Select Your Plan

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I’ve been talking a lot here about cyborgs, but not at all about the Singularity – when technology is advanced enough for humans to upload their consciousness resulting in greater than human intelligence.

There are lots of reasons for this silence - certainly the Singularity is possible but I don’t think it solves anything.  Maybe it’s for similar reasons that I don’t participate in social media. I also find the idea of the human/machine hybrid of the cyborg much more interesting as reality/metaphor grounded in the present.

At any rate, I ran across this Tom Scott video and thought it probably a pretty accurate version of what is likely to happen it the Singularity becomes possible. Plus I think it’s pretty funny.  PlusTier Three is kinda like being brain damaged.

Disabled Disability

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I had intended to write here quite a bit more than I have on disability.  This is really saying something.  Eighteen years ago I had viral encephalitis.  It damaged mainly my temporal and parietal lobes.  Making any kind of statement is remarkable.

For most of that time, I did not have much of a disability identity. While I had various and sometimes overwhelming reactions to what had happened, I rarely used the word “disabled” itself.  It was more like “Something happened” followed by various negative emotions mixed in with a lot of confusion, mixed in with a kind of clarity I struggle to explain.

The word I’m most likely to use in my own head is “brokenness”.

This brokenness is certainly the loss of function, of ability.  I have trouble making sense.  Whatever eloquence I attain here requires a lot of effort and leaves me both exhausted and in pain from the effort.   Sometimes I just talk repeating myself in increasingly tighter  circles.  Suddenly seeing a clock I might realize that 15 minutes had passed.  Seeing the worry on my listener’s face, I wonder if it had been all gibberish or “just” a semantic vortex.

This is from a general difficulty processing information, rather than extensive damage to my speech centers – although there is some of that.  Whether the information comes from raw external stimuli, my own mental processes or a combination of the two doesn’t matter.  My experiences of time, object permanence and memory are all impaired, altered, something different.  So I have trouble both making sense and making sense of.

But this brokenness is also a breaking open, a kind of general breaking open of how things are, the beautiful assault I’ve referred to before.  I would have never chosen it, but there it is.

From One to Another

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As the forest canopy approaches completion, Jack in the Pulpits erupt to full size.  A few are just ripe, but most are a visibly transducent green that the canopy itself manages to copy only for a few days.

Embedded on the spadix (the Jack), thousands of tiny flowers begin to bloom as the spathe (the Pulpit) develops its purple and white striping.   Slightly foetid, the plant attracts mosquitos and gnats. As they crawl down the inside of the tube, they brush against the flowers, pollinating them.  Continuing down past them, looking for animal flesh, the darkness and shape of the spathe disorient them.  Most of the insects eventually find their way out, perhaps in a slight insect daze, but some never do, and die inside.

What could be more Cyborg like?

Plant and insect united briefly in function operating independently of any intention, one part incapable of intention, the other full of an intention that is irrelevant to the result except for the force of its delusion.

What could be less Cyborg like?

This is the ground the Cyborg contests, the idea of Nature, apart from Humanity, the idea of intention and agency being the same, that the unintentional is the same as that without agency.

The Ghost in the Machine

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The Ghost/Machine duality is the duality of Mind/Body.  It is part of a series of nesting/interlocking dualities such as Culture/Nature, Phenonomen/Noumenon, Normal/Disabled, Sacred/Profane, Inner/Outer, Object/Process, Rational/Irrational. Free Will/Determinism, Emergent/Embodied, Harmony/Catastrophe.  Following Haraway, it is worth noting that there are not any essential properties that unify the first elements together, or the second elements together.

How one codes these dualities is itself an attempt to impose the ground for all further categorizations.

These dualities represent an attempt to reconcile the problem of Whole and Parts.  How can things be Wholes and Parts at the same time?  Indeed, the surest route to undermining any philosophical project is to point out  the particular ways it does not resolve this issue.

The Ghost was never there, but the experience of awareness, so vivid, so raw, makes awareness seem like an out-of-body experience.  But this is a useful illusion at best, possibly just an epi-phenonomen of a certain stage of neural development.

This does not mean however, that the ghost in the machine is dead.  In the Cyborg we have another apparent duality Animal/Machine or Human/Machine.  We interact with Machines within the duality of Agent/Tool.  The machines are merely, in this line of thought, extensions of our own vivid agency.

But not only are we merged with machines in our daily lives, in our effects on the planet, we could just as well see ourselves as living within machine-ness, our actions, the reproductive organs of the machines, our logic, the (for now) operating systems, our ideologies, the software.

High-tech culture challenges these dualisms in intriguing ways. It is not clear who makes and who is made in the relation between human and machine. It is not clear what is mind and what body in machines that resolve into coding practices. In so far as we know ourselves in both formal discourse (for example, biology) and in daily practice (for example, the homework economy in the integrated circuit), we find ourselves to be cyborgs, hybrids, mosaics, chimeras. Biological organisms have become biotic systems, communications devices like others. There is no fundamental, ontological separation in our formal knowledge of machine and organism, of technical and organic.

The machine is not an it to be animated, worshipped, and dominated. The machine is us, our processes, an aspect of our embodiment. We can be responsible for machines; they do not dominate or threaten us. We are responsible for boundaries; we are they.  Donna Haraway – Cyborg Manifesto

It is time to recognize there are no boundaries between the human and the machine.  Ecology focussing on Humanity’s effect on the planet will ignore our merging with Machines, will be another act of domination.

At first, calling this time the Anthropocene, can almost give us an experience of the uncanny looking in the mirror.  But left alone, it too posits a Ghost in the Machine.  It is time to recognize this is the Cyborgocene, at least until that too becomes a source of comfort.

Spring Light

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Ephemeral wildflowers live most of the time under the forest floor as rhizomes, bulbs or roots.

The category “ephemeral wildflowers” encompasses in fact the whole life cycle of the plants that manifest in spring, interacting only then with the space between the forest Continue reading →

Broken

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Cyborgs are always broken. This is a Cyborg’s third mark of existence.

All beings do not have an independently existing self.  All phenomena, living or not, exist because causes and conditions support their existence.  When these causes and conditions cease, the being or phenomena ceases as well.

A Cyborg’s non self is the same as any other being’s.  But the Cyborg experiences this as Brokenness.

The animal part of a Cyborg think it’s in control, that the machine parts are only tools, devices, information waiting for an upgrade that will fix the machines’ current limitations.  At the same time, the machine part wonders why the animal part never seems to get an upgrade, in fact, only seems to deteriorate.

Yet the parts experience phenomena only through their overlap, each experiencing itself as a whole and their other part as a temprorary collection.