Parker (pictured below) is one out of 100 people in the Supercentenarian database, whose DNA is being used to study genetic links to long lives.
So, while the ambition of most longevity enthusiasts is to reverse or eliminate the aging process, what if instead, as lifespans increase, there is a renaissance of beauty at age 200+?
Ann Pouder 110 YO England
Maria Capovilla 116 Eucador
Edna Parker 115 YO US
Yone Minagawa 115 Japan
Jauna Bautista 125 YO Cuba
Interestingly, longevity is increasing in Cuba (home to Juana Bautista, the oldest woman in the world) in part due to the winning combination of social programs, cigars, and a healthy sex life.
So, while the ambition of most longevity enthusiasts is to reverse or eliminate the aging process, what if instead, as lifespans increase, there is a renaissance of beauty at age 200+?
Interestingly, longevity is increasing in Cuba (home to Juana Bautista, the oldest woman in the world) in part due to the winning combination of social programs, cigars, and a healthy sex life.
Last night I asked google, "is the internet over?" This was the response (be warned if you have little tolerance for internet gore do not click). The result was both ironic and nostalgic, like a last stand for the unkempt wilderness the internet has been.
As I mentioned on Olena's post, it occurred to me the other night that lawlessness can be extremely beneficial to intelligence and the rapid growth of culture, particularly when it comes to the vast databases of music and movies we've stolen for our edification and enjoyment. It also struck me that those who've directly benefited from this lawlessness are simultaneously the most marketed to generation in history and a generation that's probably stolen more merchandise on a whole than any other group of people living in a semi-functional society.
But I've had a distinct sense for the past few months that the internet is no longer the frontier, that it's well on the way to becoming as practical and depoliticized as the telephone. While cyberwarfare may be making appearances in the newspaper for months or even years to come, it'll more likely be evidence of governmental meddling than radical uprising.
While I don't get off on illuminati flavored conspiracy theories, the use of Facebook friend photos to generate advertisements, in combination with the Supreme court decision, and Google deleting music blogs without warning has made me extremely aware how easily we can sleep through what promises to be (or already is) a corporate chokehold.
While this all seems a little bleak, it's actually rather refreshing to realize. I've been feeling a little coddled by the neverending stream of utopian rhetoric surrounding the internet, which I myself am guilty of propagating, and with good reason! But it seems about time we set our sites on a new frontier.
So...what comes after the Internet?
[ note, this post was written and published as private for a while so the news is old now...but still relevant ]
As I mentioned on Olena's post, it occurred to me the other night that lawlessness can be extremely beneficial to intelligence and the rapid growth of culture, particularly when it comes to the vast databases of music and movies we've stolen for our edification and enjoyment. It also struck me that those who've directly benefited from this lawlessness are simultaneously the most marketed to generation in history and a generation that's probably stolen more merchandise on a whole than any other group of people living in a semi-functional society.
But I've had a distinct sense for the past few months that the internet is no longer the frontier, that it's well on the way to becoming as practical and depoliticized as the telephone. While cyberwarfare may be making appearances in the newspaper for months or even years to come, it'll more likely be evidence of governmental meddling than radical uprising.
While I don't get off on illuminati flavored conspiracy theories, the use of Facebook friend photos to generate advertisements, in combination with the Supreme court decision, and Google deleting music blogs without warning has made me extremely aware how easily we can sleep through what promises to be (or already is) a corporate chokehold.
While this all seems a little bleak, it's actually rather refreshing to realize. I've been feeling a little coddled by the neverending stream of utopian rhetoric surrounding the internet, which I myself am guilty of propagating, and with good reason! But it seems about time we set our sites on a new frontier.
So...what comes after the Internet?
Connected to
I just found an excellent (5 year old) article to follow up an older post about Utopian thinking. This collection of excerpts would make a great companion to the State of the Union :)
Utopias tended to be written at times when the imagination overstretched the available means. They were about people feeling their way ahead, before there were yet any route markers.
Thomas More came at the dawning of modernity, when the Middle Ages was receding and a new society stretching its limbs. Charles Fourier and the utopian socialists came at the dawn of the working-class movement, when some realised that bourgeois promises of freedom were inadequate but hadn't yet worked out what to propose in their place....
...Set-ups that people take as natural - 'the way things are' - are shown to be foolish, temporary arrangements that will soon be overturned. This educates the imagination, the sense of what could be....
....It's telling that the authors of utopias often lived unromantic and frustrated lives. Their heads were reaching into the future, but their feet remained stuck in times that they were powerless to change....
...Sometimes the dreams of one generation became the practical reality for the next....
...Over time, utopias tended to become less hazy daydreams and more something that people would fight to be realised. For a start, there was a shift from utopias being set on a remote island to being set in the future. Then the visions became grander....
...And while More and Bacon imagined their utopian societies created by God or a benevolent legislator, later utopias imagined that they were created by people themselves. The vision of the future was a practical problem to solve....
...Today the old political landmarks are gone, and people have little idea about how to go forward. Past utopians' brave leaps into the future could act as inspiration. However, there are limitations with today's approach towards utopias. There are broadly speaking two different types of modern utopian project: escapist utopias, and mystical utopias. Both seek a dreamy happy ending, while sidestepping the problems of political life today....
...The question isn't whether the utopian impulse exists, for it will so long as human beings are alive: the question is whether this impulse takes us forward or just tightens our chains...
...Jacoby's conclusion: 'To connect a utopian passion with practical politics is an art and a necessity.'...
The whole article is worth a read.
FROM NEW SCIENTIST:
Red squirrels are rapidly evolving in response to global warming - they are the first mammals in which such genetic changes have been seen. The discovery could bode well for other species struggling to adapt to new conditions, say researchers.
Andrew McAdam, at the University of Alberta, Canada, and colleagues monitored four generations of squirrels in the Yukon, Canada, over 10 years. They found that female squirrels now give birth on average 18 days earlier in the year than their great-grandmothers.
The driving force behind the evolutionary changes is that the warmer climate means that females with a genetic propensity to give birth earlier are more likely to have offspring that prosper.
These early-borns have a head start on their younger peers. They are bigger and more independent when autumn comes and it is time to store food, says Stan Boutin, another member of the team.
The work joins a growing body of evidence that many living things are changing their abundance, distribution and behaviour in response to increasing global temperatures. Genetic changes have been shown in American mosquitoes but this is the first study that demonstrates a genetic shift in a mammal.
I was talking to one of the guy who helped us move this year about global warming...he thought human babies were gonna be born with heat resistent skin soon enough....i don't know about that, but we might invent some
At this moment in the Internet's history I am one of many, I would suspect, who often prefers to receive the world on demand, to leave touch with my immediate surroundings in order to surf the information of my choosing. This is a very particular and unique kind of information acquisition, it's accelerated and intentional. I've asked several friends in the cognitive sciences what to call this variety of mental processing, it's not intellectual perse, not rational necessarily, cerebral? These synonyms all have connotations that disqualify them as adequate terminology, so instead I'll call it "severed head." This particular state of being is characterized by the feeling that your body is trailing behind your head at all times, only to be felt when some mentally stimulating idea triggers a release of adrenaline. A fine feeling indeed.
Coop Himmelblau's Soul Flipper
This way of absorbing the world is very different from the world experienced by the body as a whole. And being a severed head myself, I often prefer Google search results to more physical sources of information. Recent experiences, however, have re-covered my appreciation for the latter.
Hana Van Der Kolk and I are like a lesson in fate. The strangeness of her recognizing me from the internet, unwittingly becoming my neighbor, finding out that not only are we both daughters of Dutch psychologists, but in the most remarkable twist of fate, it turns out an uncle of mine helped Hana's parents immigrate to America. So when Hana asked me to be in her next performance the answer of course had to be yes (and my solo would be nothing less than an incessant repetition of this positive affirmation).
It was notoriously hard to describe Hana's choreographic style to inquisitive friends. A blend of minimalist dance and performance art? With long pauses and pop songs? I think she said it best by calling it a mix tape, and I called it a collage, a blend of performance techniques. At it's core though, it was the performance of an altered state, and getting there required a perception of "the whole body at once," a task comparable to listening for the sound of one hand clapping.
After assigning us mental scores, Hana began to choreograph clichéd group activities, painfully simple solos, and duets that begged to be narrativized. The whole process was particularly interesting because Hana was in the position to direct us while reminding us not to plan or think.
This was a bit of a struggle, every clarification was like dancing around the mind's tendency to take information and smother it with intellectual constructions. It began to seem like the whole thing was an empirical study of how this strange clump of matter and chemistry that we identify as the human body might communicate complex sentiments without interference from "higher" brain functioning.
By the time the performance rolled around, I was eager to check this hypothesis with an audience. It was nerve racking, and slightly ironic, to present the work to a group of people harboring the very analytical agenda we were trying to debunk. It should also probably be noted that in addition to being told throughout my life that I "think too much," I'm not a seasoned performer, so the whole experience was like being in a foreign country with a bare minimum of vocab words at my disposal. It demanded complete dedication to those few words to facilitate this still unfamiliar relationship between body and mind.
The performance ended, and the only thing I knew for sure was that the audience had been audibly shifty in their chairs.
I soon learned though, that without any kind of character motivation or explicit direction, the performance not only hit certain narrative cues, but exceeded them. People were raving about transference, friends who I would never have expected to enjoy such a performance were trailing behind Hana to congratulate her, and on the third night I shed the most perfectly timed, completely uncalculated tear. It appeared that the intimacy Hana set out to cultivate was oozing from our unconditioned bodies with supernatural clarity.
I've often vouched for the internet as a unique channel for achieving intimacy, and a superior instrument for streaming thoughts without physical interference. But Hana's method was a reminder of the body's refined capacity to transmit and receive hi-fidelity information. I have never experienced a performance so devoid of intellectual burdens, so painfully simple and yet gut-wrenchingly complex.
Getting back to my life as usual has been like filing back into an anatomical hierarchy whereby my body is once again second in command. And as I sit here, a collection of limbs obediently stationed in front of a computer monitor, I'm imagining a sc-fi future in which the body is obsolete. In my mind, however, it's a mere perception that's been left behind, making way for a popular view of the body as an instrument of communication well worth being tuned.
pre-performance rehearsal, more photos of the performance here
This way of absorbing the world is very different from the world experienced by the body as a whole. And being a severed head myself, I often prefer Google search results to more physical sources of information. Recent experiences, however, have re-covered my appreciation for the latter.
Hana Van Der Kolk and I are like a lesson in fate. The strangeness of her recognizing me from the internet, unwittingly becoming my neighbor, finding out that not only are we both daughters of Dutch psychologists, but in the most remarkable twist of fate, it turns out an uncle of mine helped Hana's parents immigrate to America. So when Hana asked me to be in her next performance the answer of course had to be yes (and my solo would be nothing less than an incessant repetition of this positive affirmation).
It was notoriously hard to describe Hana's choreographic style to inquisitive friends. A blend of minimalist dance and performance art? With long pauses and pop songs? I think she said it best by calling it a mix tape, and I called it a collage, a blend of performance techniques. At it's core though, it was the performance of an altered state, and getting there required a perception of "the whole body at once," a task comparable to listening for the sound of one hand clapping.
After assigning us mental scores, Hana began to choreograph clichéd group activities, painfully simple solos, and duets that begged to be narrativized. The whole process was particularly interesting because Hana was in the position to direct us while reminding us not to plan or think.
This was a bit of a struggle, every clarification was like dancing around the mind's tendency to take information and smother it with intellectual constructions. It began to seem like the whole thing was an empirical study of how this strange clump of matter and chemistry that we identify as the human body might communicate complex sentiments without interference from "higher" brain functioning.
By the time the performance rolled around, I was eager to check this hypothesis with an audience. It was nerve racking, and slightly ironic, to present the work to a group of people harboring the very analytical agenda we were trying to debunk. It should also probably be noted that in addition to being told throughout my life that I "think too much," I'm not a seasoned performer, so the whole experience was like being in a foreign country with a bare minimum of vocab words at my disposal. It demanded complete dedication to those few words to facilitate this still unfamiliar relationship between body and mind.
The performance ended, and the only thing I knew for sure was that the audience had been audibly shifty in their chairs.
I soon learned though, that without any kind of character motivation or explicit direction, the performance not only hit certain narrative cues, but exceeded them. People were raving about transference, friends who I would never have expected to enjoy such a performance were trailing behind Hana to congratulate her, and on the third night I shed the most perfectly timed, completely uncalculated tear. It appeared that the intimacy Hana set out to cultivate was oozing from our unconditioned bodies with supernatural clarity.
I've often vouched for the internet as a unique channel for achieving intimacy, and a superior instrument for streaming thoughts without physical interference. But Hana's method was a reminder of the body's refined capacity to transmit and receive hi-fidelity information. I have never experienced a performance so devoid of intellectual burdens, so painfully simple and yet gut-wrenchingly complex.
Getting back to my life as usual has been like filing back into an anatomical hierarchy whereby my body is once again second in command. And as I sit here, a collection of limbs obediently stationed in front of a computer monitor, I'm imagining a sc-fi future in which the body is obsolete. In my mind, however, it's a mere perception that's been left behind, making way for a popular view of the body as an instrument of communication well worth being tuned.
Utopia has taken up residence in my frame of reference again, possessing me with glee, anguish, and a pronounced sense of forking paths. This past weekend I counted at least 6 references to Utopia, a trend that suggests a general awareness that major changes are afoot. What else is Utopia, after all, but the suggestion of radical change.
I just had a very long conversation about climate change, about technology, about losing 90% of all species on Earth in some sort of inverse Arc scenario, where Noah throws the animals off the boat to make room for more people.
The appeal of Utopia seems to be a byproduct of our current condition: we are at a stage where we are simultaneously losing whatever semblance of control we, as humans, had on the future, AND ushering in an age of advanced human decision making. To the shigrin of outdoor enthusiasts, we have transformed the Earth's surface to accommodate our uniquely human compulsion to invent. Ironically this seems to accelerate the rate at which innovation must take place to avoid collapsing under the weight of a significant evolutionary shift.
Whether we are perched on a cataclysmic precipice or a moment of profound opportunity is a matter of perspective, but it's clearly a moment when human beings need to once again step into a void, and a void always demands imagination. These are the conditions, I suspect, under which Utopia becomes a worthwhile preoccupation.
I just had a very long conversation about climate change, about technology, about losing 90% of all species on Earth in some sort of inverse Arc scenario, where Noah throws the animals off the boat to make room for more people.
The appeal of Utopia seems to be a byproduct of our current condition: we are at a stage where we are simultaneously losing whatever semblance of control we, as humans, had on the future, AND ushering in an age of advanced human decision making. To the shigrin of outdoor enthusiasts, we have transformed the Earth's surface to accommodate our uniquely human compulsion to invent. Ironically this seems to accelerate the rate at which innovation must take place to avoid collapsing under the weight of a significant evolutionary shift.
Whether we are perched on a cataclysmic precipice or a moment of profound opportunity is a matter of perspective, but it's clearly a moment when human beings need to once again step into a void, and a void always demands imagination. These are the conditions, I suspect, under which Utopia becomes a worthwhile preoccupation.
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