Are we real ?

Watch these 4 fascinating short videos about the fundamental riddles of existence. Some food for thought...

Wed, Nov 12, 2008  Permanent link

The Space Collective and our Post Human Future

I have been reading with great interest and pleasure Rene's latest post bringing forth with critical reflection the emergent relevance of the Space Collective. It brought to mind a few thoughts I would like to share here.

Rene writes:

To my knowledge, there is no faculty anywhere in the academic world which specifically addresses the future. In fact, the very subject tends to be dismissed as a legitimate topic for lack of empirical validation. Scientists at least are consistently pushing the envelope of their respective disciplines, but the Humanities are firmly entrenched in a canon-based tradition that is thoroughly out of step with the moving target that is our future. Everything concerning the world that lies ahead is routinely relegated to the realm of science-fiction, leaving it up to individual forward thinkers to make up for this wholesale denial of one of the most critically important subjects of our lives.

And in a comment:

...Still, like yourself, we are wondering on a regular basis how to make the theoretical activities on this site more actionable. Right now I'm pretty fond of the concept of curriculum creation and there are many other ideas floating around to establish an effective connection with the world at large.

There is no doubt that we are living in an era of an accelerating change. There is no doubt today that technological progress is becoming perhaps the single most influential force that shapes the future of human civilization. I would dare say even that there is (almost) no doubt that we become slowly but surely more intelligent. We, as a species, are increasingly capable to do more with less. There is no doubt about that. Yet, simultaneously we live in an era which is becoming less and less stable, economically, politically, conceptually and spiritually. These are all the symptoms of a great change that we all sense as the coming end of the human era. J.C. Oates, a leading American novelist wrote back in the 70's about this very experience:

What appears to be the breaking down of civilization may well be simply the breaking up of old forms by life itself (not an eruption of madness or self destruction), a process that is entirely natural and inevitable. Perhaps we are in the tumultuous but exciting close of a centuries-old kind of consciousness - a few of us like theologians of the Medieval church encountering the unstoppable energy of the Renaissance. What we must avoid is the paranoia of history’s “true believers”, who have always misinterpreted a natural, evolutionary transformation of consciousness as being the violent conclusion of all history. [Ref: (New Heaven, New Earth: The Visionary Experience in Literature (1974)) images p.105]

I deem this to be one of the most insightful reflections regarding the future, and I am continuously asking myself (and everybody around who cares to listen): Are we really in the midst of an evolutionary transformation of consciousness?

Ray Kurzweil and others claim (see link above), that all information based technologies and branches of science are undergoing a lawful process of acceleration. But consciousness is not information based. At least not yet. On the other hand our consciousness rides this great wave of accelerating change, and has to fine balance on the crest of this awe inspiring wave not unlike the surfers catching those giant breaker waves of the ocean. It is the dynamic, perhaps acrobatic, balance of our transforming consciousness that will make the difference between surfing far and beyond, and being slapped by the very same breaker wave of change into an abyss of a post modern dark age.

The transformation of consciousness, therefore, is not an option for us, it is an imperative. And since wisdom is the only recognizable mark of transforming consciousness, in this very sense I try to figure: do we become wiser while surfing this cresting wave of accelerating change? Here my thoughts are coinciding with the Space Collective and Rene's latest post, for I think the Space Collective may emerge as a very unique nexus in regards to the wisdom of the future and the future of wisdom. I was thinking about us, in the SC, holding in our hands a huge temporal scales of wisdom: one arm of the scale extends 2500 years back across history to the golden age of Greek Philosophers, the other arm extends 25 years forward into our future. Back then, a handful of humans such as Socrates and Plato have lain the foundations of western civilization's thought. Approximately at the same period in India, Gautama Buddha revolutionized eastern philosophy. None of them was particularly concerned about doing or acting, yet their influence extended across millennia. In contrast to the Judeo-Christian view that holds the human as essentially separate from and rightful master over nature, a view that is at the motivational basis of the utilitarian pursuit of knowledge and modern technological progress, the Greek approach to the pursuit of knowledge was largely aesthetic. Those great humans of 2500 years ago realized the transformative powers of pure thought. They made thought their doing and beauty their motive.



25 years into the future, are we up to balance the scales? Are we up to invest our future with the transformative powers of pure thought? To catalyze a transformation of consciousness marked by a new kind of wisdom? In a plain historical perspective we are left with very little time. While our experiential time is accelerated one hundred fold at least, our wisdom still unfolds in slow time as compared to information fueled utilitarian intelligence. If we are to create space here for anything at all we have to create space for wisdom, for the evolution of consciousness, for the pursuit of knowledge which is aesthetic in nature. This I see as a vision and a challenge for the Space Collective to lead. We need not worry about doing so much. Everybody does, just look around and observe how busy our human species has become. We can, if we dare, trust in the transformative powers of pure thought, and bet on our aesthetic intuition to lead us into an interesting and sustainable post human era.

In 25 years, perhaps in 50 years or 250 years, very soon anyway, and plausibly in our extended lifetime, the human era as we know it will end. In the post human era we will become dwellers of pure thought spaces, for eventually there will be no difference anymore between our thought spaces and action spaces. We can make the Space Collective the first vehicle of this grand unification.

Sun, Nov 9, 2008  Permanent link

Brain Power - Interfacing Man and Machine
Project: The great enhancement debate

Watch this amazing short document on CBS 60min about the first brain machine interfaces. Little imagination is needed to imagine how fat this can go in the next couple of decades. It seems that our future is deeply connected. The merging of human with machine is already here.

Moreover, this is a small yet a significant step in releasing our thoughts from a biological body.


Watch CBS Videos Online

Tue, Nov 4, 2008  Permanent link

Sent to project: The great enhancement debate

Mars the new home for humanity and then beyond

Part 1



Part 2

Mon, Oct 27, 2008  Permanent link

The Emerging Uplift Principle
Project: Polytopia

May 2008 issue of the Journal of Evolution and Technology, published a fascinating article titled: "All Together Now: Developmental and ethical considerations for biologically uplifting nonhuman animals".

In the article, the author George Dvorsky argues the unconventional case that the future application of biological and other augmentation methods to animals for the purpose of endowing them with the necessary physical and mental capabilities that will allow them eventually to participate as equal agents in a futuristic multi-species society, is not only ethically conceivable but perhaps even an ethical necessity.



Here are a few excerpts:

From the introduction, on the general change of ethical attitude towards nonhuman animals:

Recent initiatives in Spain and New Zealand seeking to establish legal personhood status for the great apes represent unprecedented steps in the history of the animal rights movement. Great apes are poised to be endowed with those rights that have traditionally been ascribed to humans, a development that would see their promotion from non-persons with property-like status to persons with real and enforceable protections. In all likelihood, and though it may take some time, other countries will follow suit.

Humanity has been widening its moral purview for some time now. With rights potentially being passed down to the great apes, it can be said that humans are widening both their moral and social circles. This is a trend that will have profound implications for the relationship between humanity and nonhuman animals.

As the potential for enhancement technologies migrates from the theoretical to the practical, a difficult and important decision will be imposed upon human civilization, namely the issue as to whether or not we are morally obligated to biologically enhance nonhuman animals and integrate them into a larger postbiological society.

Animal uplifting, also referred to as biological uplift, or simply uplift, is the theoretical prospect of endowing nonhumans with greater capacities, including and especially increased intelligence.

On the foundation of the moral argument for uplift:

Given the very real potential for biological augmentation some time later this century, the means to better distribute primary goods will eventually come into being and will by consequence enter into the marketplace of distributable primary goods. To deny nonhumans access to enhancement technologies, therefore, would be a breach of distributive justice and an act of genetic or biological exceptionalism – the idea that one’s biological constitution falls into a special category of goods that lie outside other sanctioned or recognized primary goods. Such claims, as argued by Allen Buchanan and others, do not carry much moral currency.[29]

Indeed, liberal theories of distributive justice necessarily provide for the elimination or mitigation of the undeserved effects of luck on welfare.[30] Fair equality of opportunity, argued Rawls, requires not merely that offices and positions be distributed on the basis of merit, but that all persons have reasonable opportunity to acquire the skills on the basis of which merit is assessed.[31] These skills, in the context of animal uplift, are the biological augmentations that would enable social interaction at the “human” level (at the very least).

The idea of uplifting nonhuman animals and integrating them into a futuristic sentient society is both fascinating and courageous. There is no doubt that on the technological aspect the issue is still highly speculative, and on the ethical aspect it opens more riddles than it resolves, nevertheless, Dvorski describes an important and interesting trend: "humans are widening both their moral and social circles". It seems that this widening is indicative to a more general evolutionary motion of minding. The more the sphere of human knowledge is expanded, human conscious awareness expands in scope and depth. The more conscious awareness expands, the sphere of moral deliberation and moral responsibility expands, which finds its culmination in the expansion of empathy towards that which is increasingly different from us. It is this profound sense of empathy that will eventually drive human civilization towards a perpetual motion of overreaching its own borders, and expansion of identity by embracing widening spheres of intelligent lifeforms.

The idea of uplift as described in Dvorski's article can and should be taken further. If we leave for a moment the technological aspects that are involved, I do not see why uplift should stop with , by now, obvious candidates such as the great apes, dolphins, whales and others. Uplift, it seems, is an imperative of conscious intelligent life to expand. Though we do not have the capacity to uplift other lifeforms as yet, there is quite a strong argument we can already figure, why it will be ethical to exercise such a capacity if and when we will realize it. But then, following Dvorski's arguments to their logical end, I can see no place where a line can be drawn marking the limits of the application of such capabilities. That is to say that if we consider the great apes, dolphins and such for uplift, we have to go as far as it goes, to all life forms at all stages of evolution that is, otherwise we necessarily infringe distributive justice at some point as Dvorski writes:

To deny nonhumans access to enhancement technologies, therefore, would be a breach of distributive justice and an act of genetic or biological exceptionalism – the idea that one’s biological constitution falls into a special category of goods that lie outside other sanctioned or recognized primary goods. Such claims, as argued by Allen Buchanan and others, do not carry much moral currency.

Since we cannot arbitrarily draw a line and stay faithful to the ethical principle, we come if so to an interesting and provocative conclusion: In as much as it is technologically possible, it is morally desirable to apply uplift as a form of directed evolution, to all life forms.

If we further explore this idea, it means that at the phase that human civilization is approaching culminating in technological singularity, a new ethical imperative is emerging: The commitment to the uplift and inclusion of all life forms, or in other words, the commitment to the accelerated evolution of all existing life forms to the stage of sapience. This emergence of an expanding ethical consideration, is inseparable from, and to my understanding, an essential mark of the evolution of minding, briefly described above.

When expanded to the sphere of all life forms, however, the idea becomes much more intriguing: if we think about the great apes, we may have quite a good idea of what uplift might practically mean because in fact they are very similar to humans. We could imagine that increasing the ape's general intelligence, and endowing it with linguistic capabilities will make them pretty close to our idea of sapience even without radically changing their morphology and other distinctive characteristics of their nature (again it is a nature that humans observe and there is no easy way out from this conundrum) . But when we come to contemplate the accelerated evolution of other creatures towards sapience, what should be done is not obvious at all, not even in principle. How much directed intervention is plausible as compared to the ongoing blind evolutionary processes? Would it be possible to foresee entire evolutionary processes culminating in uplift? Could an entire ecology be optimized to yield the highest number of uplifted species? These are questions that as of now belong to the realm of science fiction, perhaps even fantasy, but the motive behind asking them is very real, because philosophical speculations such as this can teach us something important about the evolution of intelligence in general, and the evolution of the human species in particular. They can help us to see what kinds of philosophical riddles radically enhanced capabilities might bring up, and give us some clues as to how to design our future to be an interesting, elegant and beautiful future.

Not only that, we can go yet further with uplift idea: our future understanding of evolutionary processes might perhaps allow us to explore not only existing life forms, but also potential life forms and whole ecologies that do not exist. The above mentioned ethical imperative will expand if so to include all forms of life, biological and otherwise, as they are and as they could possibly be. This might sound fantastic, and perhaps it is fantastic but it boils down to what seem to be a guiding principle in the evolution of minding: I call it here the Uplift Principle.

The Uplift Principle: When a sapient species reaches a stage where it can perpetually uplift itself, this species will eventually chose (following its evolving ethical imperatives) to expand by exploring and uplifting all life forms conceivable to it.

Interestingly, this invites a novel definition of the singularity as the stage when a civilization reaches a perpetual self uplifting capability, and thereby realizes the Uplift Principle. Singularity, thus understood, will not affect only humanity or a limited category of lifeforms, it will profoundly affect life at large and by that it gains the status of a universal event in that that its sphere of meaning and influence will perpetually expand without limit.

In conclusion, the idea of uplift described in Dvorsky's article extrapolates an already existing trend of expanding the sphere of humanity's ethical consideration towards non human animals. This idea is further extrapolated here to expose its possible profound meaning and consequences in regards to the future evolution of human minding and the singularity. The synergetic expansion of human knowledge, consciousness, ethics and empathy can be shown to eventually bring about the a perpetual uplifting of all life towards sapience.

Sat, Oct 11, 2008  Permanent link
Categories: polytopia, Uplift, Uplift Principle
Sent to project: Polytopia

Becoming Immortal
Project: , Polytopia

For quite a while, I have the idea to invite Space Collective members to reflect, discuss and perhaps open a continuous exchange of thoughts and emotions regarding the prospect of extreme life extension. It seems to me there is no subject today of a more profound potential impact on the future of human civilization, and human life in all its aspects.
As such, I would like to see it becoming one of the 'backbone' issues on the agenda of the Space Collective community.

I had in mind to write a keynote post to present the issue to some depth. I have found today, to my delight, an excellent and highly interesting introduction to the discussion I have in mind. It is an edited extract from a book called: 'How to Live Forever or Die Trying', written by Bryan Appleyard, and published in Cosmos Online Magazine. Bryan Appleyard is a features writer for London's Sunday Times newspaper and also writes for the New York Times and Vanity Fair.

Here is an excerpt:

Developments in a number of scientific disciplines suggest that we may soon be able to increase life expectancies from the 70- to 80-year range already seen in the richest countries to well over 100 and, perhaps, to over 1,000. We shall, in one sense, have made ourselves immortal.

We shall not be immortal in the sense that we cannot die; plainly we could still be killed in a car accident or by a cosmic event such as an asteroid striking the Earth. But we could not be killed by disease or age, our bodies would be immune to infection, dysfunction or the ravages of time. We would be medically immortal.

Some say this will happen quickly within, perhaps, 30 years with the first clear signs that we are on the right track appearing within the next decade. Others think we are at least a century or two away from attaining medical immortality. Some consider it completely unattainable. But the majority of scientists and thinkers in this area now consider life extension and even medical immortality possible and likely.

Not long ago, most would have said it was out of the question, that death at or well before the absolute maximum age of something like 122 was inevitable.

canceling the debt

The basis of this shift from unattainable to feasible is not generally understood. It involves a transformation in our conception of human biology and an expansion of our capacity to intervene in its workings that may yet prove to be at least as momentous as the discoveries of Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Darwin or Einstein.

But Copernicus to Einstein is not the only tradition that is at issue here. There are also the traditions that run from Buddha to Mohammed and from Plato to Wittgenstein, the traditions of religion and philosophy.

Our relatively brief lives and our routine proximity to the deaths of ourselves and others are the foundations of everything we have ever thought or believed. Neither religion nor philosophy necessarily promises immortality, but each offers ways of coming to terms with or giving meaning to death and, therefore, life. If death is to be postponed indefinitely, then both religion and philosophy face fundamental crises.

Of course, many other traditions of politics, art, commerce and culture are also at stake. In truth, it is difficult to think of any aspect of human life that would not face similar crises.

What, for example, would be the meaning of the greatest works of the human imagination to a medical immortal? Shakespeare's sonnets may be said to be about the brevity of life and the painful transience of human love and beauty.

But if we lived for 1,000 years or more in a condition of youthful health and vitality the postulated life extension technologies promise to hold us permanently in our late twenties then would we come to see these poems as the curious remnants of an antique world rather than urgent expressions of the deepest truths of our predicament? Would any art of the past survive this revolution with its dignity intact? Would there be any art of the future?

Many may think that, as they suffer from no illusions, fantasies or sensitivities, new life extension technologies are nothing but good news, simple additions to the portfolio of benefits delivered by modern technology. But their worlds are also threatened.

For example, the language of relationships is the vernacular of our contemporary, secular life. What would our precious relationships look like to medical immortals? Love itself would have to be redefined. Romantic love depends for its very meaning on the promise that it will last forever. But 'forever' now means no more than, say, 50 years, the average span, in other words, of the human life from falling in love to death. If falling in love actually meant a commitment for 1,000 or more years, then 'forever' starts to take on a new meaning. Love is suddenly relativised, its significance thrown into doubt.

There remains, of course, love of self and surely in that context life extension must be an unalloyed good. Life extension must mean extension of the self and the cultivation of the self is, alongside relationships, the supreme contemporary preoccupation. But even here there are problems.

How much cultivation of the self can we take? There will only ever be so many gadgets to buy, so many days we can spend at the gym or beauty parlour though these may well be unnecessary activities in the new world order so much sex we can have, so many cars we can drive. Perhaps medically immortal selves will seek alternative spiritual or intellectual diversions as the wealthier mortal selves, disillusioned with getting and spending, already do in increasing numbers.

Maybe these will see us through the long centuries of life. Or maybe none of these things will matter as we shall not be just one self in the future but many.

The rest of the article can be found here and is highly recommended.

Let us talk about the vision and prospects of immortality, This is definitely a subject I would like to see as an independent project of the Collective.

Sun, Jun 15, 2008  Permanent link
Categories: Aging, Death, Immortality
Sent to project: , Polytopia

Images of the Contemporary Mind

This a nice collection of illustrations of the contemporary mind (my tittle), by David Plunkert and Leigh Wells. The illustrations were published in Time Magazine and other places.

Enjoy :-)


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Illustration for TIME by David Plunkert

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Illustration for TIME by Leigh Wells

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Sat, Jun 14, 2008  Permanent link

Bionic limbs are becoming a reality.
Project: The great enhancement debate

...I created thee as a being neither celestial nor earthly... so that thou shouldst be thy own free moulder and overcomer... Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, 1486

No doubt, this video shows an amazing feat of technology and engineering made possible by this amazing guy Dean Kamen and his co workers. No doubt it is going to help hundreds perhaps thousands of seriously disabled people to lead a normal life. It is a real victory of human ingenuity. But this is not the only reason why what you have seen here is important.

Let me speculate just a bit: It is entirely plausible that perfecting this impressive artificial limb prototype into to a fully functional limb, which can perform as good as or better than a normal biological limb, will take about 10 to 15 years. It is not anymore a question of if, but rather a question of how soon. There is a real and immediate need for such limbs, and there are, as we see, the technological means. I guess that within the time frame just mentioned, this technology will be perfected to produce limbs virtually indistinguishable from normal biological ones.

Within an additional 5 to 10 years, a bionic limb's performance will exceed biological limbs by any imaginable criteria and the procedure of attaching them to a living body will become well understood, safe, and relatively cheap. At that time or a bit later (30 years from now to be on the safe side, and this is a very conservative scenario) normal people with normal limbs will contemplate replacing their healthy yet fallible limbs with these superior technological creations. Not everybody will do it of course, but then again not everybody nowadays goes for plastic surgery either. Why will they do it? Mostly because they will be able to, and bionic hands will be cooler, stronger, more sensitive, more dexterous,not prone to irreparable damage, etc. On top of that they will be upgradeable and adjustable to any task. They will never get tired...

There is a future rushing upon us where many choices such as replacing a limb will become available. What kind of future is it going to be? Even today technology brings into our lives many options. Some, that just a few years ago seemed to be anything between magical and speculative science fiction, are becoming part of today's conventional way of life. Sooner or later choices such as replacing a limb, or an eye, or any other organ, perhaps even parts of our brains, will seem to be conventional options available within our conventional circumstances of life.

But who or what sets the direction of what conventional is in the first place? And how exactly is such a direction being set?

The way we see ourselves today, a human body without a limb is not a complete human body. This seems to us as a given fact. Functionally and psychologically one may adapt to live without a limb, overcome the circumstances of disability, and live a good fulfilling life. And yet, in our collective image one would be better off with both limbs. There is no argument about that.

In the days coming after tomorrow, the very same technologies helping the disabled to regain their physical completeness, will provide the means to artificially augment human bodies beyond their so called natural abilities. What exactly does 'artificial' mean? Artificial as in agriculture, domesticating thousands of species to serve our needs? Artificial as in living in cities instead of hunting and gathering? Artificial as in practicing birth control? As in wearing contact lenses? As in speaking to a friend over the cellular? Most of us find these practices perfectly natural. This was not the case less than a century ago. And now what about the disabled man with the bionic arm? Does it seem natural to him to be able to feed himself again after so many years? Does it seem natural to us watching him doing so? It seems that the distinction between artificial and natural is pretty blurred, context sensitive, and most importantly depends on what is considered to be normative in our collective image.

The choices that will become available to us, and are already available today, are choices that are defining our very concept of what it is to be a human being. They define the norm of being a member of this species. These critical choices are often disguised, whether by obviously biasing circumstances such as in the case of the disabled, or by trivializing the meaning of choices in everyday life situations just because the options are available and taken for granted, like in the case of cosmetic plastic surgery.

In fact, those seemingly localized choices do have far reaching consequences beyond their immediate locality. They do, so I believe, have universal consequences for our entire species. They irreversibly change our perception of ourselves, of others, and the universe around us. We make these choices individually but it always seems to us that they are made collectively and beyond the influence of the individual. Does it occur to any of us that the very act of purchasing a cellular phone has consequences on a scale much wider than the individual context? I find it hardly believable because the choice has already been made: Not having a cellular phone is like not being functionally/socially complete. And if the case of having a cellular phone is not convincing think about owning a credit card? Is it not that in certain places a person without a credit card is a lesser person? How and when and by whom have such choices been made?

These are just some thoughts I wish to share about the future of being a human. Bionic limbs are indeed becoming a reality. What reality itself is becoming, and do we care to care about it, is an entirely different question.

Mon, Jun 2, 2008  Permanent link

Sent to project: The great enhancement debate

My cranium is open source?
Project: The great enhancement debate, Polytopia

A response to Wildcat's "My cranium, my castle?"


Thank you Wildcat for the interesting post. Indeed the prospect of accessing one's private experiential space is a very plausible future scenario, and indeed it is a matter of deep concern. The concern however is not about the issue of privacy but rather about the profound impact such mind probing technologies will have on social structure and on the individual. In science fiction literature, scenarios that include full noetic (coming from noose the Greek word for mind) reading, memory erasing and editing, memory transference, experiential filters and other even more radical options, are abundant. (The Golden age trilogy, Pandora star, Total recall, Mind scan, Permutation City, and Johnny Mnemonic, just to name a few).

Interventions in individual memory and cognitive functions enabled by technology, seem inevitable. However in the question of privacy and security, the same technologies that create the problem are also those that will offer solutions. Mental firewalls, external secure storage of experiential memories. Sensory and cognitive filters interfaced to the brain are already in the horizon.

The value of privacy is not derived solely from our sentiments, but rather from its significance in the evolutionary playground.
Privileged access to information stands at the basis of many important evolutionary advantages of living organisms from viruses and bacteria to humans and complex human organizations. Hiding and seeking, attacking and protecting privileged access to information, are therefore very ancient activities in the evolutionary playground. In the human realm, technology is continuously pushing the limits of this playground. The human mind is but a new frontier of the this evolutionary game.

It is my belief the same technology that threats our privacy and cognitive liberty will also provide the means to protect both. In this sense technology's influence is on the very definition of the playground rather than biasing the game. In the light of the evolutionary perspective however, the ethical issue here needs refocusing and creative approach, and our very concepts of privacy and cognitive liberty must be augmented and given a new significance not in the light of the past but in the light of a future profoundly transformed by technology. This conceptual shift is necessary if we wish to meet this future on favorable terms.

Where might such new ethical approach come from? It seems that an interesting step would be to identify the kind of change we are about to face. Heinz Von Foerster, one of the pioneers of cybernetics, noted that our nervous system has about 100-200 million external sensors, but five orders of magnitude more internal sensors, neurons sensitive to changes in the behavior of other neurons, that is. It follows that we are about 100,000 times more sensitive to ourselves than to anything happening around us communicated by raw sensory signals. The difference in degrees of interconnectivity is what significantly sets the brain as a private domain. It seems that the main impact of technology is primarily in the change it introduces to interconnectivity (can also be described in terms of bandwidth), and the difference in interconnectivity. This impact can be addressed in many domains of which the web is of course prominent. Our mental privacy and cognitive liberty depend first and foremost on the difference of interconnectivity. Moreover, the very concept of the individual, as currently understood, depends on the difference in interconnectivity. Once this difference changes, i.e. internal states of the nervous system are becoming increasingly accessible, our very notion of privacy, privileged access, cognitive liberty and individuality should be reassessed.

Bottom line is that in the future the very definition of individuality will probably be derived not from the arbitrary conditions of one’s biological makeup, but rather how one is connected and to what. The degree of individuation will depend on difference in interconnectivity and this will become the subject matter of our ethical debate.

On top of that, privileged access to information and controlling the degree of interconnectivity will certainly be correlated to the computation power available to the individual. The degree of individuality and privacy available will critically depend on computation power and bandwidth. The ethics of the future if so will probably deal with regulating interconnectivity, the flow of information, and the computation resources necessary to establish a basic domain of experiential privacy. Becoming interconnected minds who share all such resources might become an increasingly attractive existential option. It might be the end of individualism as we know it.

Tue, Apr 8, 2008  Permanent link

Sent to project: The great enhancement debate, Polytopia

That reminds me of a story...
Project: The Total Library

We have constructed a ladder of how to think about – about what? Oh, yes, the pattern which connects.

Gregory Bateson

Few are the authors that succeeded to embed in their writing the process of thought that brought them to write what they did while writing it. Gregory Bateson in his monumental work “Mind and Nature – a necessary unity”, Achieves just that, which, in my eyes, earns him the respectable place in the total library project.

Mind. Understanding mind for what it is, is humanity’s greatest challenge. What is mind? What is perception? How do we know? Are questions that touch the very root of our being. We know ourselves as observers, and we know the world by way of observing it; Or do we? The very concept of ‘knowing’ is deeply rooted in the belief that there is a ‘knower’ and there is something to be known, and these two, the knower and that which is to be known can always be held in clear distinction, in a safe distance of sorts, a distance being partially bridged by cognition. We call this distinction the subject-object dichotomy. It is the basis of western epistemology, the theory of knowledge, and as such it is the foundation of virtually everything from everyday life to the remotest frontiers of science philosophy and art.

Language is structured to describe our experience in terms of this dichotomy. And as we humans, live in a manner of speaking(!), in language, we are bound to exist and interact on the basis of this very dichotomy. Whenever we come across those aspects of existence which would not fall neatly into this subject-object dichotomy, we usually file it as a ‘paradox’. Etymologically, paradox is a combination of the word ‘para’ which means outside, and ‘doxein’, meaning to point, to teach, to know. Paradox is if so something out of the teaching, out of knowledge, something that cannot be pointed to, excommunicated from our safe conceptual grounds. Paradoxes have always been and still are the greatest headache of philosophers. It is the mote in the eye of our most fundamental beliefs about reality, a constant disturbance, something we cannot make go away as much as we try. And we do try…

Mind is the greatest of paradoxes, it is not going away. When we try to observe the observer itself, and especially when we try to observe the observer while observing, the very concept of knowing, our very epistemology crashes. We confront a formidable perception barrier.

If we are to ever understand mind, a conceptual breakthrough is necessary. A new kind of theory of knowledge that includes the observer and eliminates the dichotomy that stands at the basis of this perceptual barrier.

Very few thinkers are willing to even consider the proposition of including the observer, though the necessity is recognized today more than ever before. Most thinkers still believe that the issue can be circumvented somehow by clever philosophical or methodological maneuvers. Of those few, even fewer made a significant contribution to the issue. The observer-observed dichotomy is a kind of a cognitive taboo that seems to resist any effort to crack it or even to touch it.

Gregory Bateson, is, in my eyes, one of those courageous thinkers that tried and to a degree succeeded in climbing this ‘mount impossible’. As such his contribution to the treasures of human thought is immense and largely under appreciated.

He writes in the introduction to his book:

My central thesis can now be approached in words: The pattern which connects is a metapattern. It is a pattern of patterns. It is that metapattern which defines the vast generalization that, indeed, it is patterns which connect.

I warned some pages back that we would encounter emptiness, and indeed it is so. Mind is empty; it is nothing. It exists only in its ideas, and these again are no-things. Only the ideas are immanent, embodied in their examples. And the examples are, again, no-things. The claw, as an example, is not the Ding an sich; it is precisely not the "thing in itself." Rather, it is what mind makes of it, namely an example of something or other.

Content wise, “Mind and Nature” is by all means a fascinating and interesting book. But I chose to write about it not because of its specific contents but rather because the way it is written. Bateson exposes in the book a thought process of a very special kind. A thought process which tries, to reflect/observe itself while unfolding. By that, Bateson shows a path of investigation that starts almost imperceptibly to depart from our so deeply rooted epistemology, and hints towards an integrated holistic kind of knowing. A knowing that goes beyond the observer-observed dichotomy. He does it so smoothly and masterfully that the reader can almost miss that she was delivered across an epistemological rift.

Here is one beautiful example from the introduction to the book:

There is a story which I have used before and shall use again: A man wanted to know about mind, not in nature, but in his private large computer. He asked it (no doubt in his best Fortran), "Do you compute that you will ever think like a human being?" The machine then set to work to analyze its own computational habits. Finally, the machine printed its answer on a piece of paper, as such machines do. The man ran to get the answer and found, neatly typed, the words:

THAT REMINDS ME OF A STORY

A story is a little knot or complex of that species of connectedness which we call relevance. In the 1960s, students were fighting for "relevance," and I would assume that any A is relevant to any B if both A and B are parts or components of the same "story". Again we face connectedness at more than one level: First, connection between A and B by virtue of their being components in the same story. And then, connectedness between people in that all think in terms of stories. (For surely the computer was right. This is indeed how people think.)

Now I want to show that whatever the word story means in the story which I told you, the fact of thinking in terms of stories does not isolate human beings as something separate from the starfish and the sea anemones, the coconut palms and the primroses. Rather, if the world be connected, if I am at all fundamentally right in what I am saying, then thinking in terms of stories must be shared by all kind of minds, whether ours or those of redwood forests and sea anemones.

Context and relevance must be characteristic not only of all so-called behavior (those stories which are projected out into "action"), but also of all those internal stories, the sequences of the building up of the sea anemone. Its embryology must be somehow made of the stuff of stories. And behind that, again, the evolutionary process through millions of generations whereby the sea anemone, like you and like me, came to be – that process, too, must be of the stuff of stories. There must be relevance in every step of phylogeny and among the steps.

Prospero says, "We are such stuff as dreams are made on," and surely he is nearly right. But I sometimes think that dreams are only fragments of that stuff. It is as if the stuff of which we are made were totally transparent and therefore imperceptible and as if the only appearances of which we can be aware are cracks and planes of fracture in that transparent matrix. Was this what Plotinus meant by an "invisible and unchanging beauty which pervades all things?"

What is a story that it may connect the As and Bs, its parts? And is it true that the general fact that parts are connected in this way is at the very root of what it is to be alive? I offer you the notion of context, of pattern through time.

….And "context" is linked to another undefined notion called "meaning." Without context, words and actions have no meaning at all. This is true not only of human communication in words but also of all communication whatsoever, of all mental process, of all mind, including that which tells the sea anemone how to grow and the amobea what it should do next.

I am drawing an analogy between context in the superficial and partly conscious business of personal relations and context in the much deeper, more archaic processes of embryology and homology. I am asserting that whatever the word context means, it is an appropriate word, the necessary word, in the description of all these distantly related processes.

Here I am telling a story about a story about a story about stories. Turning a full circle around, it is actually a story about me. Only that the circle is never a full circle but an incomplete recursive reflection, the way mind describe itself to itself.

Crossing the epistemological rift, bringing the perceiver into the equation of perception brings out all those self referential monsters that give so much pain to logicians, linguists and philosophers. However, it makes a completely new sense out of connectedness.

There is no need to completely eliminate the observer-observed distinction, just to soften it, make it less certain, less final. Once we soften our borders, also our obsessive occupation with objectified truth will lessen, and our binary modality of experience will expand into a new spectrum of possibilities. Nothing of our hard won scientific outlook will be compromised. By allowing this new conceptual flexibility, a door is opened to a profoundly valuable insight; the unity of Mind. We are minds, and we are Mind, an intelligent pattern of interconnected reflectivity.

“Mind and Nature” is unique in the thought process it catalyzes. A holistic reflective process, that by asking the right kind of questions, dissolves the unnecessary assumptions that clog human perception, and prompts in the courageous reader the kind of thinking I wish to call insightful.

If we are ever to understand the mind, we must augment our epistemology and as a consequence our language, and finally the meta-structure of the stories that we are. Bateson certainly had in mind something of this kind when he wrote this brilliant book. While going through the pages of this book I have this feeling of connectedness, as if by the fact of reading it I, the mind, also write it, and by that I, the mind, evolve.

Wed, Mar 26, 2008  Permanent link

Sent to project: The Total Library