Braced for Launch
by rsbakker
Happy New Year all. I greeted 2017 with the Norovirus, so I guess you could say I’m not liking the omens so far. Either I’ll be immune when the shit starts flying in Washington or I’ll fold like a napkin.
I did have occasion to reread my interview of David Roden for Figure/Ground a while back, and I thought it worth linking because I believe the points of contention between us could very well map the philosophy of the future. I think the heuristic dependence of intentional cognition on ancestral cognitive backgrounds means intentional cognition has no hope of surviving the ongoing (and accelerating) technological renovation of those backgrounds. The posthuman, whatever it amounts to, will crash our every attempt to ethically understand it. David thinks my pessimism is premature, that ethical cognition, at least, can be knapped/exapted (via minimal notions of agency and value) into something that can leap the breach between human and posthuman. You decide.
Parental Advisory: Contains Grammatical Violence, Excessive Jargon, and Scenes of Conceptual Nudity.
Three Pound Brain 
It’ll be interesting when AI’s start breathing…
https://www.academia.edu/28962644/Phenomenology_of_Respiration_and_the_Sense_of_Whoness_within_Tantra_as_Personhood
My sister picked it the virus at work gave it to my nephew and all four other immediate family members starting showing symptoms new year’s day. I barely made it back to town for work today.
Also, though yours is much more interesting, you reminded me of an interview I read semi-recently: http://www.vox.com/conversations/2016/10/24/13357298/michael-bess-biotechnology-bioengineering-technology-revolution-science
I’m interested in his book, though I’m wary of overt extremism either way 😉 (myself included).
Reblogged this on The Ratliff Notepad.
“I think the heuristic dependence of intentional cognition on ancestral cognitive backgrounds means intentional cognition has no hope of surviving the ongoing (and accelerating) technological renovation of those backgrounds.” I’m a broken record here but this is what the Anthropocene is, didn’t take AI just combustion engines and the rest:
http://www.desdemonadespair.net/2017/01/china-issues-first-ever-national-red.html
technotopians are creepy…
http://www.cbc.ca/radio/day6/episode-319-becoming-kevin-o-leary-saving-shaker-music-google-renewables-marrying-robots-and-more-1.3921088/a-i-expert-david-levy-says-a-human-will-marry-a-robot-by-2050-1.3921101
Nerd cultists…
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/can-the-singularity-solve-the-valentines-day-dilemma/
john has the needed sense of the absurd around these matters
He sure does 🙂
https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27011
I saw an interview here in Australia with a very conservative politician who was against gay marriage – as in, he tried to re clarify, it opens up other claims of marriage (it’d been put to him that if he thought gay marriage would lead to beastiality). But the interviewer, though a comedian by trade, I think missed setting their own commitment – too ready to parody this conservative who was against gay marriage with his absurdist comparison of it to beastial marriage. Too ready to avoid being conservative himself – but I wonder how you get to be a lovable larrikin and yet draw a line on robot ‘marriage’? Maybe you can’t?
I don’t know how you can crash something while it has no rules. That cuts against David’s position as much – how can you know ethics is crash proof until you have rules to actually test? At the traffic lights of the future, what rule will be committed to? ‘florid and equivocal answer'(s) indeed – we play games of showing and hiding our commitments (in terms of past survival it was critical to play such games) – and it’s been fun. And it’s the end, now. And equally, it’s impossible to crash nothing – that’s easy to conclude. So what is the something? But something itches at me, tells me I’m talking to philosophers. Like people who talk about RPG’s, but never write one.
http://www.smh.com.au/comment/how-centrelink-unleashed-a-weapon-of-math-destruction-20170105-gtmsnz.html
https://www.singularityweblog.com/augmented-short-sci-fi-film-ar/
David launch’s into the posthuman 🌏
http://www.lionsroar.com/how-to-practice-feeding-your-demons/
https://t.co/rddmFrt4pE hi
we’ve long been in over our pointy heads:
When I first heard about post-humanism it occurred to me that there is a discontinuity between human beings and the rest of the animal kingdom. I wonder if the new relationships humans have forged with other animals (pets, factory-farmed animals, beasts of burden etc) since we achieved whatever it is we call sentience, might give us some insight into what post-humanism might make of humanity. One of the few things we can say with certainty about post-humans is that it costs energy to process information, so they will consume energy and produce waste heat. To the extent that they derive this energy from processing matter they will produce waste material. Similarly, to the extent they process matter to acquire energy they will compete with humans for this matter. Whatever else we think about post-humans I see no reason to believe they will exempt themselves from the law of eating and shitting.
“I wonder if the new relationships humans have forged with other animals (pets, factory-farmed animals, beasts of burden etc) since we achieved whatever it is we call sentience, might give us some insight into what post-humanism might make of humanity.”
That’s kind of how I see it. In fact, if you squint, you can see it already happening. I mean, Wells predicted atomic bombs, maybe he got the Eloi/Morlock thing right too, just a little off on the details.
http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/the-perfect-match/
That was striking and punchy. Reminds me of the matrix at the end, where the Architect wants Neo to submit to the machines in order to refine the control algorithm.
Reminds me of Hellstrom’s Hive. It also reminds me of heaven. As much of human yearning revolves around freedom from friction with other human beings as around freedom from friction with the natural world. As you’ve said elsewhere, so much of life’s strife is person vs person, and anything that minimizes that conflict will be embraced.
Terrific interview – impossible to comment properly short of a thousand-word text wall. I do believe the defining task of ethics is to define imperatives that apply to all rational agents. Not trying implies radical ethical scepticism, I think.
Bateson on processor indisposition and neglect:
Quantitative Limits of Consciousness
A very brief consideration of the problem shows that it is not
conceivably possible for any system to be totally conscious.
Suppose that on the screen of consciousness there are reports from
many parts of the total mind, and consider the addition to
consciousness of those reports necessary to cover what is, at a given
stage of evolution, not already covered. This addition will involve a
very great increase in the circuit structure of the brain but still will
not achieve total coverage. The next step will be to cover the
processes and events occurring in the circuit structure which we
have just added. And so on.
Clearly, the problem is insoluble, and every next step in the
approach to total consciousness will involve a great in-crease in
the circuitry required.
It follows that all organisms must be content with rather little
consciousness, and that if consciousness has any useful functions
whatever (which has never been demonstrated but is probably
true), then economy in consciousness will be of the first
importance. No organism can afford to be conscious of matters
with which it could deal at unconscious levels.
This is the economy achieved by habit formation.
…
What is serious is the crosscutting of the circuitry of the mind. If,
as we must believe, the total mind is an integrated network (of
propositions, images, processes, neural pathology, or what have you
—according to what scientific language you prefer to use), and if the
content of consciousness is only a sampling of different parts and
localities in this net-work; then, inevitably, the conscious view of the
network as a whole is a monstrous denial of the integration of that
whole. From the cutting of consciousness, what appears above the
surface is arcs of circuits instead of either the complete circuits or
the larger complete circuits of circuits
— grace style and information in primitive art